5 replies to this topic

[dazed1]

Its very hard for me, to find a reliable Ebay seller, someone known by the community here, with long track records, COA on requests, good customer support, variety of bulk supplements available (sulbutiamine/luteolin/rosmarinic acid  - examples)

 

 

Can anyone suggest or help me? it doesent need to be Ebay seller as well, might be any online shop that covers the specifics in the first paragraph.

[dazed1]

up

[bunsw]

dazed1,

 

I buy my bulk powders from purebulk.com, bulksupplements.com, holisherb.com and canadianprotein.com.

 

purebulk.com sells herbal extracts and nutritional supplements and the service is excellent. They actually answer the phone when you call and are knowledgeable about the products. Their site always states the minimum active ingredients of their extracts, unlike bulksupplements. They used to have more info on their site but the FDA made them take it down.

 

bulksupplements.com has an even larger variety of products than purebulk.com but the service is poor. The prices are cheaper though and they have a wider selection of products, especially the herbal extracts. One of the best features of their site is the extensive reviews done by what appear to be real customers. You can learn a lot just from reading the reviews.

 

holisherb.com stands for Holistic Herbal Solutions Inc. and seems to be a supplier for professional herbalists. Although they have some nutritional supplements, most of what they carry are whole herbs, either cut and sifted (like for making tea) or ground into a powder. Customer service is not that great.

 

I'm in Toronto Canada and there is a place called canadianprotein.com that sells Creapure Creatine, Beta-Alanine, L-glutamine and a few other products dirt cheap and includes free shipping if you buy at least $100 CAD but that's for Canadian delivery. If you're in the States you can probably do better. Customer service is poor. Forget about someone answering the phone.

 

A few months ago I bought  a couple of capsule machines, the round 100 and square 400 for size 000 capsules, from a company in China named CapsulCN. You can see their machines being used on youtube.com. I chose the largest capsule to reduce the number of capsules I needed make. I've gone through 50,000 capsules in the last couple of months though I have built up a large supply of encapsulated substances. I just had a bad experience with a delivery that may have been due to UPS and the Christmas rush but you pay via Paypal so are somewhat protected. My 3 other orders came through fine and the machines are impressive. It takes a while to get good at it though. CapsulCN is the only company that sells separated size 000 capsules in less than 500,000 lots so if you didn't want to deal with them anymore you'd be out of luck. You can get smaller injection molded machines (100 capsules per batch) for size 00 or size 0 capsules at amazon.com a lot cheaper and see if you like it and get separated capsules in those sizes from Capsuline or other companies. I have one in size 0 but haven't used it yet.

 

If you get your own capsule machines though you can encapsulate anything. Herbs, nutritional supplements and foods and spices like Spirulina, Broken Cell Chlorella, Ginger, Cayenne and all these mushroom extracts that are popular right now.

 

I "compound" my own mixtures using a kitchen scale and mixing container and use turmeric and cinnamon and other inert substances as compounding agents (filler). I actually need to go talk to a compounding pharmacy for any tricks of their trade. The size 000 capsule fits approximately 1000 mg of an average density ingredient but can actually end up weighing 600 mg to 1400 mg depending on the substance. I'm actually on this site searching for this type of info now and am surprised how many hard core experimenters are buying supplements in the form of encapsulated products from brand names. That's incredibly expensive when you compare it to bulk, although in fairness, buying in bulk gets far cheaper in the larger quantities. For many products 1 kg costs only about twice as much as 250 grams, but if you start compounding that, you're going to wind up with more product than you can use in the year it takes for the potency to start declining.

 

bunsw

[Kimer Med]

@bunsw,

 

I've tried a number of manual capsule fillers over the years, and they've all been disasters. Very difficult to achieve consistent amounts in the caps, time consuming to insert the empties, and a number of caps tend to get stuck or damaged during the press-together and/or removal stage, and so on.

 

Have you found the CapsulCN machines to be reliable and easy to use? Do they produce a consistent product? Which of their machines are you using? Manual or semi-auto?

 

[livelongandprosper]

I buy mostly from the places mentioned by @bunsw but have also found good luck at https://www.nutritionbulk.com with some things. They have a smaller selection than Pure Bulk but prices are generally better. Not sure about international shipping... maybe depends where you are in the world? Good luck!

[Oakman]

dazed1,

 

...

If you get your own capsule machines though you can encapsulate anything. Herbs, nutritional supplements and foods and spices like Spirulina, Broken Cell Chlorella, Ginger, Cayenne and all these mushroom extracts that are popular right now.

 

I "compound" my own mixtures using a kitchen scale and mixing container and use turmeric and cinnamon and other inert substances as compounding agents (filler). I actually need to go talk to a compounding pharmacy for any tricks of their trade. The size 000 capsule fits approximately 1000 mg of an average density ingredient but can actually end up weighing 600 mg to 1400 mg depending on the substance. I'm actually on this site searching for this type of info now and am surprised how many hard core experimenters are buying supplements in the form of encapsulated products from brand names. That's incredibly expensive when you compare it to bulk, although in fairness, buying in bulk gets far cheaper in the larger quantities. For many products 1 kg costs only about twice as much as 250 grams, but if you start compounding that, you're going to wind up with more product than you can use in the year it takes for the potency to start declining.

 

bunsw

 

Agree 100% with compounding. I wouldn't be able to experiment as I do with various formula if I had to purchase product in commercially made capsules, mainly because the formulations aren't available. Not to mention how grossly expensive substances are in commercial capsules. And then there are the additives I don't use that most commercial capsules do, that esp. makes a difference if you take a lost of capsules a day.

 

The capsule machines I use aren't perfect by a long shot, but with a little patience and working around their faults, you can do a credible job with excellent cap-to-cap consistency. With practice, it all goes quickly, as I do it often. I have both the 24 hole '0' and the 24 hole '00' Capsule Machine, and the 50 hole '000' Cap-M-Quick. Like you, I find the '000' size best as you can get up to 1000 mgs/cap, so it saves for bulkie herbal powders, for example.

 

I would recommend a good milligram scale as kitchen scales are not accurate at the amounts I use for such small quantity production. It also means I don't have to use extraneous fillers to 'bulk up' the capsules weight, saving on filling and wasting capsules that are mostly filler.

 

Over the last few years I've collected quite the collection of bulk substances, which makes turning ideas in reality quite a simple matter. I also agree that buying substances in larger quantities is enticing due to the cost savings, but often you end up with more than is possible to use within their best-use-by timeframe. To start I used Bulksupplements and Powder City, but lately I found less available substances and better pricing among the boutique bulk firms that have found a niche that they can supply.

 

I tell you what, I've often considered becoming a capsule retailer, as I can see the exorbitant markups that exist in that industry and also how easy it is to get in business using the contract capsule compounding firms that abound in the marketplace today. That, a good formulation, and an Amazon seller account is all you really need.

Edited by Oakman, 24 January 2019 - 03:22 PM.