The contract
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The contract matters more here than in most supply relationships, because you are handing over a product whose safety case is documentary and whose failure mode is a person being harmed.
What it has to settle
Minimum run and lead time. Price and what moves it. Who buys raw materials and packaging. Whose specification governs. Yield assumptions, because the gap between your yield and theirs is somebody's money. And who holds inventory and carries the risk while they do.
Who owns the formula
State it. You developed it, they hold it in confidence, they will not make it for anybody else, and it returns to you on termination.
Settle what happens to improvements they contribute, because a manufacturer offering development is offering something with an ownership question attached. And settle whether they may use your formula as a base for their own stock products.
Who carries the regulatory responsibility
This is the clause specific to cosmetics and the one most often left vague.
Under MoCRA both the facility and the product have obligations, and the brand owner does not escape responsibility by outsourcing manufacture. Safety substantiation remains yours, and it has no small-business exemption.
So the contract should say who commissions and holds the challenge and stability testing, who maintains the safety assessment, who registers and lists, and who handles an adverse event report. Silence here means you have it by default without having the records.
Quality, rejection and exit
Define acceptable in numbers: pH range, viscosity range, fill weight tolerance, appearance, microbiological limits. Then define what happens when a batch misses, and who pays for the materials, the packaging and the run.
Retain the right to a sample from every batch and keep them as you would your own.
And settle exit: notice on both sides, and what happens to your materials, your packaging and your finished stock sitting in their building. That last clause is the one people skip and the one that determines your leverage in any disagreement.