Quality At The Heart Of Our Sourcing

To manufacture a quality cosmetic product, you need high-calibre raw materials and packaging. That’s why, for over a century, the L’Oréal Group has been painstakingly selecting the raw materials and packaging that make up its products. How do we go about making sure that they are all of the finest quality and equal to the expectations of increasingly demanding consumers? Here’s how.

Outstanding partners, relationships built on trust

To ensure raw materials of impeccable quality for our consumers, our number-one priority is to work with the best suppliers. To identify them, we perform exhaustive quality audits, which enable our purchasing teams check that every potential partner complies with our requirements. What’s more, once selected, suppliers promise to abide by L’Oréal’s Quality Charter and become part of our drive for excellence. The upshot is that we work only with suppliers that we know and trust. Our close relationships with suppliers give us control over the reliability and traceability of raw materials and packaging, and mean that we know the history of products put out on the market.”

Some examples of raw materials tests:

Ongoing, permanent quality controls

Next, the most important thing is to monitor the constant quality of raw materials and packaging, which includes ensuring that quality is both fitting and in line with the latest regulatory standards. For this reason, after the initial audit, we regularly carry out additional supplier audits. We take a totally transparent approach, sharing the results with our partners so that we can work together to identify and quickly act on areas for improvement.

As part of our continuous improvement process and to build close ties to suppliers, we carry out these audits as regularly as possible. In fact, in the case of our packaging suppliers, we perform one audit every day on average!

We also have to strictly control the quality of the final packaging, which plays an active role in the beauty experience. This involves multiple laboratory tests.

To ensure the finest possible product quality, all raw materials and packaging are checked one more time when they enter the plant prior to manufacturing.

Some examples of packaging tests: