Blurring the lines of food, vitamins, and medicine

Multivitamin-fortified seasonings sprinkled in your shake or onto your pizza that offer health benefits without altering the taste of the product? That’s what it says in the RedOrbit.com article, “VitaminSpice Announces Exclusive North American Packaging Rights to FunnelPack’s Triangular Packets.”

The article reports that the agreement gives VitaminSpice the rights for Inland Packaging/FunnelPack’s single-serving triangular packaging. The packaging debuted at the Intl. Pizza Expo in Las Vegas in early March.

As people look to live healthier, the blurring of foods, vitamins, and medicine is likely to continue. That should increase the need for packaging materials and machinery to protect, transport, and provide barrier and enhance shelf life for such products.

In his “Pharmaceutical Packaging Handbook,” author and Packaging Hall-of-Famer Edward J. Bauer devotes a chapter to medical foods, describing them as “products prescribed by a physician for a patient with a medical problem.” He says they tend to be packaged in higher unit volume than prescription drugs, and have different regulatory requirements, which he says are closely regulated, “in contrast to vitamins and supplements.”