Nutrition Industry Executive’s roundtable of experts discusses what’s involved in formulating superior products in the modern era.
The panel:
Asa Waldstein, Founder, Apex Compliance, Boulder, CO, https://apexcomplianceprogram.com
Chase Johnston, Vice President of Operations, Arjuna Natural, Irving, TX, www.arjunanatural.com
Denis Neville, Chief Executive Officer, CoreFX Ingredients, Evanston, IL, www.corefxingredients.com
Kevin Kumetz, Senior Formulator of Key Accounts, Vitaquest International LLC, West Caldwell, NJ, https://vitaquest.com
Lauren Eisen, Senior Marketing & Business Development Manager, Minerals and Nutrients, Balchem, Montvale, NJ, www.balchem.com
Leo Lin, Research & Development Manager, BioVivo Science, Jeffersonville, IN, https://biovivoscience.com
Michael Crabtree, General Manager, Bioenergy Life Science, Ham Lake, MN, https://bioenergylifescience.com
Steve Pierce, President, Ribus Inc., Sparks, NV, https://ribus.com
Bringing new products to market is a challenging endeavor. In addition to regulatory concerns, there are formulation challenges like choosing the right ingredients, selecting the right ratios, analyzing existing products for market fit, and ensuring product efficacy. There are also supply chain considerations to be made, like selecting ingredients with a stable supply chain in order to avoid out-of-stocks. Nutrition Industry Executive (NIE) has convened a panel of experts to discuss some of the top issues concerning formulators today, and how formulators can create superior products in a challenging environment.
NIE: What are some of the top challenges that formulators face when bringing new products to market?
Waldstein: If products are difficult to use, taste terrible or are expensive, most consumers will not reorder them, even if they are efficacious. The best formulators balance all of these factors along with market intelligence.
Neville: The biggest challenge is getting everything to work together. You can have a great concept, but if the product doesn’t taste right, process correctly, hit its shelf-life targets, or fit within the cost structure, it’s not going anywhere. That’s why having development partners who understand those trade-offs and can help solve them early is so valuable.
Another challenge is that consumers want more from products today. They want convenience, great taste, clean labels and real benefits. Meeting all those expectations at once requires a lot of trade-offs and problem-solving.
Kumetz: One of the biggest challenges in product development is translating effective capsule ingredients into RTM powder mix beverages. Consumers want all-in-one solutions, but many effective botanical extract ingredients, such as berberine, andrographis and theacrine, as well as butyrates, and DHA omegas, have intensely bitter or unpleasant taste profiles that are difficult to mask. Compensating for efficacy, flavor, stability (overage), and consumer acceptance often determines whether an ingredient belongs in a beverage or should remain in a capsule format.
Eisen: Formulation challenges often determine whether a well-designed ingredient ever delivers its intended benefit. With folate, stability and bioavailability have historically been key considerations. Folic acid remains widely used because it is stable and inexpensive, but it does not reflect how the body naturally utilizes the form as folate. More advanced folate forms, including L-5-MTHF, offer improved metabolic efficiency but can still present challenges related to stability and shelf life.
Lin: Formulators in the food, beverage, health food and nutraceutical industries face significant challenges, including keeping up with the latest industry news and trends, using new and cutting-edge ingredients and technologies, masking off-flavors from active ingredients, navigating inconsistent or undependable raw material supply chains, and ensuring strict compliance with evolving regulations, oftentimes across different global markets and regulatory landscapes.
Crabtree: The biggest challenge today isn’t finding ingredients; it’s creating meaningful innovation in an increasingly crowded marketplace. There are thousands of ingredients with published mechanisms, but relatively few truly novel biological systems.
A successful formulation must satisfy multiple objectives simultaneously. It must have a sound scientific rationale, demonstrate measurable efficacy, be manufacturable at commercial scale, comply with regulatory requirements across multiple markets, remain economically viable, and deliver an experience consumers enjoy. If any one of those elements is missing, even excellent science can fail commercially.
Pierce: One of the most persistent challenges is balancing formulation performance with manufacturing efficiency and label transparency. Consumers and brands increasingly demand clean labels, but many conventional functional ingredients carry label acceptance problems that create marketing friction.
NIE: How do formulators determine which market they want to appeal to?
Waldstein: The best formulators use data to inform their decisions. For example, companies like CPG Radar provide market intelligence such as social listening to help formulators understand what customers are actually looking for. For example, the hydration market is very crowded, but data can provide insights into what form factors, price and hero ingredients customers are looking for. This helps product launches be successful rather than the “hope it works” philosophy of the past.
