New facility is Rx for supplement marketer: Jarrow's new plant brings the packaging of an established line of nutritional supplements—and a lot more—under one roof

Food & Drug Packaging, Dec, 2002 by Pan Demetrakakes

When it comes to co-packing nutritional supplements and vitamins, the Jarrow companies have what you might call a healthy relationship.

Jarrow Industries Inc. has existed only since December 2000, and does business out of a building that was an oilfield near Los Angeles just a few years ago. Its manufacturing and packaging lines have been operational only since this spring; the company has that distinct just-moved-in look, with sparsely decorated walls and more than a couple of vacant rooms. The desk of president/CEO Siva Had is unceremoniously thrust into a corner off the main entrance until the beehive of activity simmers down enough for him to move to his second-floor office.

But the company's roots run back 20 years, when Jarrow Rogovin started parent company Jarrow Formulas as a health-food store. Jarrow Formulas grew from that into a $40 million-a-year marketer of nutritional supplements, vitamins and probiotics (live-bacteria supplements that augment the bacteria naturally found in the human intestine).

Until this year, all Jarrow Formulas products had been co-manufactured; the probiotics, a mainstay of the product line, still are. But Jarrow Industries has taken over the manufacturing and packaging of almost all other Jarrow Formula products.

And the new company does a lot more. Jarrow-brand products make up no more than 30% of its production, with the rest consisting of private-label and co-manufactured products.

Landing so many co-pack customers so quickly was largely a matter of versatility, Hari says. There's a lot of competition in private-label supplement and drug manufacturing, but much of it centers on just one kind of product or package.

Drug and supplement manufacturing "is undersupplied in terms of quality facilities," Hari says. "There are lots of facilities on the market, but most of them cater to a specific product or specific packaging. To have it all under one roof--the raw materials, screening, blending, capsules and tablets manufacturing, and then packaging--there aren't many facilities that provide that kind of one-stop service."

Shell building

That roof, and the walls under it, was a crucial starting point. Jarrow Industries moved into a brand-new industrial park, developed by Trammel Crow Co., that was designed as a series of "shell buildings"--bare-bones structures easily adaptable to the requirements of any manufacturer.

With the help of architectural and engineering firm Advanced Plant Engineering, Hari, along with operations manager Eiger Bjornstad, began designing the plant. Specifications included stringent temperature and humidity control; strategically located mezzanines for product loading; capacities for centralized pneumatic conveying and dust collection; and a modular structure that isolates each step in processing and packaging.

The result is a 45,000-square-foot facility that has the capacity to produce and package over-the-counter (OTC) drugs as well as supplements. It can package pills and capsules in blisters (see "Blisters supplement Jarrow's supplements" on page 40) as well as the bottles that are far more common for nutritional supplements.

In specifying packaging machinery, Jarrow personnel kept in mind the goals of versatility, quality and regulatory compliance--both for supplements and for pharmaceuticals, which have far more stringent standards enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"When we initiated this process, the intent was to improve the standards and the quality of private-label manufacturing and packaging," Hari says. "And also, we had in mind that we could provide not only vitamins and nutritional supplements, but some over-the-counter medicine manufacturing and packaging as well. That was the intent in designing the facility."

The regulatory environment for supplements has become more strict, and that affects packaging as well as production.

"Even in the packaging area, the FDA has regulations on packing materials, labeling, stability and the interactions between the active ingredients and the packaging materials," Hari says. "And also the information that goes along with it."

Modular rooms

Jarrow's manufacturing and packaging operations are broken down into separate rooms, which makes it easier to maintain high sanitation standards and reduces the danger of cross-contamination. The automated bottling area is the largest module, a U-shaped line that comprises everything from bottle orienting to automatic case sealing. The line was designed by NJM/CLI Packaging Systems International, which also furnished several components. The area also has some tabletop fillers and labelers for small, custom orders.

Bottles are unscrambled, cleaned by an air jet and placed in single file by a Unisort 250 from Pace Packaging. A PillowPak desiccant packet from Desiccare Inc. is dropped into the bottom of the bottle by an Azco Corp. inserter.

The bottles are filled by a dual head counter from Cremer Special machines BV, which can run up to 120 bottles per minute. Vibratory grooved plates and cones, which are changed out for different-sized product, feed the capsules into the counting section. The Cremer machine counts a bottle's worth of pills into both the hopper directly feeding the bottles and another elevator-controlled hopper above, ensuring a continuous feed.