[00:00:05] Melissa Traverse: Hello, and thank you for joining. I am Melissa Traverse, Director of Community here at BevNET CPG Media, and I am excited to welcome you to the NonBase podcast, a podcast built to help CPG owners and operators navigate growth challenges and build more profitable businesses. Be sure to check out nonbase.com, BevNET's platform made for the CPG community, where you can find this episode and so much more. Functional ingredients are everywhere from supplements and powders to snacks, shots, beverages, gummies and bars. Consumers are looking for products that do more and investors are paying attention to the brands that can deliver on that promise. But adding an ingredient to a label is very different from building a product that actually delivers. For brands, there are many challenges from a formulation perspective. Can the ingredient stay stable and survive the format? Does it taste good? And will the product still perform by the time it reaches the consumer? With so much competition, brands need to deliver on those questions and make products that feel effective, enjoyable, and easy to use. To help explain what brands need to know before building around functional ingredients, I am joined by two people who spend their days answering those tough questions in the functional space. Philip Bromley, CEO of Vyron, and Sara Fenn, Vyron's Director of Marketing. Viren has spent years developing patented technologies surrounding emulsions, liposomal systems, oxygen management, pouch and bottle packaging systems, and the stabilization of sensitive functional ingredients. So thank you so much, Philip and Sarah, for joining me on the non-based podcast today. This is certainly a topic we hear about all of the time, and I'm really excited to help dispel some of the misunderstandings that surround the functional space.
[00:01:59] Philip Bromley: Oh, thank you, Melissa. Pleasure to be here, and thanks for having us.
[00:02:04] Melissa Traverse: Yeah, thank you. It's great to be here. Well, pleasure to have you. Let's start off by introducing you both to our audience. Phillip, let's start with you. For listeners who may not know Vyron yet, how would you describe what your company does and the formulation problems you're trying to solve for brands?
[00:02:22] Philip Bromley: Sure. So I'm Phillip, CEO and co-founder of Vyron, Chief Emulsions Officer. That's my acronym. What we do is we focus on emulsions, we focus on fat, healthy fats, and just a premise what we do today versus what we did back in the day is we take high-fat emulsions using healthy fats like avocado oil, omega-3s, we emulsify them in different formats, bottles, pouches. glass, whatever, you name it, we do it. And we use the fat to focus on flavor. And then inadvertently, this also increases bioavailability by producing liposomes. And liposomes just simply taste very good.
[00:03:06] Melissa Traverse: And Philip, in preparation for this call, I know that you know so much about this space. What is your background?
[00:03:13] Philip Bromley: I went to school for biochemistry and biochemistry. More so these days, biochemistry, biotechnology by trade. And I did work in pharma for a little while doing emulsions, more so drug delivery. When I started the company, I think I was like 28 years old and a long time ago, 23 years ago, in fact, we came up with a technology taking transference and binding transference to different proteins and peptides and naive compounds. And transferins, people know them as lactoferrin for our industry supplements, but you can use transferin in blood plasma as well, and it can cross the blood brain barrier. So we bind it to apolactoferrin, which protects it through the gut and helps with absorption through that same mechanism.
[00:04:01] Melissa Traverse: Well, I understood a small fraction of what you just said, but clearly there is so much science behind what you do and we are actually going to get into some of the specific ingredients that you work with and how you work with them. So we'll get into that a little bit more later on. Sarah, from a marketing and brand perspective, what are you seeing food, beverage and supplement brands ask for right now when it comes to functional ingredients and new product formats?
[00:04:32] Sara Fenn: At the moment, there's a massive shift towards more kind of food-like supplements, so tastier, liquid, gummy treat formats, and a move away from powders, capsules, and other pills. So basically, we're moving towards more enjoyable, tasty supplements. And in terms of comparing them, gummies are great in terms of they taste good, but the problems are that they're often full of sugar, and you can only put a tiny amount of active, which means you might sometimes need to take 20 gummies to get your one serving, sometimes more than that. So it's not the most efficient way of getting a nutrient in, although it's a very tasty, desirable way to do so. very much promoted towards children, not that they need any more sugar in their diets. And then you've got the stick packs that blend with water, but people are moving more towards beverages and liquid supplements. And where we are key differentiators is that we do liquid supplements, but without a lot of toxic preservatives like potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate. And Philip will go into the details on those later and how they can cause a carcinogenic reaction in the body. But we really specialize on using real ingredients. So things that you'd find in your kitchen, whether it's avocado oil, lemon oil, almond butter. We have a creamy edible emulsions pattern in which we can blend almond butter with our lipid emulsified blends. And not only does it make them more delicious, more stable, more absorbable, but also a lot more moreish. So when our customers come, they're getting a supplement that is delicious, but they want to keep coming back for more and super versatile as well. So the supplement really transform from an isolated supplement that feels like a chore to something that's really, really enjoyable. And that's gained a huge momentum and massively growing. I mean, we have just expanded to a bigger warehouse in Colton. We've recently opened up our Irish facility. And Europe is taking on, moving on with the lipid emulsified supplements too. We're usually about 10 years behind the US, but we're seeing a lot of traction over here. So it'll be exciting to see what happens in the future in this area.
