Making Actives
Taste Like Food
The compounds that make a supplement work are usually the ones that make it hard to swallow. Bitter, metallic, astringent, earthy. Our job is to leave the function intact and take the punishment out of the experience.
Efficacy People
Will Take Twice
A supplement only works if it is actually taken. Compliance is a taste problem long before it is a marketing problem, and the categories growing fastest in Asia are the ones asking consumers to take something daily.
The difficulty is that actives are chemically awkward on purpose. Whey and pea protein bring cereal and green notes, botanicals bring bitterness, iron and zinc bring a metallic edge, and high-dose vitamins bring all of it at once.
Masking is not covering. Adding sweetness on top of bitterness gives you a sweet bitter product. The work is identifying which receptors are being triggered and building a system that blocks or distracts from them while leaving the active untouched.
Bitterness, astringency, metallic and earthy off-notes
Delivery formats from gummies to functional drinks
Proteins, botanicals, vitamins, minerals and amino acids
Block the Note,
Keep the Function
Masking work that respects what the active has to do in the body.
Targeted Off-Note Masking
We characterise what is actually objectionable, bitterness, astringency, a metallic finish or a lingering aftertaste, then build a system that addresses that specific problem. A generic sweetener boost is not masking and it does not survive a consumer panel.
Working Around the Active
The active is fixed and its dose is not ours to change. We build around it without interfering with stability, bioavailability or the label claim, and we flag early where a flavour approach would compromise any of the three.
Format-Specific Development
A gummy, an effervescent tablet, a stick-pack powder and a ready-to-drink shot each release flavour differently and punish it differently. Development happens in your actual format, because a profile tuned in solution rarely survives gelling, compression or drying.
Regional Compliance
Nutraceutical labelling and permitted-ingredient rules differ sharply across Southeast Asian markets. We build to the markets you are actually selling into, so a launch is not held up by a component that is fine in one country and not in the next.
Where We Work
Development in the format you are actually launching, not an approximation of it.
Send Us the
Difficult One
Tell us the active, the dose and the format. If it is bitter, metallic or astringent we have almost certainly met it before, and we will tell you honestly how far it can be taken.