Good manufacturing practice

Good manufacturing practices (GMP) are the practices required in order to conform to the guidelines recommended by agencies that control authorization and licensing for manufacture and sale of food, drug products, and active pharmaceutical products. These guidelines provide minimum requirements that a pharmaceutical or a food product manufacturer must meet to assure that the products are of high quality and do not pose any risk to the consumer or public.

Good manufacturing practices, along with good agricultural practices, good laboratory practices and good clinical practices, are overseen by regulatory agencies in the United States, Canada, Europe, China, and other countries.

Good manufacturing practice guidelines provide guidance for manufacturing, testing, and quality assurance in order to ensure that a food or drug product is safe for human consumption. Many countries have legislated that food and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers follow GMP procedures and create their own GMP guidelines that correspond with their legislation.

All guidelines follow a few basic principles:

Practices are recommended with the goal of safeguarding the health of consumers and patients as well as producing good quality food, medicine, medical devices, or active pharmaceutical products. In the United States, a food or drug may be deemed "adulterated" if it has passed all of the specifications tests, but is found to be manufactured in a facility or condition which violates or does not comply with current good manufacturing guideline. Therefore, complying with GMP is mandatory in all pharmaceutical manufacturing, and most food processing.

GMP guidelines are not prescriptive instructions on how to manufacture products. They are a series of general principles that must be observed during manufacturing. When a company is setting up its quality program and manufacturing process, there may be many ways it can fulfil GMP requirements. It is the company's responsibility to determine the most effective and efficient quality process.

The quality is built into the product and GMP is the most essential part of ensuring this product quality.

GMPs are enforced in the United States by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), under Title 21 CFR. The regulations use the phrase "current good manufacturing practices" (cGMP) to describe these guidelines. Courts may theoretically hold that a product is adulterated even if there is no specific regulatory requirement that was violated as long as the process was not performed according to industry standards. Since June 2010, a different set of cGMP requirements have applied to all manufacturers of dietary supplements.

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