[00:06:50] Melissa Traverse: We've been talking a little bit in preparation for this call about how Viren is bridging the gap between foods and supplements. I mean, the thing that we hear in food and beverage all the time is pretty obvious, but it has to taste good in order for the product to be successful and for people to buy it over and over again. And really that's what you all at Viren are doing. You're turning supplements into a sensory experience using real food ingredients and making them actually taste good?
[00:07:22] Philip Bromley: That's correct. We do. And as Sara mentioned, we use the almond butter. We use a natural food to try to keep the emulsions from separating, instead of using polysorbates or detergents or things like that. Almond butter, if you think about it, it's very simple. Take the almond butter, add some oil, and then put it in water, and then you have this emulsion that tastes amazing, and then you can flavor on top of that. And then you can put the water ingredients, vitamin Bs or vitamin C, you can put that in the water phase in production. And then the fat soluble ingredients, you can put that in your avocado oil, your flaxseed oil, whatever oil you're delivering, olive oil. And then the the almond butter acts as an intermediary that keeps the two glued together without separation. And that also allows low water activity. So you get different, to stabilize something, you want low water activity without a preservative. You want low water activity by using almond butter, using coconut glycerin. very little water. We use less than 0.5 AW. AW is the unit of measurement for water activity. We typically are under 0.5 AW, and we do things like our bottles that we do, which we have different types of bottles. It's just one of them. It's a single injection mold, and it's made of PET, and it doesn't permeate oxygen at all, and we dose it with liquid nitrogen. and then we trap it with an induction seal. The induction seal, we call it a trampoline effect for obvious reasons. You can see it's kind of beveled on top, and that's because we trap the nitrogen in the headspace of the bottle. And it's a gas, so as soon as you open that induction seal, it just dissipates. But that removes dissolved oxygen in the liquid and oxygen in the headspace. So then you can't have chemical reactions, a lot of chemical reactions like oxidation, without the presence of oxygen, and then reducing the water activity helps with stability.
[00:09:19] Melissa Traverse: And then if you're using almond butter as an emulsifier, I would assume one of the other benefits of that is that on the ingredient panel, you're seeing almond butter and not a long word that you can't pronounce.
[00:09:32] Philip Bromley: That's right, and almond butter has PUFAs, polyunsaturated fatty acids, omega-3s. Peanut butter doesn't have as much. You're eating more of the omega-6s, the omega-9s. So it's a good choice if you're gonna use a nut butter, but we can use any nut butter. We've done cashew butter, pumpkin butter, hemp seed butter. Almond butter is more commercially available. It's cost-effective, it's organic, and it's a good substitute for whey protein because we also have patents and patents pending on using whey protein as an emulsifier. All these in combination, that's what helps assure that you have stability in these types of applications. And the same is for the pouches that we do. I would say the bottles and the smaller bottles and the pouches are about equal business. We do both. You don't see one selling more than the other. The same with the pouches, we put liquid nitrogen inside the pouches, we trap it in there. They feel like almost like little balloons in some sense of the word. And all this stuff keeps things from oxidizing. It keeps reactions from occurring. Vitamin D is not stable in liquid with water activity. So removing the water activity and putting nitrogen in there, removing oxygen assures that that vitamin D is stable.
[00:10:47] Melissa Traverse: So Viren is known for liquid supplementation innovation, but a lot of our audience is working in other formats. When a brand is choosing between a gummy, a powder, a capsule, a shot, a beverage, a bar, or some other format, what should they understand about what each format can and can't realistically deliver?
