Q&A: Path Forward Formulator streamlines supplement product development

The company launched its platform last year to offer a solution to slogging through data and creating formulas the old-fashioned way. By eliminating the cumbersome spreadsheet, users such as formulators, product developers and innovators can now opt for a digital version that simplifies formulation, cost estimation and the generation of supplement facts per FDA guidelines.

Path Forward Formulator is one of this year’s NutraIngredients-USA Start-up Stars that will be featured at the upcoming Sports and Active Nutrition Summit taking place in San Diego from Feb. 19 to 21.

Company founder Shane Durkee said being selected a Start-up Star is “vindicating in a way because of all the effort that we put into this platform for the last year.”

That effort included building a tool that helps users adjust formulation early on to help configure cost structure of a product. Path Forward Formulator can also program new features and roll them out without needing to patch or update anything.

Durkee has worked for both large and small companies in the supplement industry and spoke to NutraIngredients-USA about how that experience shaped the platform’s development.

NIU: How does Path Forward Formulator work?

SD: The easiest way to explain it is that we eliminate all the spreadsheets that everybody uses. I’ve been in the industry for 28 years, and everywhere I worked—whether that was a small sports nutrition company or a $7.5 billion multinational—all the R&D groups used a spreadsheet or a series of spreadsheets that were created internally at the beginning of their formulation work to track costs, labeling, creating product specs, etc. Our easy-to-use platform is powerful enough to do that work. It’s designed to have no limitations when it comes to determining which ingredients will and won’t work in different dosage forms and so on.

Users choose a dosage form they want and start building a formula, adding ingredients while the platform does everything in the background, from calculating the potency to the overage to the manufacturing variants.

NIU: What are the pitfalls of the spreadsheets traditionally used?

SD: Companies have built their spreadsheets and are super proud of them, but there are inherent issues. If a team member writes over a formula, you might lose it. If they break one of the formulas in a cell, the whole system could break. So why not make a spreadsheet something that’s easy to use, accessible from any device, anywhere? Our platform is web-based, and there’s also apps for both iOS and Android. It’s all seamless. No matter where you are, you can pull up formulas, you can build new ones, you can send them to team members, create spec sheets, sub facts, etc.

We wanted the platform to make processes more efficient. For example, a company may put together an idea for a formula and send it to a contract manufacturer and wait to receive a quote. That process could take up to 12 weeks. Our platform can build and quote a formula in minutes. The information can be exported and sent directly to a contract manufacturer. The whole thing is designed to maximize the efficiency of everything and speed it up dramatically.

NIU: What what the epiphany moment that led you to develop the platform? Was this something that you were thinking about for a long time?

SD: There were a few things that happened. Over the years, I moved between a handful of companies and had to re-learn whatever spreadsheet or series of spreadsheets an organization had created internally. Sometimes this was an easy process but many times it was not. Most of these spreadsheets had issues. In the back of my mind, I thought there had to be an easier way to work through them.

It feels like, in general, the supplement industry is behind other industries when it comes to digital tools. Sometimes when working for a younger company, there’s a much higher degree of usage of different technologies.

NIU: What circumstances led you to develop your start-up?

SD: When one company I worked for was going to eliminate my position but offered me either an alternate job or an exit package, I had a moment where I thought that the exit package would give me the runway to do something I’ve always wanted to do, which was start my own company, and I had the idea for this platform.

To top it all off, my wife is in the supplement industry. She knows where the challenges and opportunities are, and she was extremely supportive of me becoming an entrepreneur. Without that support, I would have started looking for another job. She also gives me honest feedback.

NIU: How many team members does your company have and what are their roles?

SD: I have two small equity partners. One of them handles much of the formulation work. The other has helped immensely in building the data set and helped with the demos and showing how the program works. We have a group of 15 advisors who were part of the initial beta test. However, we’ve been outsourcing our social media and marketing. By Q1 of this year, we’re looking to add a vice president of technical sales, and as we continue to grow, we’ll start to add whichever positions next make sense.

NIU: For the companies that have used the platform, what has it meant for their metrics and for their bottom lines?

SD: So far, the evidence has been anecdotal. In many of the cases, companies have remarked on the speed and efficiency. If they’re a contract manufacturer, they can put together and get quotes turned around much faster. This sometimes includes a quote generated in the same day whereas a company’s previous spreadsheet use once took several weeks. Some of the brands that have licensed the platform have said it makes life easier because anybody in their company can log in and build a formula.

We are also launching a reporting function where we’ll be able to run a series of reports that will tell how many formulas have been built, what are the most popular dosage forms as well as what’s trending from a dosage form and even functional category perspective as far as what’s being made. It’s important to note that from our company’s end we cannot see anything an organization does. We can query from a high-level perspective how many powder-filled capsules were made or how many liquid capsules were created, as examples, but we can’t see the particulars on the backend of the platform.

For our ingredient partners, we’re able to show where their ingredients rank in the overall data set, how often they’ve been used in a formulation within their company, and how their ingredients rank with each other. We can start to build some powerful analytics and even trending pieces of information.

NIU: What are your company’s goals in 2025?

SD: Our primary goal is to become the industry standard. If you look at other software platforms out there, none of them were built from the ground up for dietary supplements. I’m talking about labeling or formulating software. They were all started on the food industry side. We are the first of its kind.

We have about 130 users, and we’re close to 50 ingredient suppliers participating. We obviously want to build on that. Our goal for the first six months of this year is to double that number and by the second half of the year to double it all again.