The United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA) and Portland, OR-based Healthnotes have signed a commercial partnership memorandum of understanding to promote Vitature, a comprehensive software solution for dietary supplement brand holders, contract manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and importers.
 
Vitature is a cloud-based, software-as-a-service compliance platform designed specifically for the dietary supplement industry. Many supplement manufacturers rely on outdated or inadequate technology to request, track and transparently manage increasingly complex sets of data and documents required by various regulations, including the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Vitature helps manufacturers accelerate the process of qualifying vendors, create and share material specs and manage label compliance, including scientific support for structure/function claims.
 
Vitature provides many benefits and cost savings by automating communications and data sharing required by manufacturers to qualify suppliers and materials, using an industry-approved protocol (SIDI), while providing compliance reports and business insights for executives, auditors and customers.
 
“As the supplement industry works toward full regulatory compliance under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), and more recently, various provisions of FSMA, we’ve seen frustration with the costs and complexity associated with record-keeping requirements, as well as the number of external audits,” said Loren Israelsen, UNPA president. “Vitature is a smart, efficient and cost-effective answer to tackle these regulatory compliance issues. We see Vitature as a viable way for all companies in the supplement space to solve these technical issues and are pleased to partner with Healthnotes to support its adoption by industry.”
 
“UNPA and Healthnotes both support a common mission to provide more awareness, education and technology within the dietary supplement industry to support compliance, quality and overall transparency in the supply chain,” said Skye Lininger, DC, CEO of Healthnotes. “We are pleased to partner with UNPA in this effort.”
 
One company reaping the rewards of the Vitature software is Chandler, AZ-based Arizona Nutritional Supplements (ANS), which adopted Vitature in September 2017 to help manage supplier qualification and provide real-time compliance insight across the organization.
 
“As a contract manufacturer with a growing business, we realized that we needed to scale the way we were qualifying suppliers and managing regulatory information,” said Tom Dubinski, vice president of quality systems at ANS. “We needed a more efficient way to manage regulatory compliance, and having a central repository with automated workflow that manages our raw-material compliance documentation and collaboration with suppliers has greatly improved our ability to serve our customers and improve our regulatory audit preparation.”
 
Mr. Dubinski added that Vitature allows the entire ANS team to manage and store FSMA- and DSHEA-required data—as well as certification documentation for label claims, such as organic and GMO-free—from its suppliers for all of its SKUs, in one place, allowing the company to reduce costs with faster time to market for new products.

A 3:30-minute Vitature demonstration video from Healthnotes for manufacturers is available for immediate viewing, as is a 2:45-minute video for ingredient suppliers.
 
UNPA and Healthnotes will conduct a live, one-hour webinar on the challenges of managing regulatory and supply-chain compliance, transparency, consumer expectations and technology on Tuesday, July 10, from 2-3 pm MDT. The webinar is free and open to all companies interested in learning about the solutions that Vitature can bring to these supply-chain-based issues. The webinar will be recorded for on-demand viewing after July 10 from the UNPA and Healthnotes websites. Register for the webinar here.