From baby to adult: what really changes when you add an adult incontinence line

The adult incontinence products market is heading towards USD 52 billion by 2035, growing at around 9% a year, and the pants format is the one moving fastest. Behind those numbers there is a simple demographic fact: the share of the world population over 65 has almost doubled over the last fifty years. For a manufacturer already producing baby diapers, this is the most natural segment to add — but it is also the one where the technical difference is most often underestimated.

The advantage is not the machine, it is the channel

A manufacturer who has been producing Baby Diaper for a few years already has the hardest thing to build: distribution, knowledge of local retail, relationships with raw material suppliers and a team that knows what running a converting plant means. Adding adult products does not mean entering a new market, it means selling a higher-margin product to the same people. That is why the second line often arrives faster than the investor had planned.

What really changes: the core

The main technical difference is not speed: it is the core. An adult product requires a far larger absorbent mass, with a different SAP/fluff ratio and a SAP distribution that has to stay stable across a bigger, longer pad. This is where the units we develop in-house come in — SAP dosing systems, hammer mill and rotary filters — because an adult core that holds up in the test room and an adult core that holds up shift after shift are two different things. The hot melt applicators change too, for building barriers and elastics on wider geometries, and so does the stacker, which has to handle bulkier pieces.

200 or 300 pieces per minute, in continuous production

Our Adult Diaper and Adult Pants lines run at 200 or 300 pieces per minute: as with baby, these are continuous production speeds, not test-bench peaks. It is a point that matters even more on adult products, because the pad is longer and the linear metres per minute constraint therefore arrives sooner: on adult, a declared speed without the corresponding figure in metres says very little about the large sizes — which are exactly the higher-value ones.

Diaper or pants? Two products, two channels

The Adult Diaper with adhesive tapes remains the reference for care facilities and home care, where fitting is handled by a carer. Adult Pants is the fastest-growing product, because it is the one the independent user chooses for themselves: it is a retail product, with an expectation of appearance and discretion closer to clothing than to medical devices. They are two different machines, and the choice is made on the channel before the datasheet.

A second plant, the same operator logic

Our adult lines keep the philosophy of the baby ones: two operators, accessible adjustments, compliance with Directive 2006/42/EC and the same approach to spare parts. For a customer already working with one of our baby lines, that means shorter training and a spare parts stock that does not double.

If you are evaluating a move into adult products, tell us the channel you want to reach, the sizes and the volumes: that is where the technical screening starts, to understand whether the starting point is a diaper, a pants or both.