Blast caps boss finally attracts beverage big guns to vitamin dosing technology

30-Nov-2011 - Last updated on 30-Nov-2011 at 16:15 GMT

Blast, shake and drink: Shoppers can dispense the active ingredients into their drinks

The entrepreneur behind ‘blast caps’ – a dosing technology enabling consumers to add vitamins, probiotics and other bioactives to beverages at the point of consumption – says major players in the industry have finally warmed to the technology and are planning launches in early 2012.

The brainchild of Blast Cap Technologies founder Mikel Anderson, the patented self-activating dispensing caps can be customized to fit any bottle and enable firms to add meaningful doses of nutrients to shelf-stable vitamin waters, juices, sports drinks and other beverages.

Two major global brands

Three beverage firms would be launching products in January, February and March, followed by a further group in the summer, Anderson told NutraIngredients-USA.

“I have been talking about the potential of this technology for years. But now they finally seem to get it. The time is now.”

Anderson, who is working with “two major global brands” among others, said a flurry of new products containing his caps would be launching next year.

He added: “It can be very hard to include a meaningful amount of active ingredients to hot filled shelf-stable beverage products, sports drinks and waters.

“The heat destroys half of the vitamins and then if you leave them sitting around for long enough there is often very little nutritional value left by the time you actually drink half of these products. And then you have all of these preservatives, stabilizers and other ingredients which are just there for shelf-life.”

“If you have these active ingredients in a powder form, they can sit, shelf-stable in a cap for months and you activate them when you want to drink the product, so they are fresh and bioavailable.”

Hot-fill to cold fill?

The caps, which can be attached to bottles at speed using equipment already in place at most modern bottling facilities without major capital investment on the part of manufacturers, also enabled firms to save money, claimed Anderson.

“By using the blast cap technology the beverage market can virtually eliminate the need for hot fill bottles for pre-mixed beverages and use cold fill bottles and dramatically reduce the plastic waste, thus making the cost of the blast caps technology line of products a non-issue.”

Anderson, who is also talking to firms interested in selling the caps in multi-packs directly to consumers to attach to reusable bottles, said the caps are manufactured in China to his patented designs and can be filled and sealed by partner E T Horn in California or handled directly by clients.

“Companies will come to me and say I want these ingredients with this kind of cap, and I will customize a cap for them.”