[00:11:08] Philip Bromley: Yeah, so Sara touched on this a little bit with the gummies. We saw the gummy popularity just thrive maybe starting eight years ago and you've seen it become more saturated maybe in the past like three years. And we get a lot of people contacting us because they wanna put five grams of collagen and people don't wanna take five, 10, 20 gummies or they want probiotics and some probiotics and some processing gummies, there's heat involved, there's water involved and probiotics can colonize and grow and then rapidly decline, die. So our formulations with probiotics, not only is it low water activity, but there's absolutely no water activity. Some people want 1,500 milligrams of EPA DHA per serving, can't do that, and two or three gummies. You would need 10, 15, 20 gummies. And then the process of producing gummies with heat oxidizes the omega-3, then you have to use a lot of terpenes and lemon oils to hide that. And not only just omega-3s, but glutathione, we talked about that. There's a lot of products out on the market that combine glutathione with water. And if you have water with a tripeptide that's bound with disulfide bonds, those twist and turn produces sulfuric gas, which smells like rotten eggs. We have no water activity with the glutathione. Same with NAD+. which is positively charged, so we bind it to negatively charged apolactoferrin, which helps stabilize the NAD+, so it gets to the gut, it binds, and receptor mediates and becomes systemic.
[00:12:42] Sara Fenn: One of the things that I love about the formulations that we do at Viren is specifically that we're making supplements more like food, and in that, that is very different to powder formats, pill formats and capsules. A lot of nutrients are fat soluble, which means that when you have them just with water, you don't necessarily absorb them, you're just getting expensive whey. Historically and ancestrally, we never had vitamin C as an isolated ingredient, independent of the food, and the same with vitamin D3 or omega-3 DHA, for example. It was always bound in other phospholipids and fats. and those ingredients help you absorb the food. So when you do the lipid emulsification, you're making supplements more like food and your body recognizes them as food and absorbs them. So you're not just getting better stability and better flavor, customers are actually benefiting from the supplement themselves and getting the ingredients because our bodies recognize food, they don't recognize isolated compounds always. And another super important point is that we don't use artificial sweeteners or artificial flavors. So we'll be using organic. vanilla extract, like real organic Peruvian cacao. So it's not just like a chocolate flavor or a kind of pretend natural flavoring. These are organic high-grade real ingredients and oils that you'd use in the highest quality food recipe that you'd be making. So it's more like high-level recipes rather than just putting together some delicious flavors that maybe look like treats, but the ingredients are very, very wholesome. And there's no artificial flavors, no artificial preservatives because of all the technology that we do have with the nitrogen flushing, the deionized water and the bicarbonate soda downstream processing. So there's a lot of technology in the background at Viren that allows us to make supplements that are not just stable and delicious, but far, far more healthy than your mainstream liquid supplement that's around.
[00:14:46] Philip Bromley: As Sora mentioned, so we get a lot of, when you want like a fruit flavor, like raspberry, you want to do a raspberry cream or a raspberry ice cream using the almond butter and you have vanilla extract. And then we'll get terpenes and natural flavors from a company called Liebermuth in Europe. And they manufacture all these terpenes. We focus on flavor first. We always say the best liposomal manufacturers are French sous chefs. Think of like hollandaise sauce, mayonnaise. French rice milk, French sauces, ranch dressing. You start with a liposome, it just gets you a really good flavor experience, and then you can build on top of that. Liposomes just taste good, but a lot of people look at liposomes as carbon nanotubes or some pharmaceutical, fancy, sciency thing, and it's really not, it's just food with a very medical sounding name.
[00:15:37] Melissa Traverse: Let's talk a little bit about liposomal systems. They're often used in the liquid supplement industry. You know, when I think about liposomal technology, I think about brands like Mary Ruth Organics, Symbiotica, brands like that, but it can certainly be a challenging concept to understand if you don't have a scientific background. What do brands misunderstand about liposomal technology and what should they understand about delivery systems before they put claims on a label?
[00:16:08] Philip Bromley: Liposomes actually go, in a biological term, they go through something called mycelization. Liposomes really are intended for things that are fat-soluble, because your body has a hard time absorbing things that are fat-soluble, because your brush border membranes are composed of lipids that are water-soluble. and that whole analogy of like dissolves like. If you have water and then you add sugar in there, which is water-soluble, it dissolves very easily. If you have water and you pour olive oil on top, it just sits on top. But if you emulsify that together, you create a micelle or a liposome, then it's not separated anymore and your body is more likely to absorb that. But like I said before, we actually use liposomes for flavor and it's an inadvertent effect. but to those brands that are looking to produce liposomals, going to a manufacturer and trying to ask them, can you explain how you produce liposomes? Can you explain what they are in less of a scientific manner? What is it actually doing? And they'll say stuff, a lot of companies out there talk about saponification. They say a lot of words that are very scientific, it's hard to understand. What we tell people is to make a liposome, think again, French sous chef, think a ratatouille, Your mixing bowl is your tank, your whisk is your homogenizer, your egg yolk is your phospholipidemical liposome. And you pop it in there with the other ingredients and you whisk it with your whisk, your homogenizer, and then you have a liposome. It's really simple like that. That would be my recommendation is to ask questions and make sure it makes sense. If it's not in layman's terms and you can't make sense of it, then I would just keep asking questions.
