Effective Use of Color for Nutritional/Food Supplement Brands
Colorcon
The patent relates to a capsule made from foamed film, whereby gas is blown into the film during production resulting in a film with a honeycombed structure. The voids in the film may be gas filled, empty or filled with other materials to produce specific taste-burst characteristics or to deliver active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).
The light honeycombed film structure results in capsules that dissolve rapidly, releasing the capsule contents into the mouth. The capsule wall film residue also dissolves quickly with a pleasant melt-in-the-mouth sensation that the company claims is more pleasant than rival technologies based on gelatine. These are chewy and remain in the mouth long after the capsule contents have been delivered, it says.
Quick-dissolving film strips are already being used in breath freshening product introductions from Warner Lambert and Wrigley's in the USA and Europe, and Boots in the UK, as well as vitamin products.
But the foam-filled approach supports higher ingredient doses than is possible in a single square of dissolve-in-the-mouth film.
The patent also covers a double chamber capsule - a technology that BioProgress is developing under the Septum banner with its conventional cellulose films - than can be made from this foamed film. This will enable two separate actives to be released simultaneously in-the-mouth.
Graham Hind, BioProgress' chief executive, said that the company was making progress on building the capacity to work with foamed film capsules, with the preliminary machine design now completed.
