The nutritional supplement industry has been steadily growing for years now. In part that’s because the price of prescription medication has also been growing: insurance can only cover so much, and so people have been looking for other ways to stay healthy. One of the best options is supplements: they have tested formulas, they offer real benefits by providing nutrients your regular diet might not give you, and their prices have remained steady thanks to heavy competition.
But how to open a supplement business? It’s not too expensive to buy a machine that will create tablets for you, but it’s hard to scale up to meet a growing demand and even harder to meet FDA regulations. The FDA isn’t as strict with supplements as it is with prescription drugs, but you still have to meet some important standards. Fortunately, that’s where Vitakem comes in: we are a supplement manufacturing contractor that creates private-label supplements for our clients that can sit next to any national brand on a pharmacy’s shelves.
Many of our clients already own existing businesses and want a private-label supplement to grow their brand and improve their profits. After all, any business connected to health, wellness, fitness, or beauty has a connection to nutritional supplements, and selling their own private label improves both their branding and their bottom line. A spa can sell supplements for skin health, a fitness gym can offer protein powders and muscle recovery vitamins, and a hair salon can stock hair-care supplements next to the shampoos by the front. Even a drug store could offer its own multivitamin brand.
Other clients come across us because they’re looking to find out how to open a supplement business from scratch. We take care of the major capital expenses like the production machines and the clean lab where we produce the supplement formulas, so our clients can get the products they plan on selling right away. Just about anyone can create a website and a national presence thanks to the internet, so the only hard part is building up a customer base and planning a strong marketing strategy to get your name out there.
We don’t tell clients how to open a supplement business at Vitakem, we just give them all the tools they could want. Because our clients are so diverse, the supplements we offer are equally diverse. We have several dozen formulas ready to go that include vitamins, multivitamins, herbal supplements, and several options for protein powders that include kosher and vegan-friendly formulas. We can then process these formulas into tablets, capsules, gel caps, powders, or even gummies.
The packaging design is completely up to you. Our facilities can handle, bottles, boxes, jars, blister caps, packets, and more. Our graphic design team can then create a unique label for your package that meets your requirements. If you have a business logo ready to go, we can add it and give you a discount. You can also design your own labeling from the ground up, and in that case, all we’ll do is make sure it’s legible on the packaging and meets FDA requirements.
Aside from learning how to open a supplement business, it’s also important to know how to reach your customer base. Fortunately, Vitakem offers a number of shipping and stocking options for our clients. Along with shipping directly to clients, we offer a drop-shipping program. For an added fee, you can give us your customer orders and we’ll manufacture and ship your supplements directly to them.
As an alternative, our partnership with Amazon lets us stock your supplements at one of their warehouses so you can list your products on their site and have the valuable “fulfillment by Amazon” note on your page. We also offer international shipping for overseas clients who want supplements with “Made in the U.S.A.” on the package.
At Vitakem, we focus on supplement manufacturing so our clients can focus on things like marketing, brand awareness, and managing other businesses. So if you’ve ever wondered how to open a supplement business, the answer is to partner with Vitakem so we can deliver the formulas you want, the pills you need, and packaging unique enough to stand out in a competitive market.