Neville: It usually starts with identifying a need or a gap in the market. The best products are created by understanding what consumers are looking for and where current products fall short, not just chasing trends.
Once you understand the target consumer, the formulation decisions become much easier because you have a clear goal you’re trying to achieve.
Lin: Formulators determine their target market by analyzing consumer health trends, demographic and anthropological data, functional needs, and the supply and demand that already exist and/or are projected in the near and long-term future. Formulators will look for gaps and identify demands in the market, and in some cases, reverse-engineer products to fit those specific lifestyles and needs.
Crabtree: Research and geopolitical and geomedical literacy. The best formulations begin with understanding an unmet biological need rather than chasing a marketing trend. Appealing to a trend means you’re already behind.
Consumer trends provide valuable insight, but they’re often transient. Biology is considerably more durable. We begin by asking fundamental questions: What metabolic bottleneck are we trying to solve? What physiological function is being limited? Where can nutrition genuinely improve human performance or resilience?
Pierce: It usually starts with the intended delivery format and the brand’s positioning. A practitioner-channel supplement formulated for bioavailability in a capsule has a very different ingredient selection lens than a mainstream retail gummy. At RIBUS, we see this play out in real time—our customers range from premium dietary supplement brands targeting health professionals and the contract manufacturers who produce for them, to consumer packaged goods companies that need an ingredient story they can communicate in four words on a front panel.
NIE: What are some best practices for product formulation?
Neville: Start with the end product in mind.
Too often people fall in love with a particular raw material or technology before they’ve fully thought through what they’re trying to create. The best development programs begin with a clear understanding of the consumer, the format, the desired benefit, and the manufacturing requirements. That same philosophy shapes how we work with customers at CoreFX. We spend a lot of time understanding what success looks like for them before recommending a solution. Crabtree: I believe good formulation begins with systems thinking.
Rather than asking, “What ingredient should I add?” formulators should ask, “What biological system am I trying to optimize?”
That means understanding metabolic pathways, nutrient interactions, absorption, stability, manufacturing constraints and, ultimately, the consumer experience.
Pierce: Start with the function, not the ingredient. Too often formulators fall in love with a specific material before confirming it performs in their matrix. At RIBUS, our first question is always what problem are you trying to solve? Whether it’s flow, compressibility, coating or replacing a synthetic ingredient on a label, we see ourselves as a formulation partner—not just a supplier handing over a spec sheet. Best practice means stress-testing your ingredient candidates in your actual delivery form under realistic manufacturing and storage conditions.
NIE: How do formulators prevent overwhelm when choosing the correct ingredients? Do they analyze existing products?
Neville: Looking at what’s already in the market is a good starting point. You want to understand what’s working and where there may be opportunities to improve.
There are thousands of options available today, so formulators have to narrow the field quickly. They look at performance, scientific support, availability, cost, processing requirements, and whether the material is a good fit for the finished product.
Experience also matters. The more products you’ve worked on, the easier it becomes to identify what will work and what probably won’t.
Eisen: When evaluating ingredients, we filter through three lenses: Metabolic efficiency, role in one-carbon metabolism, and performance in real-world formats. We prioritize ingredients that are in a bioactive form and are supported by scientific understanding of absorption and utilization. For example, L-5-MTHF does not require conversion and can directly participate in methylation and one-carbon metabolism, helping support normal cellular processes. Ingredients should also clearly contribute to established biochemical pathways such as methylation. But even the most biologically relevant ingredient has limited value if it degrades before consumption. We look for solutions that demonstrate stability and consistency across manufacturing, shelf life and delivery formats, helping ensure the ingredient can perform as intended when it reaches the consumer.
Lin: To prevent being overwhelmed by thousands of materials and ingredients, R&D formulators use structured filtering systems to map out and analyze ingredients by physical and chemical utility, strict design constraints such as health claims, target cost-in-use margins, and competitive benchmarking i.e. extensive analysis of existing products and their relationship to the market to narrow down and select choices before the experimental and benchtop phases.
Crabtree: Competitive analysis is important, not to copy existing products, but to understand where opportunities exist.
The marketplace often converges around the same ingredients because they’re familiar. Innovation comes from understanding why those ingredients work and whether there are more effective ways to achieve the same biological objective.
