Format is not a styling decision. It is set by the active, the dose, the way people actually take the product, and what the material does over two years on a shelf. Here are the questions we work through before anything goes into development.
The four questions we answer first
1. What is the active and what is its daily dose?
An active that works at 200 to 500mg a day (most herbal extracts, the B vitamins) is a clean fit for capsules. An active delivered at 5 to 25g a day (collagen peptides, protein blends, glutamine) is not: nobody swallows twenty capsules, so it becomes a powder. A cream is for actives meant to work in the skin or the tissue under it, where the point is local delivery rather than getting the molecule into the bloodstream.
Stability narrows it further. NADH, the active behind our U.S. brand PureNADH, degrades with heat, light and moisture, so the format and the packaging around it are part of the formulation rather than something chosen afterwards.
2. Who takes it, and when?
A 28-year-old training five days a week mixes a powder into a shaker. A 60-year-old taking something for joints swallows two capsules with morning coffee. A 35-year-old applies a cream at night. The format has to fit a ritual that already exists. A product that needs a new habit built around it gets abandoned by week three, so we choose for that and not for what is easiest to run on our line.
3. Where does it get sold?
Capsules travel best. They are light, they are not fragile, and they survive a warehouse and a courier without much drama. Powders build repeat purchase, because a jar that runs out on a predictable date reorders itself. Pharmacy shelves read blisters and bottles as serious and a tub as sports nutrition, whatever is inside it.
4. What does the format demand of packaging and handling?
Capsules are the forgiving one: a bottle, a desiccant, a tamper seal, done. Powders need a real moisture barrier, either a wide-mouth jar with a proper liner or single-serve sachets, and they need controlled humidity in the room while they are being filled. Creams need airless pumps or sealed tubes, because air and repeated finger-dipping are what break an emulsion and exhaust a preservative system. In a cream, the packaging is doing part of the formulation work.
Format-by-format reality check
Capsules
Best for: daily routines, single-active products, doses under 1g/day, actives that need protecting from light and air.
What can go wrong: fill-weight variance. A filler running slightly out of tolerance puts more powder into some shells than others, so capsule 60 does not carry the dose capsule 1 did. We weigh a 20-unit sample from every batch and hold it to USP uniformity limits.
Shelf life: 2 to 3 years.
In practice: Vitamin D₃ 5,000 IU, 60 capsules a bottle. The active weighs micrograms and nearly the whole fill is carrier, so blend homogeneity is what decides whether the label claim is true.
Powder
Best for: high-dose actives (collagen, protein, creatine, fibre), anything where 10g a day cannot realistically be swallowed.
What can go wrong: humidity and homogeneity. Powder pulls water out of the air, and once it cakes the scoop stops measuring what the label promises. Moisture also accelerates degradation and gives microbes something to work with. A blend that separates during filling leaves one jar richer in active than the next.
Shelf life: 18 to 24 months, and it is the format most sensitive to storage conditions.
In practice: collagen peptides at 10g a serving, 30 servings a jar. Scoop discipline matters more than people expect: heaped against level is a 20 to 30% swing in dose.
Cream
Best for: topical delivery to skin and joints, actives that should stay local.
What can go wrong: emulsion stability. Oil and water want to separate. Heat in transit, a weak emulsifier system or a pH drift and the cream splits or the preservative system fails and the jar grows something. We run accelerated stability at elevated temperature before a formula is released, and we produce under ISO 22716 GMP.
Shelf life: 24 to 36 months unopened, considerably less once opened.
In practice: a 50ml jar of day cream with 0.5% retinol. Retinol oxidises on contact with air and light, which is why the container is chosen at the same time as the formula.
Why we do not make gummies
Gummies are everywhere and they look easy. They are not, and we do not make them. Our jars take powders and creams.
Gummy production needs equipment with nothing in common with a capsule filler or a powder blender: depositing lines, starch or silicone moulds, curing rooms, and days of tightly controlled humidity while the sweets set. The sugar and pectin chemistry runs hot, hot enough to degrade heat-sensitive actives, so vitamin C, the B vitamins, probiotics and most botanicals reach the shelf below label claim. The industry answer is overage, meaning put in more than the label says and hope enough survives. That is a guess wearing a specification.
Made by a plant built for them, gummies are a good consumer product. We could not run one to the standard we hold everything else to, so we do not run one at all.
How we settle it
- Under 1g a day, taken daily: capsule.
- 5 to 25g a day: powder, in a jar or as single-serve sachets.
- Works on the skin or the joint underneath it: cream.
- More than one format would work: we pick the one the active is most stable in and run it properly, rather than splitting an active across formats to make the range look bigger.