Solubility and dispersibility

The problem

A practically insoluble active does not fail in the laboratory. It fails on the line and in the pack. The powder will not wet when the sachet hits water, so the consumer stirs a raft of floating material. It sediments in a suspension within days. It resists uniform distribution through a blend, so content uniformity drifts batch to batch and the assay result depends on where in the drum the sample was taken. In a beverage or a stick pack, the visible consequence reaches the consumer directly.

The commercial cost is rarely the raw material. It is rework, failed content-uniformity testing, shortened shelf life and consumer complaints about an appearance the formulator never intended.

Why the conventional ingredient fails

Crystalline CoQ10, curcumin and the carotenoids are lipophilic solids with high melting points and very low aqueous solubility. Milling them increases surface area but also increases surface energy and agglomeration, so a finer powder often disperses worse, not better. Simply adding a surfactant at the finished-product stage moves the problem into the formulation rather than solving it at the ingredient.

How NexaGens addresses it

Two platforms apply, for different reasons.

Liposomal delivery places the active in a characterised phospholipid vesicle system. The phospholipid presents an amphiphilic interface to the aqueous phase, which is intended to improve wetting and reduce the tendency to agglomerate on contact with water.

Microencapsulation embeds the active in a food-grade matrix that itself disperses readily, so the carrier does the dispersing rather than the active.

Neither approach is a bioavailability claim. We are addressing physical behaviour in your formulation, not absorption in the body — we hold no human data for any product and make no such statement.

Relevant products

What to specify, and how to test it

Ask any supplier — including us — for these. If they cannot answer, the dispersibility claim is decorative.

• Wettability — sinking time of a defined mass on a defined water surface, at a stated temperature. State the method; there is no universal one.
• Dispersion stability — sedimentation over a stated period at a stated concentration, measured by turbidity or visual scoring against a reference.
• Reconstitution behaviour — presence of lumps or floating material after a defined stir time.
• Content uniformity — assay across a defined number of samples from a representative blend, with an acceptance range.
• Particle size distribution — by laser diffraction or sieve, with D10/D50/D90 stated.
• Surface active — how much of the active sits unprotected on the particle surface.

For every NexaGens product on this page, these are confirmed specification values, and each production batch is supplied with a batch-specific certificate of analysis.

Next steps

See the liposomal range · See the microencapsulated range · Request the current technical data