[00:17:49] Melissa Traverse: We've been talking a little bit about how functional products can fall short between the innovation and production and how it sits on the retail shelf and how the consumer actually uses it in their home. A big piece of that is stability and stability failure. Can you explain what you've done to combat that issue? I don't know if liposomals play into that or how much they play into that, but talk a little bit about that.
[00:18:17] Philip Bromley: I would use the example of DHA, EPA, omega-3, and oxidation. Everybody knows about oxidation, the fishy smell, bite into a soft gel, and you know, it rancid, it's all hell, it's terrible. And I can explain why it is. If you want something to taste like chocolate, vanilla, salted caramel, ice cream, you want some fat in there. But of course, healthy fats in order to achieve that experience. But these oils, they oxidize. And then industry measures peroxide levels, even in olive oil or avocado oil, but EPA, DHA as well. And the peroxide levels in all these oils they naturally start to decline over time during the oxidation process. So measuring peroxide and seeing it low doesn't mean it's actually not oxidized. Have you ever tasted, I'm sure all of you are testing peroxide levels and have an expectation at home. If you do test peroxide, if you send off to a lab, you'll see the levels are low, but yet it still tastes like turpentine, or you can tell that the flavor's off. It tastes like paint. I'm thinking specifically of like flaxseed oil or olive oil. It just starts to taste off. So with all these oils, the peroxide's oxidizing. and different other things are oxidizing, and they're actually converting into carcinogenic materials that have been shown to cause DNA mutagenicity that's linked to cardiovascular disease, it's linked to liver health and kidney health, cognitive decline, your olive oil in your pantry, your avocado cooking oil, these all need to be stored at room temperature at best inside your pantry. Getting bottles that are black, there's a reason why I love this Greek olive oil that it gets in a can and it's coated, it's protected from oxidation, it's got a special cap on top that doesn't allow you to have oxygen enter and it gets preserved very well. Same with bottles, you'll see olive oil comes in black bottles. I like the analogy of if you go to a restaurant and you order a salmon and they deliver it and it just tastes rancid, like dead salmon that's been sitting there in the kitchen counter for three weeks. And you tell the server, hey, take this back. I don't want to eat this. It's bad. But yet we consume your olive oil that tastes turpentine-ish, and we still use it, and we're consuming these soft gels that have oxidized and are producing these byproducts. Even though peroxide levels stay low, that doesn't mean it's not oxidized. So these are things that we all need to be aware of, and these are things Byron removing the oxygen, keeping the water activity low, using special packaging. I do give credit to a lot of these oil companies and food manufacturers that are putting their olive oil in a black glass bottle or the aluminum metal bottle that's coated and putting special caps and dispensers on their pore spouts that keep at least the oxygen levels less than it would be otherwise. I wish our industry would take more considerations in that regard.
[00:21:17] Melissa Traverse: What you said is so important. And just to sum it up in layman's terms, how are flavor stability and ingredient quality connected?
[00:21:28] Sara Fenn: Going back to what Philip said, the crux of the issue is, are your supplements good for you or are they bad for you? Because when you look at oxidation, if they're inflammatory and oxidized and gone off, then they can make you very, very sick. And with regards to stability and flavor and the connection is that We have an innate ability to sense if something has gone off, if it's rancid or our nose tells us, but we kind of have parked that when it comes to supplements. And we think if we have a fish oil capsule that gives us a fishy burp, that's okay. And actually that's a very good indicator that you've eaten something that's probably not very good for you. And where this is a real issue is that we can taste if something is stable or not. But within the lipid emulsified idea and the liposomal idea is that it's the shape of it in terms of when you mix the emulsions and the ingredients and the water. is that you get the nutrient is protected in a double layer of fat. So it's like a sphere with a double layer around it. And that double layer of fat is what protects the volatile nutrient, which becomes particularly important with ingredients like omega-3 DHA, for example. We know it's from fish, therefore it degrades much more easily than say other compounds like vitamin C, for example. And what that does is literally protects the nutrient when it's in the bottle on the shelf, as well as supporting it to bypass your stomach enzymes and stomach degradation. There's quite a few ingredients, including creatine and glutathione, that degrade when there's a lot of water activity in the blend, so you get a lot of fizzy drinks that have creatine in them. And creatine degrades into creatinine very, very quickly, which is when you have creatinine in your urine, that means that you have kidney failure. So it's not having any benefit for you when it comes to hormone balance or cognitive focus or muscle building. It's just giving you the symptoms that somebody with kidney failure would have. and some ingredients like glutathione also they degrade with water so you really need to be formulating with them without water and they will give you like glutathione will then smell like gone off eggs so that's another clue but people still take the supplement because they they kind of park their biases that they would have with food when it comes to a supplement I think what's really important for formulators and brands to think about is it's not just the quality of the ingredient that you're choosing to put into your blends, but it's the format. Is it the best format and corresponding ingredients for that blend, or are they contradictory?
