In an ideal world, your relationship with your nutraceutical ingredient distributor would be like a long, happy marriage. Like all successful, long-term relationships, there might be some ups and downs along the way, some bumps in the road—but the upside would be a true partnership with an abiding trust and mutual benefits for both parties.
The right ingredient distributor for your business will be one that possesses the qualifications, competencies and resources to secure and deliver the ingredients your company needs in an efficient, timely and affordable manner.
Layer on to that the more complex and harder to define (especially in the beginning of a relationship) qualities that build trust, make your life easier, and just bring you back to that distributor time and time again. You might call it the “X” factor.
In other words, you want a distributor who has both the hard skills and the soft skills to get the job done.
Nine Things to Look for in a Nutraceutical Ingredient Distributor
Relationships
Assuming you agree that long-term partnerships will save you time and money in the long run and eliminate some of the headaches that go along with having to find a new distributor on the regular, look for a company whose values match your own company’s values. Be sure you interview the person you’ll be working with on a day-to-day basis and make sure you’re sympatico with that person. Evaluate whether you think your primary contact will be responsive to your needs, but also whether your working styles and personalities will gel.
Open communication and a collaborative approach are vital for any mutually fulfilling relationship and working with your distributor should follow that rule.
What to ask: How will your team be structured? Who will you have access to and often? Who will be your main contact? How—and how often—do you prefer to communicate and can the distributor’s team accommodate those preferences?
Transparency
Are you going into a relationship where your partner-to-be is open and trustworthy in their business dealings? That starts with the distributor sharing information around supply chain clarity, so that you know where the ingredients are starting from and the path they are taking to get to you. Is there accessible documentation sharing that you can review and ask questions about?
What to ask: Are flexibility and pricing breaks built into a longer-term contract? Is the distributor able to accommodate last minute or “just-in-time” deals and offer special pricing promotions?
Track Record
Be sure to ask for specific examples that would engender trust in the distributor’s capabilities, flexibility and track record. Does the distributor have business practices in place that would demonstrate its consistency in communications, meeting deadlines, getting comparative bids on ingredients, and delivering your orders on time. Especially in today’s environment, you want to look for a distributor with crisis management expertise in anticipating potential problems and executing solutions around those problems should they occur.
Service
As the client, you have the right to expect responsiveness, logistics support and value-added services from your distributor. What is important going in is to discuss and agree upon what exactly those terms mean to each of you. Take into consideration not only your own expectations as the client, but also the expectations of the people to whom you report at your own company. Open communication and setting expectations at the outset will lead to a stronger, positive working relationship. Be realistic and fair about your expectations.
What to ask: What kind of logistics support and value-added services does the distributor offer? How long will it take for responses to emails and phone calls? What does the do best that sets them apart from their competitors?
Vendor Qualifications
Your distributor should be asking many of the same questions of its vendors that you’re asking the distributor to help ensure you’re getting safe, high-quality ingredients. It’s also important to determine if the distributor’s vendors are reliable in all the same ways that you’re expecting your distributor to be—starting with meeting timelines.
What to ask: What specific kinds of certification requirements and ingredient safety reviews does the distributor ask for when sourcing ingredients? From what countries is the distributor sourcing, and what do you need to understand about regulations in those countries? Ask about the relationship between the distributor and its vendors: how long have they worked together, what is the timing track record for specific vendors in fulfilling their orders?
Audits
In the U.S., for example, the dietary supplement industry is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among other agencies (federal and state) and legislative bodies. Federal regulation includes adherence to good manufacturing practices (GMPs) established by FDA under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). GMPs help ensure products are not adulterated—meaning what is on the label is in the product and vice versa.
Manufacturers may choose to do their own inspections or audits to ensure all laws and regulations, including GMPs, are built into the process. Some companies will use a third-party consultant or GMP certifier to ensure that all applicable laws and regulations, including GMPs, are being followed. You may want to know what processes are in place, usually from the ingredient supporters and along the way.
