[Herbnerd]

In a previous life, I worked for a company supplying food products to supermarkets. Much of what was bought wasn’t so much because customer demand, but more by what supermarkets telling customers what they sell and then telling the manufacturers what the ‘customer wants’. Often the two are totally different.

I have seen similar trends in the dietary supplement industry - the manufacturers tell customers what they want - unless perhaps the miracle ingredient was featured on Dr Phil - and then everything is reactionary (I have seen products on the shelf within 2 weeks of Dr Phil shows).

I guess it is the same with cosmetic industry.

Trouble is, there is so much misinformation out there and if anyone mentions “Cancer” associated with any ingredient, whether proven or not, there is pressure against that ingredient.

[Herbnerd]

It is my understanding that antioxidants are almost sacrificial in their nature because they will reduce a number of other chemicals. They do this in the body - and this is why Vitamin C is hard to stabilise in an aqueous solution.

[Herbnerd]

Welcome back Perry, good to see this site running again, although it was a shame to have lost such a repository of information on some of those old threads.

I’m Rob Martin, a formulation chemist for the natural health industry, specialising in hardshell capsules, softgels, nutritional powders, tablets and the like.
I am currently studying Cosmetic Science to add those range of skills to my portfolio.

[Herbnerd]

Hi Perry,

I think I may not have been clear. We knew the preservation system was fine - that had been tested using preservative efficacy tests and 3 month accelerated stability to give 9 month shelf-life before the product went on sale. There has been on-going accelerated stability with each batch to ensure we can push this out to 36 months safely.

We were tweaking the vitamin C levels based on the claims to ensure it could be assayed to the claim levels. This is normal practice under TGA (Australia) to conduct on-going stability to ensure compliance.

I cannot comment on the US dietary supplement industry. There are different regulations to be dealt with.

Under Australian Dietary Supplements regulations, they come under the same regs as pharmaceuticals and cosmetics and compliance is defined in law.

[Herbnerd]

I had this problem recently with an Aloe Vera juice dietary supplement I developed for a customer. Everything looked fine on the shelf ( quickest way to see if anything goes wrong was to put on a shelf in bright sun… Mould shows up very quickly).
Sent this away for preservative efficacy tests and 3/4 products came back fine. The fourth passed after a tweak to the preservatives.

So, we felt fine to release for sale whilst doing on-going stability.

Under accelerated stability the Vit C disappeared within hours in three of the four product. The fourth was still there but lower than the levels claimed.

The difference between the fourth product and the others was addition of Vitamin E (dl-alpha tocopheryl acetate).

The quickest solution to the problem was to add vitamin E to all products and increase the overage of the vitamin C by 120%. Ie 90 mg/serve claimed input amount was 198 mg/serve.

Admittedly I was working with pharmaceuticals rather than cosmetics, but I am sure there will be a cross-over of information that could be useful. We did consider using Ferulic acid, but we wanted a solution that didn’t require product relisting.