Consumers and buyers of all product groups always receive a so-called end product: a unit that a manufacturer or seller regards as ready for sale to the future customer.
But what path must a product take to become a ready-to-sell unit? Given the unmanageable variety of products available, it can only be summarised for all of them that a manufacturing and packaging process takes place.
In the contract manufacturing of dietary supplements, various substances are combined in different dosages, depending on the end product, and in further steps mixed, pressed or filled, and finally packaged.
A ready-to-take dietary supplement rarely consists of just one raw material. In most cases, excipients are added alongside the actual ingredients, which matter above all for pressing tablets and for the stability of their final shape. Other dosage forms of dietary supplements include capsules, sticks, sachets, granulates, powders and many more.
Manufacturing
The manufacturing process begins – where several substances are needed – with mixing the raw materials supplied in the specified quantity. These can be in various solid and liquid forms. Once blending is complete, dry materials are converted into the dosage forms mentioned above during further processing.
When pressing tablets, for example, the pre-mixed powder is taken up by the machine as bulk material and pressed under high pressure by cylinders moving vertically towards each other into the familiar, mostly round shape.
Capsule filling is different. Here the empty capsules are first fed into the machine as bulk material, then separated into halves and filled with the correct amount of the raw material, which is also added as bulk material, and the two halves are pressed back together.
Both filling methods deliver the end products, tablets and capsules, as bulk discharge into a collection container, and they are counted in the process. Further processing then takes place by exact-count filling into suitable containers such as cans, jars or blisters.
In container filling, the tablets or capsules are fed as bulk material to another machine, which counts out the preselected number of pieces, dispenses them into the container below and then transports it onward.
The containers are then usually closed with a lid by machine and labelled. If required, they are additionally packed into a folding carton or an outer carton.
After tablet pressing or capsule filling, further processing can alternatively take place on a blister machine. For this, the end products are again fed to a machine as bulk material and, depending on the design, counted into the cavities of a blister pack, which is then sealed with a foil on the back. The blisters are subsequently cut out, collected and, as required, placed in a folding carton as secondary packaging.
These are only two examples of the many ways dietary supplements can be manufactured and packaged.
