By applying a pharmaceutical process, the company is creating double-dose vitamins.
By Adam Risman
COURTESY USANA HEALTH SCIENCES
Company: USANA Health Sciences, a Salt Lake City-based manufacturer of diet, energy, weight-management and personal-care supplements
Market Cap: $568.7 million*
A new manufacturing method for creating vitamin supplements could trim down consumers’ daily piles of pills. USANA Health Sciences Inc. (USNA) is reducing the number needed by applying Nutritional Hybrid Technology, a process previously reserved for the pharmaceutical industry. Using a European-designed press, the technique combines two pills from separate product batches into one bi-layered tablet.
“Certain products are incompatible,” says Jim Brown, vice president of operations at USANA. “Mixing them into one single batch starts affecting the stability of the product almost immediately, and it can bring your shelf life down.” But mixing batches separately prior to the tablet’s compression stage avoids these problems, he observes.
The difficult part, Brown adds, is deciding which two pills should be put together. “You wouldn’t want to force two different things on people who weren’t planning on taking them together before,” he says.
Expressing confidence that Nutritional Hybrid Technology will allow for the creation of new supplements and cut down on consumer pill fatigue, Brown further notes that one of its greatest benefits still looms over the horizon. “R&D is looking at the opportunity for sustain-and-release tablets, where certain ingredients are digested quicker than others,” he says. “Potentially we can use this to make a long-term release method offering more stable dosage.”
*Market cap as of April 1, 2011
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