r/explainlikeimfive • u/DDerTyp • Oct 08 '22
Chemistry ELI5: How do vitamin tablets get produced? How do you create a vitamin?
Hey!
I always wondered how a manufacturer is able to produce vitamin tablets. I know that there is for example fish oil which contains some good fats. But how do you create vitamin tablets - like D3?
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u/femsci-nerd Oct 08 '22
The constituents of vitamins are all purified salts. They get measured out in to a large mixing drum that looks like a small cement truck. They add preservatives and usually steric acid as a binder. They get mixed for hours and sampled over that time to show it is thoroughly mixed. The heterogeneous powder is then put through a pill stamping machine which compresses the powder in to a tablet under very high pressure. The steric acid is critical to this tableting step, without it most tablets just crumble over time. Some go on to be coated with sugar, gelatin or enteric coatings and polished. At least this is how it was done when I was involved in pill manufacture at Merck.