When it comes to making supplements and functional products, contract manufacturers do some heavy lifting, helping brands from sourcing and development to packaging and labeling. With so many clients depending on such partnerships to keep retail inventory stable during the pandemic-laced year that was 2020, contract manufacturers were under intense pressure to shore up sourcing and production. Through all this, they still had to keep an eye on the future to stay competitive in a world driven by innovation and progress.
Natural Products Insider talked to several contract manufacturers about how they adapted to the challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic and how they continued to invest in the future. Included in this discussion were:
We held a virtual roundtable with several contract manufacturers for our digital magazine on contract manufacturing, and the following are bonus online questions and responses on ingredient challenges and servicing small brands/lines. Download the Insight into contract manufacturing – digital magazine, to see a fuller Q&A with these manufacturing leaders. Also, check out prior online bonus questions and answers on the pandemic and political impacts.
Insider: Which ingredients or product types have presented the biggest challenge to you, and how did or will you overcome these?
Mark LeDoux, Natural Alternatives International (NAI): Believe it or not, one of the biggest challenges we encountered was lack of bottles and caps, which we have contracted for annually for some time. When the government got involved with securing hand sanitizer and other products requiring bottles and caps, the numbers that they procured vastly overwhelmed our supplier capacity, so we were forced to secure