Romaco Kilian recently teamed up with Biogrund, TaBlitz and the Romaco sister companies Innojet and Tecpharm to host a “Nutraceuticals get-together”. The two-day event was an opportunity to address key nutraceutical handling challenges and examine the manufacturing process from various perspectives. With around 20 guests from six European countries, this exclusive industry meet-up was fully booked in no time.
Nutraceutical production presents an array of challenges. In most cases, only a limited choice of ingredients is available for the formulation, as chemical additives need to be avoided as far as possible. Moreover, the authorized natural ingredients are often very complex to process: plant-based raw materials, for instance, tend to be sticky and poorly flowing, making them difficult to compress. They also have a reputation for high chemical and physical instability. Minerals, on the other hand, exhibit highly abrasive properties and attack the tooling.
These issues were the starting point for the get-together. The aim was to:
• Enable a diversified group of experts to discuss industry-specific requirements for the manufacturing process.
• Explore potential solutions for granulating, tableting and coating nutraceuticals were explored in seven expert lectures.
• Novel concepts for lubricant usage and an AI-supported platform for tablet design were likewise featured in this context.
• A hands-on session at the KiTech tableting laboratory concluded the event. Participants carried out compression tests using the KTP 1X compaction simulator from Romaco Kilian. Granulation of a placebo mixture was additionally demonstrated on the Ventilus Lab fluid bed processor from Romaco Innojet.
The get-together was specifically targeted at European nutraceutical manufacturers and was a small-scale affair with just 20 participants from Germany, Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, Czechia and the UK.
