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Can you make your own supplements at home?
The answer is yes! Making supplements at home is safe and has never been easier. If you already take a number of supplements then this thought has probably entered your head. Thanks to pill-encapsulating machines being available to the home user – making DIY supplements is now a real possibility for the creative health enthusiasts!
Supplements are available online, in health stores and now even in corner-shops! But why put up with unwanted ingredients such as colourings, fillers, or additives? Making DIY supplement capsules means you know exactly what is in each serving! Bulk-buying powder supplements and turning them into capsules means you can save money and only include what you want.
What do I need to make my own supplement capsules at home?
To fill capsules at home and make your own DIY supplements you’ll need a few simple tools:
Equipment list
In this DIY supplement guide I’ll be using the actual products linked here:
- Capsule filling machine. We have found size 00 capsules to work best. This size fills around 750mg of powder.
- Bulk powder. Choose the bulk powder you want to encapsulate. This could include vitamins, minerals, proteins, herbs, fibre, or anything that can fit in a capsule.
- Empty capsules. Ideally you want some non-GMO plant source capsules. Remember match your capsule size to your capsule filling machine.
- Mixing bowl. Using a shallow cereal bowl is more than suitable for mixing herbs and vitamins.
- Large flat dinner-plate.
- Weekly pill box. This is essential to ensure you’re taking the right pills at the right time.
Essentials:
In this handy bundle we can grab our capsule filling machine and 500 empty vegetarian capsules!
Optional:
Organise your supplements in a weekly container. With 7 daily slots and 4 time-slots per day, never forget your supplements again.
Don’t forget your spare empty capsules. Remember these must be the same size as your capsule filling device.
Click to jump straight to our our step-by-step guide on how to make your own supplement capsules.
Keep scrolling or click to jump to these helpful parts of the guide
Deciding the doses of each ingredient
What are the benefits to making your own supplements at home?
Why make your own supplements at home?
Is it difficult to make your own supplements?
Is it cheaper to make your own supplements?
Deciding the doses of each ingredient
When people make their own supplements there’s generally two different groups of ideas. Firstly there are people who reduce their supplement cost by converting high value bulk powders into travel friendly capsules. Secondly we can group multiple vitamins into a convenient one-a-day capsule. How easy is that?!
Buying in bulk is almost always cheaper, but are powder supplements convenient? Well, they are if you’re sat somewhere with a water supply, teaspoon, and suitable glass! However, if you’re on the go, stirring combinations of powders should be the last of our worries. Enjoy the value of bulk buying supplement powders, with the convenience of simply swallowing a capsule!
Deciding on the amounts of ingredients is completely up to you. Some people may require more or less of a vitamin than another person. For example, I know if I take zinc that my body favours magnesium alongside it. That’s why I made a magnesium/zinc 2-in-1 supplement. This way I never take the wrong dose of either mineral. Now that’s thinking smart!
What are the benefits to making your own supplements at home?
There are many benefits to making your own supplements. Making supplements yourself means you decide exactly what goes inside each capsule. No more settling for unwanted fillers, flavourings or colourings. When you design and make your own capsules you are the head chef! That means you choose the ingredients and you choose the doses. For example, are you the type of person who wakes up with a list of pills and powders to ingest? Why not combine some of these into one easy to take daily capsule? Problem solved!
What’s more, making supplements yourself can save a lot of money! Did you know the majority of supplement cost is actually a result of the fancy packaging and marketing? Some of our favourite supplements such as magnesium or calcium are extremely cheap to manufacture! That’s why I always recommend to buy in bulk powder rather than in capsule form. Some powder supplements are a quarter of the price compared to their encapsulated counter-parts!
Why make your own supplements at home?
- Save money buying bulk powders
- Eliminate filler, additives and unnecessary ingredients
- Reduce waste buying in large quantities
- Customise your own formulas and doses
- Combine several vitamins into one convenient supplement
- Turn bulk powders into travel friendly capsules
Is it difficult to make your own supplements?
Making vitamins or supplement capsules at home is very straight forward. We will provide all the information you require to conveniently make your own vitamins or supplements at home. Continue reading for our easy step-by-step guide on how to make your own supplements at home.
Is it cheaper to make your own supplements?
It is almost always cheaper to make your own supplements. What is the reason behind this? Most supplements are over-priced, and sometimes not that effective, but that might be a separate post for another time. Nonetheless, the supplement industry was valued at a staggering 141 billion USD in 2020, with that number growing every year! We all know the supplement world is a lucrative industry, so let’s try to reduce cost to ourselves as much as possible!
