Materials
A material is a specific instance of something you can buy in the real world and use inside a formula.
Each material comes from a specific supplier and manufacturer.
Sometimes the same material by manufacturer can be sold by two different suppliers. In Labgrind these would manifest as two separate materials that can have the same name.
A material contains all the information that regulatory would need:
- Who it was made by
- Who it is sold by
- What lots were received and when
- Important identifiers
- Notes for you and your team
- Exact INCI composition
- Pricing tiers and historical pricing
- Documentation and safety information
Materials are added to your trade material library when you use them in your formula. This lets you keep track of, and update materials across all your formulas.
Every formula ingredient will need to have some material selected for it for a formula to be created as a batch.
Marketplace
The marketplace is where you can add ingredients to your own library with a single click. Its there to help save you time and energy manually inputting all the information.
When you add a material to your library from here we will add a brand new material with some of its information already filled in. If the material is already in your library then it will link you to it instead.
The composition will be added as estimated and you will still want to verify your exact specifications and add your own documents.
Supplier vs manufacturer
Every ingredient has some kind of manufacturer, they are who actually physically made the product. Then there is who you actually buy the product from, which can differ from the manufacturer. This is the supplier.
So every material has some kind of manufacturer and supplier which may differ.
A material with the same name may have a different combination of manufacturer and supplier, so names are not guaranteed to be unique.