New nutraceutical industry brands enter the scene constantly, and contract manufacturers are always expanding to meet consumer demand for safe, consistent dietary supplements. These functional foods, if you will, have to meet the highest standards. If you have a good plant design, you’re giving yourself a big leg up.
What a good facility design can do for you is make production easier, help protect your consumers’ safety, and take away some of the chances of expensive problems popping up later. That’s what we want, right? The question isn’t what we want, but how we get it. Often, it comes down to getting some help.
Working with nutraceutical products isn’t just about shoving equipment into a building willy-nilly. It requires a deep understanding of the problems you’re facing. Cross-contamination is a huge concern. Powders travel farther than you would think, and ingredient contamination between batches can change the next batch if the process isn’t just right. Allergen cross-contact, airborne powders, and product loss all become bigger concerns as your company becomes bigger.
If there’s one thing to consider, it’s that your supplement industry facility should be designed around FDA regulations and Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP). If you want to look into the details of that, visit the requirements found in FDA 21 CFR Part 111 for dietary supplements. It’s bad news to not comply with these, since that can lead to FDA warning letters and product recalls.
Having a strong quality control game means things like ingredient traceability, standardized extracts, active ingredients, botanical extracts, reliable blending, labeling, packaging, shelf life, product efficacy, and customer health. There’s so much to keep track of that doing it yourself is nearly out of the question.
We know just how to assess your manufacturing needs and recommend a cleanroom setup that addresses all the right things. Controlled air and HEPA filtration, airlocks, gowning areas, and personnel flow. Airlocks, gowning areas, and personnel flow, as well.
Our job is to think about things you might not know, such as how smooth surfaces on walls, floors, and ceilings make cleaning easier while reducing places where contaminants can collect, and help you know how that impacts product quality.
One thing we’ve learned as we’ve served companies over the years is that good layouts save time. We see it every day, as facilities fight to work with a hodgepodge setup that was never meant to last.
We pick spots that would be great for wash stations, utility connections, QA and QC labs, stability chambers, and storage areas. A good layout isn’t just easier to work with, it’s easier to inspect, easier to expand, and easier to keep clean.
Onwards and upwards to equipment selection. We’ll look at your manufacturing needs, available space, utility requirements, and future plans, and recommend equipment based on the numbers that we gather.
That may include:
Particle size matters in nutraceuticals even more than it does to other food manufacturers.
Efficient warehousing (organizing ingredients for quick testing, identity checks, and staging) reduces problems that come before production even starts, specifically delays. That’s something to fix, as delays can be the death of a company. You have to actually build a product to be able to sell it, but if you’re always being set back to raw materials and dreams, you won’t get too far.
We already mentioned this, but it’s worth noting again that, as product lines grow, changeovers often become one of the biggest challenges in the facility. Supplement manufacturing is especially complex, and there are more rules than in other industries.
We’ve never yet met a company that enjoyed the idea of redesigning its facility every few years. In truth, that’s because there’s no reason to waste such time and resources. It’s possible to design your facility with growth in mind so that, when the time comes, and when sands shift, you’re ready.
Your facility isn’t the only thing that will change. We also plan for changing consumer demand. People change all the time. What they want, what they need, what they see on the internet, it’s always morphing. The only way to survive is to plan ahead. Flexible facilities are a lot easier to adjust to introduce new products, improve dosage accuracy with newer technology, and respond to changes in the nutraceutical market.
It can be overwhelming to try to work out the best plan on your own, but the good news is that you don’t have to. There are people, like our team at HMS, who know just what you need and how to get it. There are only a few things required from you.
Bring your ideal product list, projected output, facility information, specific ingredients you work with, and information on any equipment you already own to us. We will talk about streamlined sourcing, scheduling, and equipment integration. Suddenly, everything is much more manageable.
