Food supplements actually form a legal category, rather than just a way of marketing certain products. In the UK, the category covers any concentrated source of a vitamin, mineral or other substance with a nutritional or physiological effect, sold in dose form and intended to top up a normal diet. That’s quite a wide and potentially ambiguous definition that pulls in an enormous range of products, from a straightforward multivitamin tablet through to botanical blends, collagen powders and shakes designed to supplement a healthy diet.
Plenty of ordinary diets fall short of providing everything we need to be fit and healthy, which is why food supplements are so popular. Vitamin D is the obvious one in the UK, where we simply do not get enough daylight for half the year. Iron runs low in a lot of women and anyone eating plant-based needs to think about B12 and omega-3. Plus older consumers absorb some nutrients less efficiently than they used to, so every one of these groups is a potential gap for a food supplement product to fill.
Parkacre is a UK food supplement manufacturer headquartered in Lincolnshire, UK, where formulation, production, packaging and dispatch all happen in the same building. Over two decades in nutraceutical manufacturing has given us all the essential food supplement accreditations that matter to retailers and consumers, plus the technical depth to solve formulation problems properly. Most of our partners are brand owners, retailers and distributors, and we take on the production and compliance to get their food supplements to market.
Compliance is where food supplement projects usually go wrong, especially when brands try to take on the full manufacturing process themselves. A proper manufacturer that formulates to the rules from day one like Parkacre saves you a costly reformulation. Here’s our approach to food supplement regulation compliance.
Food supplements in the UK sit under the Food Supplements (England) Regulations 2003 and the matching regulations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all of which cross refer to retained Directive 2002/46/EC. Annex 1 sets out which vitamins and minerals you may use. Annex 2 sets out the specific chemical forms of each one. We check formulations against both lists before a trial batch is ever produced.
Every food supplement label has to carry a number of core elements, including the nutrient or substance that characterises the product, the recommended daily portion, a warning not to exceed the recommended dose, a statement that supplements should not replace a varied diet and a note to store the product out of reach of young children. Nutrient amounts and NRV percentages sit alongside those. All labels we design and produce take all these essential statements into account from the very beginning, leaving nothing out that could cause our brand partners an issue.
Buyers tend to ask what you are certified to before they ask about price. Our Lincolnshire site holds BRCGS Food certification and SGS GMP accreditation, and we are Informed Manufacturer registered, Soil Association organic approved, HMC halal certified and KLBD kosher certified. We also hold ISO 14001 for environmental management and are Sedex members, alongside other trade accreditations that carry genuine weight with both brands and consumers.
Some food supplement ideas are not covered by an existing formula. You might need a dose that supports a particular claim, a format nobody in your category has tried or a clean-label version of something that currently relies on additives your shoppers have started reading about. Our on-site innovation centre handles that kind of work, taking a brief through formulation, trial batches, stability testing and pilot production before anything gets committed to a full run.
A food supplement is a concentrated source of a vitamin, mineral or other substance with a nutritional or physiological effect, sold in dose form such as a tablet, capsule, sachet or measured powder. It is intended to supplement a normal diet rather than replace it. Food supplements are regulated as food in the UK, which puts them in a different category to medicines.
They describe the same kind of product under different regulatory systems. Food supplement is the term used in UK and EU legislation, coming from Directive 2002/46/EC. Dietary supplement is the equivalent US term under DSHEA. The rules on permitted ingredients, dose limits and labelling differ between the two, which matters a great deal if you plan to sell in both markets.
Food supplements do not go through a pre-market approval process in the way medicines do, but they must comply fully with the relevant regulations before they go on sale. That means using only permitted nutrients in permitted forms, meeting labelling requirements and avoiding unauthorised health claims. Novel ingredients are a separate matter and may need novel food authorisation.
Contract manufacturing is where a brand owner appoints a third-party facility to produce their supplements. The manufacturer takes on production, quality control, accreditation and regulatory compliance, while the brand keeps ownership of the product, the packaging and the customer relationship. For most brands it is a considerably faster and lower risk route to market than building manufacturing capability in-house.
Yes. A significant share of what we produce leaves the UK, and we exhibit at Vitafoods Europe, Vitafoods Asia and CPHI Shanghai to support that side of the business. Different markets have different requirements on permitted ingredients, maximum levels and label content, so it is worth telling us where you intend to sell at the start of the project rather than after a formula is signed off.