[00:24:14] Philip Bromley: Creatine is a great example. We use Crea Vitalis, who has third-party studies published published journals and very high purity creatine and we like to use Korea vitalists, and they've tested the formulations that we've done with absolutely no water and using nitrogen to purge oxygen and make sure that there's no all oxygen has been displaced. The thing about that is creatine does convert to creatinine, which if you get your blood panel, your blood work done, you'll see creatinine as one of the, as Sarah mentioned, one of the indicators toward something that could be affecting your kidney or your liver. Look, if you want to supplement creatine, and your product is creatinine, forget the fact that it's creatinine and it's associated with blood panel for kidney and liver conditions, but you want to be buying what's on the label. And if there's creatinine in there and no longer creatine, then they should be labeled as creatinine, not creatine.
[00:25:15] Melissa Traverse: Such a good explanation of flavor stability and ingredient quality. My next question is around preservatives. A lot of brands want cleaner labels, but they also want their products, of course, to be safe and stable. What do brands misunderstand about preservatives, additives, and the way that ingredients can interact over time?
[00:25:38] Philip Bromley: Yeah, it's very similar to what we were discussing with the oils. The same reactions in the aldehydes and the ketones, they get produced from potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate. Everybody knows, a lot of people know just from way back when, how sodium benzoate can convert to benzene. But potassium sorbate also does something similar. And nitrites and nitrates are notorious for this as well. Potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate, nitrites, nitrates on their own, They're not harmful. They don't cause inflammation. They're not carcinogenic themselves. It's the react with other compounds within that formulation and it's the byproduct that gets produced. That's the damage. It's interesting too with food because we're not here just trying to explain what we do best, which is fats, but the nitrites and nitrates and food and we talked about olive oil cooking oils and the byproduct and if it tastes bad, what's up with that question that but the nitrites nitrates. A lot of people go to the store, and they buy the nitrite, nitrate-free products. If you're at Sprout, Whole Foods, or wherever, and you're paying twice as much for that product that's free of nitrites and nitrates. But then if you look at the ingredients, it contains celery extract. And just go to your AI, search celery extracts, and how much nitrites and nitrates are in the celery extract. So all it is is your kids, you're telling them to clean their room, and then they throw everything under the bed. I don't see it. It's not visible. So therefore, it's a clean room. It's no different here.
[00:27:11] Melissa Traverse: That's such a good example. And now I guess I'm going to have to stop eating deli meat.
[00:27:17] Sara Fenn: What I'd like to add is that where you get potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate added particularly to supplement blends or even processed fizzy drinks is that they're usually present in high water volume blends. So if supplement, when people are choosing supplements, they might go for the, the cheaper one in water over using a lipid emulsion, because water is cheaper than fats. But then the only way that the water stays stable is that if you add potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate as well. And the problem with them, as Philip was talking about the byproducts, is that you get nitrates and nitrates in the runoff from agricultural industry. So it's always present in water generally. So when you're mixing your supplement or food or drink, you're getting nitrates and nitrates anyway, unless you're having some kind of really clean filtered water. And what happens with the nitrates and nitrates is when they blend and come into contact with potassium sulfate and sodium benzoate, is that they produce mutagenic compounds that then can interrupt your DNA and potentially become carcinogenic. So it's very important to be aware that sometimes the cheaper formulations, the ones that look more desirable, can be packed with, they're full of water, water is cheaper. But because of the water and oxygen activity, they need to have preservatives. And then the preservatives become potentially toxic. And then you wonder, is the supplement really good for you? Or is it actually quite dangerous? But it's cheaper than the lipid emulsified one.
[00:28:47] Melissa Traverse: And what is the point of doing all of this if you're not working to support the health of your consumers?
