Overcoming Moisture Problems in Processing
Challenge
As anyone in this industry knows, using raw Alpha Lipoic Acid, L-Carnitine or L- Carnosine slows processing time because they pick up moisture and gum up the machinery. It was the age-old problem for one of our customers who manufactures capsules. The company was using all of those ingredients; as a result, the processing slowdowns were causing deadlines to be missed and labor costs to spiral out of control – and the manufacturer was in jeopardy of losing the account.
Solution
The capsule contract manufacturer turned to Maxx Performance – and we went right to work. First, we requested a sample of the raw Alpha Lipoic Acid they were using in their formulation and from that, created a prototype for testing. Unfortunately, the gumming up of equipment persisted.
After thorough probing about what other ingredients were in the formulation, we identified that L-Carnitine and L-Carnosine were potential contributors to the problem. Again, raw samples were sent to us from which we built additional prototypes from each ingredient, and encouraged the customer to try them in the formulation. The customer called us from the floor in the middle of the pilot run to thank us for helping them solve the “gumming” problem—once again, micro- encapsulation technology had saved the day!
Result
The customer requested shipment of commercial quantities of all three ingredients, microencapsulated separately. It was then that we informed them of our ability to handle blended ingredients in a single micro-encapsulation— which would further enable them to overcome processing challenges and speed processing time.
In the end, the capsule contract manufacturer reported that by micro- encapsulating ingredients, they were not only experiencing enhanced bioavailability and cost savings of greater than 50%, but were also able to run 5 million capsules instead of 100,000 capsules.