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Growing the operation

The contract

Updated

On this page5

Four clauses do the work; the rest is ordinary commercial terms.

Four clauses

Formula ownership. Label responsibility. Acceptance criteria. Exit.

Who owns the formula

Say it plainly: the formula is yours, it is confidential, and it will not be made for anyone else.

Ask for the scaled process back, including any adjustments they made during scale-up, because without it you cannot move to another manufacturer without redeveloping.

And be specific about raw material specifications, since a substitution that works for them may change your finished concentration and therefore your compliance position.

Who is named, and who holds the SDS

Manufacturer, packer or distributor on the label, which decides who is publicly responsible.

Who authors and maintains the safety data sheet, and who updates it when a raw material changes.

Who maintains the California ingredient disclosure page.

And who is responsible for transport classification, which matters if the product is a hazardous material.

These are cheap to agree in advance and expensive to argue about later.

Acceptance and a bad batch

Written criteria against your specification: pH, viscosity, appearance, odor, fill weight, torque.

Who tests, and whether you receive the results for every batch.

What happens when a batch fails: who pays for materials, components, labor and disposal.

And what happens when a fault is found after delivery, which for stability and container-compatibility failures is the realistic case, because they appear months later.

Plus notice period, ownership of components held at their site, and who keeps the batch records, which you need copies of, and which are a bad thing to ask for the first time on the way out.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for cleaning, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation and agency guidance named on each page, not from a laboratory or a legal practice. Whether a particular product and a particular label make a cleaner or a pesticide is a determination about your product, and this is not that determination.