What to ask: Has the ingredient supplier or distributor ever been audited or inspected by FDA (or other regulatory entities, country dependent) for GMPs or other processes, and if so, what was the result? What kind of record keeping does the distributor require from vendors and from itself? What does the distributor require from its vendors to ensure the products are compliant with regulations?
Raw Material Qualifications
As you assess whether a distributor is the right distributor for you, it’s key to be aware of the depth and breadth of ingredients that the distributor has access to. Does that potential inventory align with the ingredients you’re looking for?
You’ll also want to understand how a distributor qualifies companies that provide the raw materials they are purchasing. According to an article (FN1), “raw material qualification refers to the process of establishing source, identity, purity, biological safety and general suitability of a given raw material.”
Not surprisingly, there are many factors that go into qualifying raw materials, and different ways to develop a raw material qualification program. USP can be an important resource, having developed guidelines for creating raw materials qualification programs focused in five areas: 1) identification; 2) selection and suitability for use in manufacturing; 3) characterization; 4) vendor qualification; and 5) quality assurance and control. Certificates of analysis (COAs) and Country of Origin (CoO) paperwork are just two of the documents that you can expect your distributor to obtain from their raw material providers.
What to ask: What requirements do you have for your raw materials vendors beyond GMPs to ensure that they have appropriate raw materials qualification programs in place? How will you, as the client, have access to this information?
Testing
FDA regulates dietary supplements in the U.S. as a category of food. Two things that means is that FDA does not pre-approve supplement products (or product labels) before they go to market, leaving certain responsibilities to the company manufacturing the product. However, there are extensive regulations in place.
For example, a company manufacturing or distributing a dietary supplement product is responsible for ensuring that product is not adulterated, misbranded, or otherwise in violation of federal law. (FN 2) Testing is one way to help ensure that those regulations are being followed.
The EAS Consulting Group is one third-party consulting firm that offers laboratory services (through Certified Laboratories) to meet FDA’s requirements that dietary supplement companies use “appropriate” tests to verify that “components, in-process, and finished products meet established specifications.” Whatever tests used should apply scientifically valid methods fit for the intended use and comply with recognized industry standards, according to EAS. (FN3)
Additionally, facilities that manufacture, process, pack, or hold dietary supplements or dietary ingredients for consumption in the U.S., must register those facilities with FDA.
What to ask: As the distributor, do you conduct any testing of ingredients or raw source materials or is that the responsibility of your dietary ingredient suppliers? What is the difference between lot-specific and interval requirements in testing? Are your facilities registered with FDA?
Business continuity planning
Pricing is an important consideration when selecting a distributor, but it is by no means the only important consideration. You have budget limitations and your distributor will have sales figure expectations, but if all the other factors for choosing a distributor are a match, then the pricing should fall into place. (After all, you could find a distributor with the lowest pricing in the world, but if that low pricing is made possible due to eliminating other important elements of business continuity planning, e.g., sacrificing responsiveness to the customer or letting timelines for fulfilling ingredients and raw materials slip) at the end of the day, the low pricing won’t really help you meet your production, marketing and sales goals.)
There are other ways to save on costs of materials and that occurs with smart business continuity planning. Selecting a distributor with multi-source and multi-country connections gives you more flexibility and more guarantees that you will be able to get the ingredients you need, when you need the, even when there are snaps in the supply chain.
The same is true with long-term planning and multi-year commitments to a distributor who consistently meets your needs. While your distributor should be expected to do the same great job for all its clients, let’s face it: business relationships matter—in the short haul and the long run.
What to ask: How can Vitajoy Group USA best serve your needs as your distributor partner?
References:
- “Raw Material Qualification—A Fundamental Overview,” Stemcell Technologies, Technical Bulletin, stemcell.com, Document #27066, July 2019
- “Questions and Answers on Dietary Supplements,” U.S. Food & Drug Administration, https://www.fda.gov/food/information-consumers-using-dietary-supplements/questions-and-answers-dietary-supplements
- “FDA Dietary Supplement Testing Requirements: A Guide for Quality Control Professionals,” Certified Laboratories + EAS Consulting Group, https://certified-laboratories.com/blog/fda-dietary-supplement-testing-requirements/
