Recognizing the growing demand for high-quality gummy supplements, FIG recently opened its Pennsylvania-based facility, which is capable of making up to 600,000 gummies a day. With a background in product development, Webber, who also serves as chief innovation officer, said her company specializes in complex formulations. She saw first hand a variety of challenges that gummy manufacturers face, including unreliable potency and molding issues.
“I found that those challenges were not easy fixes if you don’t actually have a gummy machine to work through those steps, those scale-ups and those early stages of production,” she said. “So with the right ingredient sourcing, processing parameters and SOPs, those things are easy to circumvent, but you really have to dial those in before launch, which is why we built this innovation center.”
Gummies have received their fair share of criticism, with many parents pointing to large amounts of sugar hidden in children’s supplements. With that in mind, FIG offers everything from sugar-free to clean-label to vegan, while ensuring stability and consistency, Webber said.
“Being a registered dietitian [...] I absolutely don’t want to cram sugar in with every single vitamin,” she added. “I recommend people selecting gummies that are holding things that are more challenging to get in the diet. You don’t want to get a gummy where you can easily find it [the ingredient] in food, so sometimes a little trace of sugar is worth the extra benefit of having that rare-to-find nutrient.
“But also, one of the challenges that Formulation Innovations Group works on on the manufacturing side is tweaking the machine, adjusting things, changing temperatures so you can get to replacing sugars with fiber and things like that that are just a little bit more of a complicated process, but certainly doable if you work through the steps.”
Webber said the most difficult part of being an entrepreneur is finding others who are experiencing the same challenges as she is.
“I think just the loneliness and looking for mentorship and entrepreneurs who have done it, and that’s why I’m so grateful for my partnership with Women in Nutraceuticals because they offer all of those those things, the entrepreneurship group and the mentorship committee are doing such great things for women like myself.”
To hear more about FIG’s capabilities and what’s next, watch the full interview.