[00:28:54] Philip Bromley: And not only with the preservatives, because we touched a lot of nitrates, nitrates, potassium, sorbate, sodium, benzoate, lower water activity, adding nitrogen to displace oxygen. Using special PET, this is metallized PET in our pouches, which have the same effect, two-year shelf life, and that nitrogen stays trapped in here so that you have a product free of oxygen, so reducing reaction. A lot of other companies, they might not have a preservative in there. And this is important for brands that are looking for formulation. We have some companies that come to us, and they say, we've been working on with a company for over a year, and they still haven't developed our product yet and aren't able to scale up. In some cases, we get companies that come to us and say, we spent x amount of dollars, and yet we have nothing to show for it. And they come to us, and then we get their product out on the market within three months. A lot of companies come to us and they have their products manufactured elsewhere. And you'll go to stores and you'll see their pouches expanding. And whether it's fermentation, whatever byproducts being formed, something is happening through the chemical reaction. The product's expanding, whether it's yeast, fermentation. Now you have, what, alcohol in your product? And in essence, you're making kombucha. But yeah, it's not just the preservatives. It's also your packaging, your water activity in the product. Are you using nitrogen? We use deionized water. You don't want metals with fat. And we use water softener, reverse osmosis, deionization, UV loop, and then constantly testing for micro and testing the water activity constantly to show that, hey, our standards are injectable water, not just water.
[00:30:35] Melissa Traverse: Let's go ingredient by ingredient and help our audience understand what each functional ingredient is supposed to do, how brands misunderstand it, and what formulation issues each one creates. I know we touched on this a little bit for some of them, but let's just go ahead and start with creatine again. So what does it do? How is it misunderstood? And what issues does it present?
[00:31:01] Philip Bromley: So creatine's becoming really popular. I think everybody here knows. It became popular with us because we had a lot of people asking for it. It was on Joe Rogan's podcast. But from women, hormonal modulation last year, some studies came out, sleep deprivation, people take 15, 20 grams of creatine to help with sleep deprivation. You have three hours of sleep, feels like you got eight hours of sleep. Of course, there's water retention, and it helps with bodybuilding. It reduces lactic acid and increases repetitions when you're bodybuilding, working with weights or endurance athletes and running. And it helps with, speaking of runners and track and field and cross country, taking creatine for recovery is very helpful. It helps muscle repair quicker. But for me, I take it for more so the sleep deprivation aspects of it, the cognitive, under high cortisol levels as a CEO of a company working 16 hours a day, that creatine really helps modulate any kind of sleep deprivation or increase in cortisol I have.
[00:32:09] Melissa Traverse: I recently saw a beverage that has creatine in it, but you also mentioned that that is that creatine is an ingredient that has water management issues. Is it possible to have a beverage that contains creatine that is effective? Is there a way to present that in a beverage form?
[00:32:31] Philip Bromley: I don't see it being successful. There is a creating out there that's advertised to be stable and beverages. But if you actually look at the data it's only stable for a certain amount of time and you get degradation. You can't have a beverage be stable as typical beverages shelf life and expiration date are in a store. There's some things. you can do to slow it down by using nitrogen, but after six months, well, how much creatine do you actually have in there? What's the ratio of creatine to creatine?
[00:33:02] Melissa Traverse: So we did talk a little bit about DHA omega-3. In my mind, it's one of the supplements that the majority of consumers are familiar with. It's been around so long. We've been told by our doctors, by the newspapers, by every sort of source that it really is an important thing to have in our diets. What don't people know about DHA omega-3 that we haven't said already?
[00:33:28] Philip Bromley: Yeah, no, great question. We focus, because we're a fat company, Healthy Fats, we do focus a lot with DHA, EPA, DHA, Omega-3, both from fish and from algal, because we have both products on the markets. I think we have maybe over 100 different Omega-3 products on the market today. It's very important to have the source. We talked about the soft gels. And this is interesting, the process of getting your EPA EHA from fish oil or from algal is you get the oil, they're both processed, they go through CO2 extraction to get the levels of omega-3 as high as you possibly can without too much processing, which can make the double bonds, the omega-3 fragile, go off, oxidize, and then you have a product that doesn't last long. So they do that, they pack it in barrels, 55-gallon drums, we go through maybe 30 metric tons a month, and then they put nitrogen in there, they cap it under pressure, and then they freeze it. We receive it frozen, we store it frozen, and then we process it with all that stuff we talked about before, that nitrogen, the PET bottle, the PET pouch. Then we get it so that the omega-3 doesn't need to be frozen anymore because there's no oxygen in there, low water activity, so it's stable. What's interesting is other products that don't go through all that process. They don't have PET bottles. They don't have, they might have low water activity like a soft gel, but they don't use nitrogen. Bottles permeate. They're not stored in a refrigerator. They're not stored frozen. So how is it that when you make, and it's the same with olive oil, it's the same with flaxseed oil. They come temperature controlled. The EPDHA comes frozen with nitrogen, yet all of a sudden they're soft gels up on a shelf and they're not stored the same way that raw material is. it maybe said there's some antioxidants added, but they're not powerful enough to make it no different than that raw material that was stored frozen. So it's good to question, hey, the raw material, its quality, how is it that the finished product doesn't have to be stored the same way as the raw material is?
