Quality At The Heart Of Our Manufacturing

Our top priority has always been to offer consumers products of the best possible quality. This is a huge challenge for a company like L’Oréal given that the Group manufactures annually over seven billion cosmetic products all over the world. How do we ensure that each individual product meets the very highest quality standards in every country, across every distribution channel and for every one of our brands? Here’s how.





A peek behind the scenes of L’Oréal manufacturing

At L’Oréal, making sure that consumers get products of the very highest quality is more than just a priority, it’s our whole raison d’être. To guarantee this level of quality for every single product, you have to target excellence. Starting with operational excellence, we have set up an overall, single, structured system that we apply worldwide: our staff at every plant and subsidiary follow in-house standards that far exceed the regulatory requirements. To give you an idea, we carry out about 100 quality controls for each one of our cosmetic products over the course of the production cycle, from design to sourcing of raw materials and packaging, manufacturing and distribution. We basically make sure that the product is perfect at every stage of production.  

Harnessing technological advances to enhance quality

To ensure the very best product quality, we also have to stay at the forefront of the sector. This is why our plants integrate an ever-increasing number of ultra-modern technologies from the 4.0 Industry.

  • In recent years, the Lassigny plant in France has been using cobots – smart, collaborative robots that allow employees to save valuable time, leaving them free to focus on quality control and improving their know-how.
     
  • At our Ormes plant in France, we are harnessing technology to improve quality control for makeup products. To ensure that your foundation or lipstick is always exactly the same color, we check every batch to see that it matches the specified shade for that product.

    • For a long time, these checks were performed visually. A quality control technician would compare a sample of the product against the shade specification, with some leeway allowed for subjectivity. Now, with the help of a Spectrocolorimeter, the color checking process is standardized, digitalized, and largely automated, so shades can be reproduced perfectly at every stage in the product life cycle.

    To go a step further in delivering the right shades, we use an algorithm that automatically suggests the adjustments required to obtain the exact color sought for the product. Ultimately, this means that you can always find your chosen shade with every single product.

    Our priority: maximum satisfaction for consumers

    Day in, day out, we are striving to improve our industrial and operational excellence. And all that work is paying off. We know it because of our certifications, which include ISO 9001 for quality management and ISO 22716 for good manufacturing practices for cosmetic products. Most of all, though, our excellence shows through in the feedback we are getting from consumers.

    We get only 52 complaints per million products sold. The challenge now is to cut that number even further over the following years.

    Moreover, we’re proud of the awards we received.


    100%

    of our plants manufacture in accordance with ISO22716*
    *Good manufacturing practices for cosmetics products

    90%

    of our plants manufacture in accordance with ISO9001**
    **quality management

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