Registration tool aims to revolutionise nutraceutical global compliance

The startup, named Rubicon Bridge, is working to help players in the nutrition space to eliminate the lengthy regulatory process involved in the global expansion of brands, cutting down a process which could take up to a year, down to under an hour.

Aiming to eliminate the common challenges encountered by brands when entering new markets, the tool ensures regulatory compliance, provides instant labelling in multiple languages, as well as eCommerce text.

Co-founders Emma Hunt and Kathryn Szymonowicz, both experienced regulatory experts, say businesses can use the tool to launch brands "instantly" in multiple European markets.

"We believe that regulatory compliance should not be a barrier to international growth. Our tool is the first of its kind, and we are proud to lead the charge in making compliance easy and accessible for all businesses," says Hunt.

Lee Gray, Business Development Director at Rubicon Bridge, explains that in 2019, brands were trying to catch up with the growth of ecommerce but the complexity around regulations around the EU and in the UK meant that you had to pay a third party regulatory affairs company to check the product is compliant in the other countries.

"Typically the way brands would do that, is in one country first, then send it to say five experts in those countries, have it translated five times, and checked five times. You then get a 'version one' artwork - a live mock-up of the finished label - hosted on a design agency's website, and all six experts come together alongside the brand and write comments on it.

"At the time I was working for a brand doing just this. As a brand owner, by the time I got to check the artwork there were over 120 annotations, which meant there were over 120 issues that needed to be fixed. So it really was a painful process, and that could take up to five months just to get to that point.

"Emma and Kathryn were working with me at the time and thought there must be a better way of doing this so they decided to create technology to solve the issue."

Rather than having manufacturers entering free text to be manually checked, they developed a repository of regulatory requirements which allows brand owners and manufacturers to input information and check, live, the compliance.

Gray adds: "Where it could take 5 months to generate compliant copy, in the first trial we did with a customer we reduced that down to four minutes.

"As soon as we did that we knew we were onto something big."

The service has recently been made available on Amazon's European Service Provider Network, with the platform enabling any seller operating within the EU to access it.