Today, we also have computational tools that help tremendously. Artificial intelligence (AI) can rapidly organize scientific literature, identify mechanistic relationships, compare formulation approaches and reveal potential ingredient synergies that would have taken months to identify manually.
Ultimately, AI doesn’t replace scientific judgment. It simply helps us organize information and make better informed decisions.
Pierce: Competitive benchmarking is common and useful, but the risk is designing to the category rather than designing to the customer. The formulators we work with who do this best have a shortlist of trusted supplier relationships they return to when a new project starts. Rather than surveying the entire market, they begin with materials they know perform, then evaluate alternatives against that baseline.
NIE: How do suppliers assist manufacturers with formulation when using their ingredients?
Johnston: Bringing a finished supplement to market involves far more than selecting a raw material. At Arjuna Natural, we view our role as an active formulation partner—not simply a supplier. That support spans four interconnected areas. Our team works directly with manufacturers to understand the formulation context. We also bring delivery system expertise—each ingredient behaves differently depending on its physical form and the delivery system it’s placed in. We advise on how our ingredients perform across formats, and help manufacturers anticipate challenges like particle size, flowability or moisture sensitivity before they become production issues.
Neville: The best suppliers become an extension of their customers’ development team. They help solve problems, provide application support, troubleshoot manufacturing challenges, share formulation experience, and often save customers a tremendous amount of development time.
Lin: At BioVivo Science, we are ahead of the game by providing expert R&D and application support in the areas of prototype innovation and development, troubleshooting support, and consultation on complementary ingredient combinations to optimize texture, taste, cost-effectiveness and product integrity and stability. Furthermore, we readily offer guidance and resources in the areas of regulatory compliance, labeling, technical documentation, quality specifications and commercialization support.
Crabtree: The relationship between suppliers and manufacturers has evolved significantly. A good supplier today shouldn’t simply sell ingredients. They should provide scientific support, formulation expertise, regulatory guidance, analytical methods, stability data, manufacturing experience and clinical evidence where available.
Increasingly, suppliers are becoming scientific partners rather than commodity vendors.
At Bioenergy Life Science, we strive to be scientific partners rather than simply ingredient vendors. Our objective is to help customers build successful products, not just purchase raw materials.
Pierce: At RIBUS, we work directly with formulators during the development phase—providing application data, discussing performance across different matrices, and flagging considerations around moisture, flow and compressibility before they become problems on the manufacturing floor. We also support the regulatory documentation process. When a formulator is working on a label declaration or an international market submission, having a supplier who can respond quickly with the right technical and regulatory documentation is a real differentiator.
NIE: How do formulators ensure their finished products meet regulatory standards and are efficacious?
Waldstein: Formulators help ensure finished products meet regulatory standards and are efficacious by building regulatory review into the earliest stages of product development.
This starts with confirming that every ingredient is lawful and appropriate for the intended product category and market. This may include evaluating whether an ingredient is an old dietary ingredient, whether a New Dietary Ingredient Notification may be needed, whether the ingredient has an appropriate GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status where relevant, and whether the intended conditions of use are supported by safety data. Safety is the foundation of compliance.
Strong formulators also consider the global regulatory pathway early. A formula that works in the U.S. may not automatically work in the E.U., Canada, Australia or other markets. Maximum vitamin and mineral levels, permitted ingredient forms, novel food rules, botanical restrictions, required warnings and claim standards can vary significantly by country.
Neville: You have to think about compliance and performance from day one. Those aren’t boxes you check at the end of the process.
It’s important to work with reputable suppliers, understand the science behind the materials you’re using, and make sure your claims are supported. Beyond that, you need to verify that the finished product is delivering what it’s supposed to over its entire shelf life.
Lin: Formulators ensure finished products are safe, compliant and efficacious by establishing strict ingredient specifications, verifying identities using COAs (certificates of analysis), and validating claims through literature, preclinical or clinical trials. Furthermore, they are well-versed in and apply current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs), conduct extensive shelf-life studies, and use advanced scientific knowledge and formulation techniques to preserve active and functional ingredients against processing loss, damage and degradation.
Crabtree: Regulatory compliance and efficacy should never be independent conversations. The strongest products are designed so that their scientific evidence naturally supports compliant structure-function claims.
That requires rigorous ingredient characterization, appropriate analytical testing, carefully designed clinical studies and complete manufacturing documentation.
