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canadian industry Online - NOVEMBER 2014
try, he admits, he hadn’t yet found his
niche.
But, after making a deal to ful-
fill orders for a broker who was also
an equipment dealer, Bourdeau ap-
proached the employees and worked
side-by-side with them to set up shop
and launch a company that has be-
come habitually listed on fastest-grow-
ing-company publication lists. “There
was a steep learning curve,” Bourdeau
said of the early years, “but, persis-
tence paid off and we got over that five
year mark and really started to grow.”
With growth came challenges for
Suntrition. The space they had leased
was just 8000 sq. ft and as orders
picked up, it was difficult to keep up
with increasing levels of production.
Having re-branded Suntrition as the
leader in small batch oral dose manu-
facturing and with increasing orders
and business Bourdeau looked for help
to invest in higher capacity machinery.
“
Sometimes as a young company, to
be able to invest in that capital to help
you get efficient just isn’t feasible. So
the SMART program, for us, was fan-
tastic.” With SMART program funds
Bourdeau purchased a high-speed
encapsulator that cut production time
from weeks to hours. In addition, the
company began to incorporate the best
practices of LEAN, introduced robust
enterprise resource planning software
and continued to explore capital in-
vestments.
Today, Bourdeau considers Sun-
trition a leader in what he calls “NHP
2.0.”
The next wave of natural health
products that will bring nutraceuticals
in-line with the rigours of pharmaceu-
tical grade manufacturing. An intro-
duction arranged through the National
Research Council of Canada’s IRAP
program led to Suntrition partnering
with Biomedcore, a leader in disease
progression forecasting. Bourdeau
hopes the partnership will revolution-
ize the natural health product industry.
“
We’re collaborating with brand own-
ers to create products of differentiation
that have actual scientific evidence that
biologically they work, not just anec-
dotally,” said Bourdeau, about the ben-
efits of the partnership to Suntrition.
Bourdeau believes the partner-
ship of biotech and natural health
product companies to be the first of its
kind. His hope is that capabilities of
Biomedcore will allow for the testing
of products tailored to the individual
user and that the processes for testing
will create differentiated products. The
market for targeted health products
could present valuable intellectual
property opportunities as well. “Part
of this is building something truly dif-
ferentiating for our clients but, being
able to protect it through IP gives them
an edge.” Bourdeau said of the poten-
tial of patenting a natural health prod-
uct. “We need to show that synergistic
effect between these two ingredients
that just don’t exist independently.”
SUNTRITION