[00:35:28] Melissa Traverse: I'm rethinking my entire supplement routine. Okay. The next one I wanted to ask you both about was NAD+. This is one that I see, I've seen more and more of recently, especially on social media. What are some of the need states that you see being fulfilled by NAD+, how are brands using this ingredient to present their consumers with a way to live better?
[00:35:54] Sara Fenn: So it's very much falls into the longevity category and. What it does is replicate what happens when we do things like fasting, which promotes longevity because it improves mitochondrial health. So NAD plus is really important for mitochondria. Mitochondria are the energy batteries, power houses of the body and then the cells. And if your cell batteries don't work, then nothing else works. So NAD kind of switch on the core of our mitochondria and then our cells and then we can function better and that includes the whole body. So it's very much promoted as a longevity product, a mitochondrial one and a metabolic product.
[00:36:38] Melissa Traverse: Well, I could ask the both of you about functional ingredients all day long. We probably only have time for one more. Let's hit this one probiotics. I mean, there's just so many foods and beverages that are incorporating probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics in them. I just saw a study showing that gut health and immunity tied to these biotics are something that consumers continue to look for and continue to buy. Let's talk about probiotics. What do we need to know and what don't we know about them?
[00:37:08] Philip Bromley: We mentioned earlier about probiotics and we use no water formulations because water in the presence of probiotics allows the probiotic to grow, colonize, and degrade very rapidly. We do probiotic droppers in glass bottles and we use just a oil base. MCT oil, sunflower oil, MCT we prefer because it's got claims, it's associated with ketogenesis and has some health benefits. My favorite application though is the probiotic pouches. It's a good alternative to the gummy because gummies do degrade in the presence of water and heat and both water and heat are used to make gummies. There's some companies that do choose and that have probiotics in it that I think are good technologies. I would definitely encourage brands looking for probiotics to look into the chews as opposed to a gummy. But we do pouches, and you can add other stuff to the probiotic. You can add vitamin D, MK-7, because you have such an oil base, it makes sense to put functional phytochemical or functional oils that have some sort of biological effect, like vitamin D3, like K2 and K7, astaxanthin, lycopene, beta carotene, they all can be added in these formulations that have no water. And one thing that's interesting, I mentioned the lactoferrin, when it reaches your gut, there's published studies showing that it actually kills bad bacteria in the gut and helps colonize good bacteria. And I personally take lactoferrin, which I guess you could call that maybe a prebiotic, but there's, I've seen more studies on lactoferrin for gut microbiome health than I have for many probiotics. So it's just an interesting effect. And again, that's probably why it's in breast milk because a baby doesn't have a fully functional, fully grown microbiome, just like it doesn't have a fully grown pancreas, which lactoferrin can also help absorb insulin in an infant from the gut, from the mother.
[00:39:18] Melissa Traverse: What does that mean for probiotic sodas?
[00:39:23] Philip Bromley: Probiotic sodas, maybe a kombucha, because a kombucha is fermenting over time. I might have that incorrect, but that's my understanding. And then it's actually producing probiotics, but they have to be processed right. And I would definitely want to see third-party testing on that, on the kombucha, because you don't want breakdown over time or too much growth. But just a plain soda or probiotics and beverages, I would be very skeptical about that. I mean, the links and the energy that we go into processing probiotics to assure there's no water, you can't even have water inside your freezer where you store probiotics. You can't use nitrogen either, because nitrogen can act. Kind of like as a desiccant, it can help displace moisture by removing water, but you can't add nitrogen because they're live organisms, these probiotics, and the nitrogen will basically suffocate them. If you have no oxygen, the organism can't live. So they're very delicate, and adding them to water, you get rapid growth and quick decline.
[00:40:32] Sara Fenn: I'd also add that in an ideal world, we shouldn't need probiotic supplements. The reason that we need them is because we eat a diet that isn't really diverse enough, or with foods that are processed, too many antibiotics and painkillers, and that actually kills your healthy gut bacteria. Having healthy gut bacteria is so important because of the gut-brain axis, but also it dictates your whole health. They've associated different gut bacterias with depression, bipolar disorder as well and also with good mood and feeling more satiated. So it's really important to have probiotics, ideally from food, eating a really diverse amount of food, but if not to have a probiotic supplement and then eat a diverse range of fibrous foods to feed those probiotics in your gut microbiome. But the reason they're exploding is because we do have, we eat diets deficient of nutrients, and there's too many poisons and chemicals killing our good bacteria.
[00:41:34] Melissa Traverse: Sarah, for brands who are trying to build the next generation of functional products, what should they stop accepting as being good enough in their formulations?
