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Making Your Own Sports Supplements? The 5 things you must consider

S3B Tablet Presses Sports Supplements

You own or run a gym or fitness centre and your clientele are dedicated to personal improvement.  As fitness experts, you routinely develop training programmes for them, but that’s only one side of the coin.  Supplements now play a massive role alongside the physical side of training and can accelerate each individual’s performance.

It’s a new profit opportunity which will increase client retention

Your business may be selling supplements from other brands, but have you considered making your own?  We have many clients who have taken this step and find that they are able enhance business profitability and increase client retention.  Its really easy and return on investment can be very fast.

Outsource or manufacture inhouse?

The first decision to make is whether to engage a specialist supplement contract manufacturer – a quick google search will give you a massive choice.  Pick one, and either take a product off the shelf and rebrand it or devise your own formulation – or just talk to us as we offer supplement contract manufacturing too.

The upside of this approach is that you do not need to invest in your own plant and find somewhere to make the products.  The downside is lack of true flexibility.  You will be committed to volumes and lead times will be fixed.

Many of our clients start like this with outsourced manufacture  – it’s a great way to test the market with minimum outlay.  However, a large proportion switch and manufacture their own products inhouse.

Manufacturing supplements inhouse means you have full control and great flexibility over output as well as the formulations you create.

Your formulation can be tailored specifically to your client base and their exercise programmes.

Start making your branded sports supplements

The first decision is the product range and break this down over time based on either gaps in your current range where there is demand you can’t fill, or the most popular categories you currently sell, for example:. 

  • Muscle building
  • Fat burning
  • Mass gain
  • Energy enhancers
  • Performance enhancers
  • Post workout recovery

Once you have planned your supplement range, you need to study the ingredients needed as this will determine the type of machine you need.  Tablet presses are best for dry ingredients and capsule fillers work well for both dry and liquid form, but tend to be more expensive.

There is a huge amount of resource available to assist in developing your own formulations and almost certainly your trainers will have their own views too.

Our recommendation would be to start with a tablet press, and you will need the active ingredients and a good binding agent.

The active ingredients are the beneficial substances inside the tablet, but often the amount of the active ingredient will be minute in comparison to the size of the tablet and they will need a good binding agent to form this into a tablet that can be packaged and sold.

Binding Agents and Tablet Excipients

In an ideal world, your binding agent needs to compress well under low pressure saving strain on your machine and it needs to ‘flow’  to ensure efficient mixing and compression.  There are many available but we recommend PRESSIT® which is an all-in-one tablet excipient using only uses 100% pharmaceutical grade ingredients.

A good tablet binder will save you time and increase production profitability.  We recommend PRESSIT® which is an all-in-one tablet excipient using only uses 100% pharmaceutical grade ingredients.

Equipment Choice – Tablet Press or Capsule Filler?

This choice is all about output volume and budget.  A capsule filling machine can deal with a wider variety of ingredients, both dry and liquid but they are more expensive and typically start at around £10k, which will get you a machine capable of producing 25k per hour.

Table top tablet presses start at £600, but are labour intensive as they require to be worked by hand.  However, at only £1200, a semi automatic press is capable of producing between 50 and 100k tablets per month which is ideal for an independent operator or startup.

Creating your own brand

Once you start the path of creating your own supplements, you need to create a professional branding to the products – after all they a have been designed for your business and your customers in mind. 

As such, its not a good idea to produce your own supplement range and then have cheap looking labels and packaging.  You need to factor in the cost of doing this essential part of the process professionally. 

This is not something we do ourselves, but we do have a great partner who are expert in branding and corporate ID that we would recommend!  If you are interested in how to create your own brand,  check out this blog on why branding is so important – even for small businesses.