The firm, which encompasses a consumer facing brand and contract manufacturing arm, aims to provide consumers with the ultimate in personalization by launching a range of supplement powder blends, alongside empty capsules and capsule filling machines.
“At the moment, if someone wants to make a supplement blend for immunity or energy or sleep, they have to buy the separate ingredients and work out how much to take of each,” Ben Blackburn, CEO of Life Lab, told NutraIngredients.
“Our new stack pack starter kits will be £20 and provide the powdered blend and the empty capsules, along with the capsule filling machine, pill organizers and containers to keep them in once they’re made. This will allow them to make their own supplements at home at about 50% cheaper than buying a product in the shop.”
Planned for launch in early August, the new offering will allow consumers to make 25 capsules in less than 10 minutes.
"They are doing a bit of the manufacturing process themselves," Blackburn said. "We teach them about the ingredients, and they can tweak them a bit to suit their needs. For example, if they’re a vegan they might want to add some B12."
The stak pack blends will cover a range of key health concerns, such as beauty, gut health, energy and immunity.
The new launch comes in the firm’s twentieth year of trading, following a particularly successful 12 months thanks largely to its rebrand in 2023 which heralded a 35% growth in customer base and 15% increase in turnover.
“The name ‘Life Lab’ aims to inform consumers we are improving their life through our laboratory," Blackburn said. "The core is the science so we wanted to emphasize that.”
This coincides with expansion to a new, larger manufacturing facility, enabling the business to expand its manufacturing offering, and increasing production capacity of capsule products by 268%.
With the rebrand, the business also created two dedicated websites and identities for the consumer-facing brand and the contract manufacturing side which Blackburn said has helped growth on both sides.
“This past year has been transformational for our business in terms of capitalizing on the high levels of growth in the supplements sector,” he added.
Humble beginnings
Blackburn set up the firm when he was a university student, simply to be able to provide his grandmother with a diabetes-friendly sweetener that was not available in stores.
“My grandmother asked me to get her this specific diabetic sweetener but no-one was selling it," he said. "I found a manufacturer making it, but they only sold to businesses. A few weeks later I got back in touch and said 'I’m Blackburn Distributions, can I buy 25 kilos of sweetener?'”
He sold the sweetener to a number of customers and slowly built the portfolio from there.
"I didn’t have a plan," he said. "I saw the great demand around weight loss and calorie control—that’s what a number of people took this sweetener for—so I expanded into that area initially with supplements like guarana and theobromine."
In 2013, the business expanded into contract manufacturing, and by 2018 turnover for this side of the business was growing 85% year-on-year.
The now global business, boasting a team of 22 staff and a turnover of £2.5m a year, manufactures a full portfolio of supplements, from vitamins and minerals to core sports nutrition staples, botanicals, mushrooms and other herbal alternatives.
The brand appeals to the highly motivated and invested health consumers who spend a lot of time researching ingredients and know exactly what they want, Blackburn explained.
"We appeal to people with allergies or specific dietary requirement, people very dedicated to their sports, who might want to buy in bulk and take larger quantities of the supplements," he said. "They look at the ingredients in the blends they can buy in store and realize they can buy the ingredients in bulk for a fraction of the cost without compromising on quality."
Discussing how the market has changed, he added: "In the time I’ve been working in this space I’ve seen consumer interest pivot from the artificial, pharmaceutical stimulants, round to the natural and organic alternatives. People are now seeing ingredients that have traditional use in other cultures, and they are open to trying new ingredients."
He noted some of the best sellers in the consumer-facing range are the ingredients focused on female health support, including MSM, magnesium and mushroom extracts.