The upgrades are expected to triple or quadruple the existing production capacity and enable supply to global markets. At the moment, the factory has been audited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.
“We’ve acquired adjacent land and are expanding the facility to increase the production capacity of our existing ingredients, while also adding new production lines focused on next-gen ingredients for healthspan,” Salman Mehkri, head of business development at Bio-gen Extracts, told NutraIngredients. “However, it is not just about capacity expansion, but also about adding value by improving ingredient performance through new and advanced delivery systems and formulation technologies.”
Having celebrated its 25th year last year, he said that the company’s investments will help drive the next phase of growth.
Healthspan is one of the focuses for its new ingredients, amid emerging science and data on carotenoids, which the company specializes in, including lutein, zeaxanthin, beta-carotene and lycopene etc.
This week at Vitafoods India, the company will launch a new ingredient for mitochondrial health support.
In fact, the company has identified six key segments within the healthspan framework. These include neuro-longevity and cognition, metabolic and vascular balance, inflammaging targeting chronic low-grade inflammation, cellular repair and resilience targeting sirtuins and stress response, mitochondrial health and cellular aging related to senescence and telomere integrity.
“We already have an established portfolio of ingredients, primarily from the carotenoid space, and we’re adding a few more this year, which will also be produced at the expanded facility,” he said.
To date, the company has conducted studies on carotenoids for eye health, cognitive health in terms of memory and learning and more recently on skin health for an aging population.
“We started researching carotenoids beyond single-condition benefits like eye health, where we looked at telomere dynamics under oxidative stress conditions, about a decade ago,” he said. “Healthspan is a natural progression of how we have approached the science behind the ingredients and not a reaction to a new trend.”
The company will also adopt precision artificial intelligence (AI) models to identify new ingredients and formulations to support the different segments of healthspan and validate these with preclinical experiments.
“Our objective is to make healthspan-focused benefits more accessible to everyone, and one of the purposes for using complex AI models is to reduce the cost per unit dose, while delivering ingredient complexes in different formats tailored to specific demographic needs,” he said.
“This expansion is not only about scale,” Saif Mehkri, founder and director of Bio-gen Extracts, added. “It reflects how nutrition is evolving—from isolated actives to engineered, evidence-backed solutions that deliver consistent performance across real-world applications.”
Meeting format needs and bridging real-world gap
The investments are also used to procure new equipment to improve the delivery of bioactives and formulate these bioactives into non-conventional supplement formats, such as functional foods and beverages.
“What we’ve observed is a gap between clinical efficacy and real-world performance. While many ingredients are supported with strong science, they may fail to deliver their full benefits because of multiple limitations like limited absorption, stability challenges, or incompatibility with modern delivery formats,” Salman said.
To achieve this goal, the company is adopting the “precision nutrition manufacturing“ approach, supported by technological upgrades and expanded capabilities.
Examples include introducing lipid-based encapsulation and self-emulsifying systems, as well as particle and mechanical engineering in the extrusion process, which have been successfully tested on the company’s carotenoid ingredients.
“Particle size of the bioactives plays a key role in the absorption. Using extrusion-based technologies, we can reduce the particle size to an optimized level, and improve how different active ingredients interact and remain compatible within a formulation, supporting more consistent absorption in finished product formats,” he said.
The company is also aiming for a 60% reduction in its carbon footprint by improving energy efficiency and waste reduction.