We’re also seeing tremendous opportunity in decentralized clinical research. Wearable biometrics, remote sample collection, digital symptom tracking and AI-assisted data analysis allow us to evaluate products under real-world conditions while maintaining scientific rigor.
These approaches complement traditional randomized clinical trials by providing additional insight into how products perform in everyday life, helping us better understand the real-world experience of consumers.
Pierce: Efficacy and compliance are parallel tracks, not sequential ones. Starting the regulatory review process at the ingredient selection stage—rather than after the formula is locked—saves significant time and cost.
Beyond regulatory compliance, the most successful brands today are also thinking about certification and transparency as formulation criteria in their own right. Certifications—whether organic, non-GMO (genetically modified organism), kosher, halal or allergen-free—aren’t just marketing checkboxes. They represent a verifiable, third party-validated commitment to what is and isn’t in a product, and consumers and retail buyers increasingly expect that validation to exist before they ask for it.
NIE: What are some things formulators should consider regarding supply chains when formulating a product?
Johnston: When formulating with any ingredient, supply chain reliability is as important as efficacy. At Arjuna Natural, our vertical integration—from sourcing through extraction and quality control—gives formulators a level of traceability and consistency that’s difficult to achieve with commodity suppliers. We control the process at every stage, which means tighter batch-to-batch specification control, comprehensive documentation packages, and a clear chain of custody from raw material to finished extract.
Neville: Supply chain considerations are far more important today than they were a few years ago. A material may look great on paper, but if it has inconsistent availability, long lead times, or limited production capacity, it can create problems later. Formulators should be thinking about scalability and supply security from the beginning, not after a product has launched. We spend a lot of time helping customers evaluate those risks early so there aren’t surprises later in commercialization.
Kumetz: Protein beverage formulation continues to face supply chain and cost challenges, particularly with whey protein, as growing demand from both the food and supplement industries has tightened supply and increased pricing. While grass-fed whey protein isolates align with clean-label trends, limited availability often forces brands to choose between higher costs and more readily available conventional whey proteins. In response, formulators are incorporating alternative proteins such as yeast, pea and collagen, while leveraging amino acid optimization, flavor technology, mouthfeel modifiers and dairy-inspired flavors to deliver the creamy sensory experience consumers expect.
Lin: For R&D formulators, proactive supply chain management is critical to bridge the gap between a benchtop prototype and a viable, scalable commercial product. Failing to evaluate ingredient sourcing, batch consistency and supplier resilience early in development can lead to botched scale-ups, formulation bottlenecks and shelf-life inconsistencies and failures.
Crabtree: Supply chain planning now begins before formulation begins. Costing and financial modeling are critical before bringing any product to market. A formulation may be scientifically innovative, but if it isn’t economically feasible, it will struggle to succeed commercially.
When we evaluate a new ingredient system, we’re simultaneously evaluating precursor availability, fermentation capacity, manufacturing infrastructure, regulatory acceptance, geopolitical considerations and long-term sustainability.
Pierce: Supply chain resilience has moved from a back-office concern to a formulation decision point. If a key ingredient has a single-source supplier in a region with geopolitical or climate exposure, that’s a material business risk embedded in your formula. At RIBUS, our rice-based ingredients are domestically sourced—that origin story matters both for supply reliability and for the “made in the USA” narrative that resonates with a growing segment of buyers.
NIE: What’s the next big thing in product formulation?
Neville: The next big shift will be moving from nutrient/bioactive inclusion to optimization.
Historically, the industry has focused on how much of something can be added to a formula. The next phase is understanding how to help those nutrients maintain their integrity and perform as intended throughout the life of the product.
Lin: Three areas are likely to have lasting relevance: stress management and resilience, sustained energy and sugar reduction. Interest will continue to grow in botanicals, adaptogens, natural caffeine and natural sweetener solutions that can support these needs in convenient, enjoyable and cost-effective products.
Crabtree: I think we’re entering an era of intelligent formulation. Artificial intelligence will dramatically improve our ability to identify biological synergies, optimize formulations, predict stability and personalize nutrition.
At the same time, advances in co-crystal engineering, fermentation technologies, synthetic biology and systems metabolomics will allow us to build ingredients that function more like integrated metabolic platforms than isolated compounds.
Pierce: Functional excipients—ingredients that do double duty. The next generation of formulation won’t accept the trade-off of a functional filler that’s either performance-focused or label-friendly. There’s real momentum around excipients that contribute positively to the nutritional or functional story of the product while still performing their technical role. NIE