Here’s an example of saving money by making your own supplements at home. Recently I realised my calcium intake was below standards. To increase my intake I decided upon calcium carbonate as the type of calcium I liked best. I then decided to compare the cost of a calcium-carbonate supplement in capsule form vs a powder form version.
Lindens Supplement are a well established low-budget supplement.
This product provides 100 tablets consisting of 400mg Calcium Carbonate each.
- Total serving: 40,000mg Calcium
NOW supplements are a highly-respected brand that puts quality above quantity.
This powder version provides 200 servings of 600mg Calcium Carbonate.
- Total serving: 120,000mg Calcium
This means that Lindens budget supplement has 100 single serve doses at 400mg each. Whereas the NOW calcium product provides us 200 servings at 600mg each. Maths isn’t my strong suit but that means we’re getting THREE times as much bang for our buck with the NOW powder version compared to the budget capsule version. This is the power of buying in bulk compared to single serve capsules.
Now if that doesn’t sound like enough of a reason to choose powder over pills, the NOW version costs less to begin with! If you’re looking for a calcium supplement I can’t recommend this product enough, zero additives and amazing value, and a product I personally use.
Now I know what you’re thinking, that’s all well and good, but I don’t want a fiddly powder supplement. I simply want to take my pills in the morning and be on my way. Well that’s why people are gravitating towards DIY supplements.
Step-by-step guide on how to make your own supplement capsules
1. Identify the ingredients you wish to include in your capsule.
Now we have the correct equipment we can begin to make our first DIY capsules.
Firstly we want to decide what’s going inside our capsules. Remember this can be just one product or a combination of several products. This way you can make your own multivitamin.
DIY supplement recipes will be provided further along. For now some good choices would be any vitamins or minerals purchased in bulk powders such as:
- Magnesium
- Calcium
- Potassium
- Sodium
- Vitamin C
- Vitamin E
- N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC)
- Glycine
2. Prepare the capsule machine
The capsule machine has a separate base plate which ensures the capsule machine can be filled correctly. To avoid spillage, firstly place this base plate on-top of a large flat plate.
3. Insert the empty capsules
Our capsule-filler contains 24 empty slots, so we’re going to grab 24 empty capsules from our capsule bag. Ideally these are best emptied into a separate small bowl, or somewhere they won’t roll around too much. The capsules each have two pieces. Separate the pieces and insert the longer piece into the capsule machine as shown below.
Now insert the shorter capsule pieces into the lid section of our capsule filler.
4. Filling the empty capsules
Sit the main piece, that contains our long ends of the capsules, inside the base plate. Now put that base plate and main piece on top of a plate if you haven’t already.
We are ready to fill our capsules. The total volume depends on how compact the powder is to begin with, how grainy the powder is, and how much we can compact it afterwards. This means pre-measuring the desired total amount of powder is a bit of a guessing game. Instead grab a teaspoon of your powder and empty it into the main piece as shown below. If you want an exact dose of product in each capsule you will have to calculate based on the product used. For reference find the sizes of each capsule here.
When we have the correct amount of powder we can begin to tamp-down or squeeze the powder into the capsules. This is done by using the back of the spoon or the convenient levelling card that is included with our capsule maker.
Once you have levelled your powder into the capsules use the tamping tool to compress your capsules further. Repeat the stage of adding powder, levelling it off and tamping down several times until your capsules are “maxed out”.
5. Finishing our capsules
Now our capsules are complete we can seal them for storage. Firstly clean off any residual powder from our main piece. Now push the lid that contains the small end of our capsules onto our main piece. Depending on what powder you’ve chosen you may need to press the lid down with considerable force! Push down until you see and feel the lid make complete contact with the base plate.
6. Empty finished capsules into a container
Now our capsules have been compressed we should be able to remove them from the device. Lift the lid away from the main piece and you should ideally have all 24 full capsules staring back at you! Our capsule has an ingenious mechanism that allows us to easily remove all our filled capsules. Simply press down hard as shown below and empty the contents in a bowl, or ideally a mason jar, for storage.
Success! You have just completed making your first batch of DIY supplement capsules at home. With each run you’ll be more confident and before long you’ll be mixing and matching all manners of pills & potions. The combinations are limitless!
