New high potency oil allows Nordic Naturals to enter one-pill-a-day omega-3s game

13-Nov-2015 - Last updated on 13-Nov-2015 at 15:26 GMT

Nordic Naturals has delved into the “one pill a day” omega-3s space with a new product featuring its latest, super high concentrate triglyceride fish oil. The company says the product, called Omega One, gets over one hurdle that drives some consumers out of the space, that being the need to swallow multiple large soft gels.

Made with raw material from the Peruvian anchovy fishery, Nordic Naturals’ new oil is a 90% triglyceride oil that features the company’s nitrogen bath manufacturing at its facility in Tromsø, Norway. The result is an oil that can serve the needs of customers who either have trouble swallowing multiple large pills or are averse to doing so, said Monique Wellise, Nordic’s education manager and manager of professional sales.

“Omega One is just one of the four new products that feature our highest concentrate oil. Omega One was created to serve the foundational health needs of the consumer that simply wants to take one pill a day. If they will only take one, that one needs to deliver meaningful levels of EPA and DHA. That consumer also tends to have an aversion to large pills,” Wellise told NutraIngredients-USA.

One meaningful pill

And if it’s one pill that is called for, Nordic wanted to put out a product that could deliver a meaningful nutritional punch in that one serving, something that krill oil products, for all of their phospholipid bioavailability claims, cannot, she claimed. “One easy to swallow soft gel of Omega One delivers over 560 mg of Omega-3. Krill has been aggressively marketed as an ‘all you need is one’ solution. You’d have to take seven krill soft gels to get the level of EPA & DHA in one serving of Omega-One,” she said.

Wellise said the oil’s 90% triglyceride form represents an investment in quality on the part of Nordic Naturals. Many oils on the market are offered in ethyl ester form, the initial stage after extraction from the raw material. Turning the oil back into a triglyceride form, the form it exists in within the fish, is an additional step, and many suppliers don’t take that step as far as Nordic does, Wellise said. This offers a bioavailability advantage over less expensive fish oils, she said.

“All of Nordic Naturals concentrates deliver at least 90% true triglycerides. Most ‘triglyceride form’ products on the market are only 50-60% triglycerides. We invest heavily in additional production time and resources to deliver concentrates in the molecular form our bodies recognize. For most, these steps would be cost-prohibitive,” she said.

Preventing the burps

Consumer research has shown that another thing besides multiple soft gel dosage forms that drives users out of the category is the so-called ‘fishy burps.’ Krill oil marketers claim that this is a factor of the oil form itself, and say that the phospholipid form that makes up most of the bulk of krill oil is more easily digested. Wellise claimed, however, that this mostly a quality issue. Oils in general and fish oil in particular can oxidize quickly, and careful manufacturing to exclude oxygen at every step keeps this to a minimum.

“Fishy burps are caused by rancid oil. If you eliminate oxygen from the equation, you eliminate the oxidation. We take great care at our manufacturing facility in Tromsø, and our wholly owned bottling and encapsulation facility to eliminate exposure to oxygen,” she said.

A high potency product and a an offering aimed at the prenatal market are among the new skus featuring the new oil. All of the processing steps needed to bring the oil to market make it a higher priced product, one that is never going to compete on price with the fish oils sitting on the big box shelves. But Nordic is committed to its existing distribution model, Wellise said.

“We are loyal to our natural channel retailers, customers and healthcare practitioners . They helped make Nordic Naturals the brand that it is,” she said.