How capsules are made

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ONE MORNING late last winter, a wet snow fell over Salt Lake City and the surrounding mountains. The sky was ice-gray, and cars slipped off the highway with the drama of an Olympic skater on a bad night. It would be a good idea, one radio announcer advised, to stay indoors and whip up something good to eat.

Employees at two of the United States’ largest suppliers of herbal supplements were more or less doing that, only the result wasn’t a batch of cookies and a spoon to lick. Instead, these “chefs”, dressed in neatly pressed uniforms and wearing hairnets, plastic gloves, and face masks, were making as many as 60,000 echinacea, ginkgo, and other herbal capsules an hour, or up to 8.5 million little pills a day.

What is encapsulation?

The process of preparing plants and putting them into capsules is known as encapsulation. Capsules are tiny containers measuring less than an inch long and most often made of a clear, see-through gelatin. Capsules made of potato starch and turmeric or other non-animal ingredients also are used but are in less demand.

Herbal supplement makers produce huge numbers of capsules now, but encapsulation is fairly new to the trade. While the pharmaceutical industry has been making capsules for decades, the herb trade has only been at it full force since the 1980s, says Grace Lyn Rich, marketing director for Nature’s Herbs, an herbal supplement supplier to health-food stores based just south of Salt Lake in American Fork.

“We weren’t encapsulating in the 1960s, perhaps because capsules seemed too pharmaceutical or druglike and those who liked herbs wanted to be very separate from that,” Rich says. “By the mid-1970s, the herb trade was still considered ‘on the fringe’, but we were growing. By that time, most people didn’t want to fill their own capsules or concoct their own teas and were looking for an alternative to taking herbs by the spoonful. So we looked at how we could provide easier ways to use herbs.”

Taking a cue from the pharmaceutical industry, her company and others began purchasing encapsulation machines, primarily manual ones that could produce 100 capsules an hour. By the late 1970s, semiautomatic machines were added, speeding up production to 20,000 capsules an hour. By the 1980s, some herbal supplement makers had acquired automatic encapsulators, which can produce up to 60,000 capsules every hour.

One big kitchen

Like cooks, each herbal supplement maker has a particular way of doing things and chooses its own ingredients, processes, and tools. Manufacturers freely discuss many of their techniques; others are trade secrets. But some basic generalizations can be made about the process of getting a plant into a capsule.

As with any recipe, the starting point for making herbal capsules is assembling the ingredients. Supplement makers purchase herbs from growers and vendors all over the world. Some herbs grow only in specific regions, and sometimes the manufacturers get better quality or price outside the United States. Take dandelion, for instance, an herb that has been used in traditional medicine to treat indigestion and a host of other ills. “You can’t buy and use dandelion grown in the United States because there isn’t one that hasn’t been sprayed with a weed killer,” says Neil Reay, marketing director for Nature’s Way, another major supplier of herbal supplements to retail stores and located in Springville, Utah. “But in Europe, dandelions are treated as a food, so we can get a much cleaner product there.”