Generally, I don’t take
supplements. But when I do, I buy them
in their pure, powdered form and encapsulate them myself.
A supplement company does
the same thing, only on a larger scale. It
acquires pure, powdered supplements from one of the few supplement
manufacturers and packages them into dosage units (e.g. capsules or
tablets). Then, it bottles those dosage
units into containers that bear the name of its company, before selling them,
at a premium, to wholesalers and retailers.
Not only is doing it on
your own cheaper, but it also allows you, the user, to decide on the type of
dilutant[*] to use, as well as to avoid certain
excipients that may be necessary on a large production scale, but unnecessary (and
possibly allergenic) for making supplements at home for your own use. You also get to create your own unique
mixtures of supplements, and to vary the proportions of the supplements in
those mixtures – handy for self-experimentation purposes.[†]
And, lest the requirement for comprehensiveness be disregarded, some powdered
supplements taste awful, so encapsulating them automatically gets around this
taste factor.