For any pharmaceutical or nutraceutical company, deciding whether to outsource your manufacturing often comes down to three things – budget, expertise, and capacity. If you have these resources at your disposal, manufacturing your own products can make perfect sense.

However, if you don’t, using a contract manufacturer can quickly bring your products to market.

But you’ve got options when it comes to outsourcing production, and you’ll need to know the difference between a Contract Manufacturing Organisation (CMO) and a Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisation (CDMO), to understand which one is right for you.

A CMO manufactures products from pre-established formulations. This service could be ideal for your business, assuming you’ve already done all the product development and innovation work.

If you don’t have the capacity for this, then a CDMO can provide the end-to-end product development and manufacturing services needed to deliver market-leading products within tight timeframes.

When challenge meets opportunity

When a global, multibillion-dollar nutraceutical company needed an innovative solution to improve its cognitive health product, it turned to SFI Health Solutions for help.

The client had two main challenges:

1. Its 450-milligram capsules were powdering in jars, resulting in too many chargebacks from retailers.
2. It also needed to increase the capsule dosage to 750 milligrams without enlarging the capsule size or serving size in order to make new on-label claims.

Complaints were piling up from retailers about the powdering issue, and ignoring the problem wasn’t an option. The product was broadly distributed across North America and Europe, and being pulled from shelves would blemish the balance sheet.

At the same time, the client’s clinical trials presented an opportunity to make additional label claims by increasing the dosage. Consumers, of course, want maximum effect with minimum consumption, so the challenge was how to increase the dosage without increasing the size of the capsules or the number of capsules consumers would have to take.

The client came to SFI Health Solutions for help. Although this nutraceutical company had never worked with SFI Health Solutions before, when the CDMO said it could not only solve the challenges, but it could do so in six weeks, the contract was signed.

A “creative and out-of-the-box” solution

Initially, the client was determined to keep the product in capsule format. The plan was to increase the dosage by further compressing the ingredients. But after trying several options, SFI Health Solutions realised a more innovative approach was needed.

“When a new client tells you they want something done a certain way, you do everything you can to accommodate their request. But, in this case, compression wouldn’t get the job done, so we proposed a different solution and they went for it,”

– Matthew Brabazon, Head of Americas for SFI Health Solutions.

The solution was to tablet the ingredients – it sounds simple enough, but no other CDMO had proposed it. This “creative and out-of-the-box solution,” according to the client, enabled SFI Health Solutions to achieve the client’s potency goals while keeping the serving and supplement size the same.

“Our product developers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” explains Brabazon. “In this case, their innovative approach enabled us to produce a more potent and higher quality product with an extremely fast turnaround.”

By looking at the problem through a different lens, SFI Health Solutions solved both problems: tableting the product not only resolved the powdering issue, but it also gave the product a higher potency at the same size, enabling the client to make the additional label claims.

All this happened in just six weeks, an impressively fast turnaround time which would typically take a CDMO twice as long, according to Brabazon. It helped that the client owned the raw ingredients and shipped them quickly. But it was also SFI Health Solutions’ ability to start immediately and quickly prototype potential solutions that enabled a successful outcome.

In this case, the client didn’t need a manufacturer; it already had one. What it needed was a company with product development expertise, the drive to deliver high-quality work, and the capacity to start right away. And that’s what it got with SFI Health Solutions.

Photo: SFI Health Solutions manufacturing site in Reno, Nevada, USA.

How SFI Health Solutions can help you

As a full-service CDMO with long-standing experience in the natural healthcare space, SFI Health Solutions can help any pharmaceutical or nutraceutical company quickly bring its products to market.

With world-class manufacturing facilities in the USA, UK, and Switzerland, SFI Health Solutions can help with all your production needs, including product design and development, sourcing ingredients, manufacturing, analytical testing, labeling, distribution, and whatever else you need to realise your opportunities and address your challenges, wherever in the world your markets are, and wherever in the world you want your products to be.

Visit sfihealthsolutions.com to read other case studies and to learn how SFI Health Solutions can bring your natural healthcare products to market faster.