Building ingredients that work

We develop our Superculture^® ingredients with a necessary bar in place: they should be  efficacious in the final form of the pet food or supplement they’ll be formulated into. 

Pet food and supplements are manufactured under  intensive processing conditions, often involving high heat and pressure, and the end products often sit on a shelf for quite some time before being consumed by pets. It’s important that our ingredients still do their job after all of the processing and throughout the shelf life. So, we put each of them through the same challenges they face in these conditions and assess how they performed.

Here's a look at the work behind validating the stability of our ingredients.

Surviving manufacturing

Given the range of manufacturing processes for pet food and supplement products, we tested each of our Superculture^® ingredients across a range of realistic conditions.

For heat, for instance, we exposed the ingredients to everything from extended, low-temperature drying typical of air dried processing to the short, intense heat experienced in injection molding. We also ran them through typical retort processing (the high-heat, high-pressure sterilization used for canned wet food). We also tested our ingredients under high pressure, up to the upper limit of injection molding. And because fresh, refrigerated products get frozen and thawed, we ran freeze-thaw cycles as well.

Across the board, our ingredients showed efficacy with little to no loss of potency, which tells us that they hold up across the range of manufacturing processes used in final pet products.

Staying stable on the shelf

Surviving a short time on shelf isn't enough; it’s critical our ingredients remain stable throughout the entire shelf life of the product. This is where long-term stability really matters: it tells the story of how our ingredients hold up over time.

Moisture is one of the biggest factors we test for stability. Different pet foods hold different amounts of available water (something we measure as water activity). For both Superculture^® Pet Oral and Superculture^® Pet Immune, we tested them in a dry powder and in a liquid format, stored at cold, warm, and hot temperatures.

We use two approaches for these tests. First, accelerated studies, a well-established method to estimate years of shelf life, push samples to high temperatures to undergo accelerated conditions within a few weeks. Over a longer term, we conduct real-time studies: storing the ingredients in its actual commercial packaging and measuring its stability over months and years. Real-time stability studies take extensive planning and preparation. 

Stability within a pet’s oral and immune system

Finally, an ingredient has to remain stable long enough to do its job once the pet actually consumes it, which means surviving the conditions inside the pet’s mouth, digestive tract, and gut.

For Superculture^® Pet Oral, which works in the oral cavity, we tested the ingredient across the pH range found in canine and feline oral cavities using a simulated saliva. For Superculture^® Pet Immune, which needs to reach the gut, we went further, testing the postbiotic’s full journey: across the acidic stomach and the more neutral saliva and intestine. In both cases, we saw no meaningful degradation in the efficacy of our ingredient.

How we measure all of this

Behind every number in our reports are careful measurements. We rely on in vitro assays, which validate the ingredient's mechanism of action, and analytical chemistry, to precisely measure the key active compounds present in each ingredient. These are the same methods we used to design and validate the ingredients in the first place, with quality controls built into every run.

The main takeaway

Testing isn't just a box to check. It's how we earn confidence that our ingredients stay effective through difficult manufacturing, long shelf lives, and the realities of a pet's own body. When we say Superculture^® Pet Oral and Superculture^® Pet Immune are built to withstand challenging pet formulation, manufacturing conditions, and shelf lives, this is the work that stands behind it.