Case Study Snapshot
Sector: Pet Food.
Services Provided: Regulatory Adaptation, including Translation.
Value Added: Helping our client to navigate international obstacles and avoid unnecessary costs and delays as they grow in 21 markets.
About our client:
Lintbells cares as much about your pet’s well-being as you do. An established name in pet products, they manufacture a range of joint, skin care, digestion and calming supplements for your dogs, cats, horses and humans. As the UK’s no. 1 veterinary joint supplement brand,* they pride themselves on providing the highest quality products and exceptional customer satisfaction and are already supporting over 2 million pets worldwide.** As part of their commitment to quality care, they came to Ashbury for support in ensuring their customers have all the information they need to make informed decisions about how to supplement their pets daily.
Taking Lintbells global:
Launching into new markets requires a breadth of expertise to ensure your label meets local regulations, languages and cultural expectations. Lintbells partnered with Ashbury to help them launch their animal health supplements globally, which included a total of 8 products in 21 countries.
Having in-market knowledge is critical as different countries will interpret and enforce laws in different ways and have unique rules of their own. At Ashbury, we employ regulatory experts from these core markets under one roof, so our clients only need to deal with one contact rather than multiple across different markets. We also have a dedicated Project Delivery Lead who, on this occasion, was Product Information Advisor Laura Martinez. Her role encompassed project management of our advisors and quality assurance to ensure all work was delivered on time with accurate and consistent advice across each market.
A partnership built on expertise and communication:
With regulations always evolving, the project began with reviewing the latest requirements in each market to inform our reports. We then looked at how these apply to our client’s products and formulated practical recommendations to any challenges. Some examples of recommendations for Lintbells included consideration of the legislation applicable locally and at EU level for several aspects, including product name, product composition, additives and nutrition. Language and grammar, as well as the use of capital and lowercase letters, dots and commas, needed to be considered for decimal declaration to adhere to different country rules. The warning statement on the label required slight rewording for some countries to ensure they are clearly understandable for purchasers in the intended markets. This included language regulatory adaptation for declaring the durability indication and batch number. We also provided advice on recycling and green dot symbols where it applied to relevant countries – a very confusing topic in the industry right now.
We also provided a statement to reassure all third-party country representatives that Ashbury performed the translations, saving them time and costs related to doing it themselves.
The project was finalised with Ashbury delivering regulatory translations that were consistent and aligned across the 21 countries of scope, and the client was then ready to sell their products globally.
Time was of the essence for Lintbells, so throughout the project, our Business Development Liaison, Bethany Andrews, kept her fingers on the pulse of the project, providing consistent, professional and friendly communication to our client, ensuring they always knew the project status.
Lintbells truly understands the importance of due diligence in producing high-quality goods. With this first project being a success, we are pleased to be strengthening and expanding the scope of our partnership to further product SKUs.
Client Testimonial:
Lintbells said:
“From first enquiries and quotes to the end delivery of this mammoth project, Ashbury has been professional, supportive, and wonderfully efficient. We were extremely impressed by their breadth of knowledge and comprehensive reporting. As well, Ashbury were very accommodating to our ad hoc requests and questions whilst also tailoring their report to the structure that was most useful to us. I would highly recommend Ashbury to any food/feed industry looking for useful and reliable support for their products.”
YuMOVE | Home Of The UK’s No.1 Pet Joint Supplement*
*Kynetec VetTrack December 2022. Sales of YuMOVE branded products through veterinary wholesalers.
** YuMOVE brand tracking study