[00:41:45] Sara Fenn: That's something that we deal with with customers all the time when they're thinking of putting in toxic preservatives that are good enough because the consumer doesn't know the impact that it will have on the health or using oils that might be oxidized already because the consumer doesn't know if the marketing is really good. It doesn't really matter the quality of the product. So I think it's it's not accepting that it's not okay to make, well, that it's okay to make supplements that actually compromise human health. And really putting a lot of thought into the ingredients that they're working with and the processes and then the packaging as well, because that will deliver a product that actually improves someone's health versus detracting from someone's health. And we get clients all the time who say, oh, but we want to use this artificial sweetener that we know is carcinogenic, or we want to use this toxic preservative. and we say no we don't we don't want you to use that we advise against this because look at these studies like Philip will send them an email with so many links to all the studies where something is proven to be carcinogenic and I think it's like what's more important to them is that integrity and really what working with real science and or just hiding things from the consumer. You know knowingly hiding harm from the consumer is so damaging. And I think it's moving away from from allowing that to be acceptable and saying actually we'll challenge the status quo and create products that we know are holistically healthy from the ingredients that we're sourcing to the processing to the finished product and the way that the customer is advised to use that product. I think it's massively important.
[00:43:28] Melissa Traverse: And Phillip, before a brand chooses a functional ingredient, what should they ask about? Things like sourcing, clinical support, purity, and then even whether the ingredient is actually appropriate for their format.
[00:43:42] Philip Bromley: One good thing about working with Firen, or if you were to work with any of our competitors, or you're working with someone that's even outside of our capability, whether you're doing a stick pack powder, or you want to do a two ounce RTD, definitely stability, knowing the things that we talked about today, about water activity. When you talk to the company that you're wanting to create a product with, you should get a sense of confidence. It should be well explained to you. There shouldn't be scientific, words nano encapsulated by using a fluidizer and all these things which are just fancy words to for an emulsion, it should be something that's that any of us can understand. The branding ingredient, a lot of companies are using branding ingredients, which I think is great because they're wanting to associate with the brand, because you can't put claims on a label as much as you used to, especially in the US, Europe too. So having a brand like Crea Vitalis, or Afera, or Conica QH with their Ubiquinol, or we have a brand here using bio-astin, astaxanthin, and they grow that in Hawaii. And it's completely sustainable. Their farms are literally growing it in their pond, their astaxanthin, you can see. You can see it go from clear ponds all the way up to this bright red color. That's how flamingos get their red colors from the astaxanthin they get from the krill that eat the astaxanthin in the ocean. Salmon with that pink hue, that's astaxanthin. And it's a great product, it's a super carotenoid. So brand ingredients are great. Clinical studies. The companies, like us, we're CGMP, we're third-party certified through SGS, and we have to do third-party testing We have to have the raw materials tested. We third party test ISO certified all the stuff going out and your customers should get a copy of that from that third party. And they should be able to see that no different. A lot of people just post stuff on their website. I would want to receive that myself. And like I said before, it's really important that who you're talking to delivers the message in a clear, concise way. Because if they don't, what are they hiding? And how is the brand, how is the customer going to know that, hey, you have a lot of water activity in here. Is my pouch going to blow up like little helium balloons? My probiotic has water in it, and no one's telling them otherwise. So there's a lot of companies out there that don't have the right, let's call it food science, but the right science to make sure that the end product's stable. We've been doing this for 23 years, and we refer people to, someone wants a stick pack powder. I tell them to, I tell them the company to go to. They want no protein tubs. Hey, go contact Simpson Labs in Valencia. We want to focus on what we do best and our fatty emulsions with our little company, with our niche application that we do. And we will help forward other people that want to contact me. Sara, we can suggest those companies to work with outside of our capability.
[00:46:51] Melissa Traverse: And the best way to reach the both of you, would that be right on the Vyron website?
[00:46:57] Philip Bromley: Yeah, you can email innovate.today at vyron.com. And that comes to all of us. And we usually get back within 24 to 48 hours. And anybody can contact me directly.
[00:47:10] Melissa Traverse: This has been such a fascinating discussion, not only from a formulation perspective, but also from a consumer perspective. So thanks to you both for really unraveling functional ingredients and telling us what we didn't know. Philip Bromley and Sara Fenn from Vyron, thank you so much for joining me today in conversation. For everybody else, thank you for listening to the Non-Based Podcast, and we will see you next time. That concludes another episode of the Nambase podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review and follow us on your listening platform of choice. You can also watch and listen to past episodes on nambase.com. And don't forget to join our Nambase Slack at slack.BevNET.com for company updates, industry networking, and community discussions. See you next time.
