Have cake, eat cake: Ingredients for Australia’s nutraceutical boom

This is frustrating especially when you spend time, money and effort sourcing the ingredients, then measuring, mixing, baking and sculpting to find the end-result flat and disappointing.

On the flip side, have you ever tasted a homemade, perfectly fluffy, soft and delicate cake creation that melts in your mouth? That homemade goodness can't be easily replicated. Much like the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when embracing a loved one? Pretty special isn't it?

Now it turns out that the manufacture of nutraceuticals is much like baking a cake. Put very simply, you get out what you put in. Guided by the Australian legislator and regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the Australian manufacturing landscape has been setting strict standards and raising the bar on quality for many years. 

We are proud to say that the Australian industry leaders continue to push the quality mantra, which begins with quality-tested raw materials, and continues through precise and critical manufacturing processes, validated testing on the release of the product, and stability studies which test the product throughout its lifecycle.

It turns out that one of the keys to success when baking is passing all the ingredients through a fine particle sieve at the start of the process to ensure even mixing and distribution of all the ingredients. Funnily enough, this is also a key aspect of making perfectly formed, stable and efficacious tablets. 

Come to think of this, I have never used a sieve while baking. It was always faster, easier and cheaper not to do so! Much the same with quality nutraceutical manufacturing, it takes quality ingredients treated with absolute care, with no shortcuts taken, to produce a quality end-product.

In the nutraceutical industry, end-users don't get a warm, fuzzy and emotive connection when they take our products—after all, it's not a soft, fluffy unforgettable cake that they are consuming! 

What they do expect is that the product they take are safe and deliver results—something that may be compromised when raw materials are of poor quality and manufacturing process steps are missed or shortcuts taken. 

Did you know that many nutraceutical actives cannot be heated past certain temperatures as heating can degrade key actives? Although an end-product may visibly look perfect, actives may not have made it through this complicated process. 

So now we reach the crescendo of the cake, icing sugar delicately sprinkled on the warm cake like a sparkling tiara on a princess. It turns out that if you do this quickly by hand straight out of the packet (which is my technique of choice) icing sugar patches are unevenly distributed all over the cake leaving some poor consumers, depending on what piece they end up with, with way too much sugar or probably worse, with hardly any at all; how heartbreaking! 

Micro dose vitamin and minerals are exactly what they seem: supplements in tiny doses, like a pinch of salt on your plate of rice, which in reality converts to approximately 500g usage in a 1000kg batch. Obviously it is critical that these ingredients are mixed in a validated and precise manner and that the mixture is tested before and after it is compressed into tablets so that each tablet is of guaranteed potency.

All these factors are simple yet critical processes in the success of the Australian nutraceutical industry. And unlike trends that come and go, our industry, along with the TGA and various leaders, have been working like this for many years to ensure quality and safe products that deliver results. 

These products are made with love, which does make all the difference. Come to think of it, my grandmother always told me the secret to her famous cake was that it was made with love; maybe she was onto something!

• Angelo Di Sapia is the head of sales and innovation at Lipa Pharmaceuticals, a contract manufacturer of nutraceuticals and OTC products.​