Quality and trust: how Artemis International expands its ingredient portfolio

Berry and botanical ingredient supplier Artemis International is Nutritional Outlook's 2025 Best of the Industry, Industry Supplier.

In this interview, Melanie Bush, vice president of science and research, and Leslie Gallo, president of Artemis International explain the process behind adding new ingredients to the product line, utilizing third-party testing and rigorous quality standards. Gallo highlights customer-driven expansion into botanicals and fungi as a testament to the company's diligence and reliability.

Transcript

Sebastian Krawiec: Artemis recently expanded its portfolio to include botanicals, fungi and more recently, a vegan calcium ingredient. How do you approach taking on new ingredients or suite of ingredients, and is there a rigorous process involved to ensure quality and identity throughout

Melanie Bush: Very much. So yes, new ingredients definitely have to make the cut with our rigorous quality standards and health benefits. They have to serve our customers and be properly vetted before we would add them to our product line. We don't just haphazardly supply, distribute anything. It has to really be trustworthy. We have established a reputation in the industry as being leaders and experts in authenticity, even taking upon ourselves an anti-adulteration initiative. Our customers trust our ingredients, and so we make sure that we are on top of just the standard regulatory requirements by the FDA and proper FISMA procedures, and making sure that the health and hygiene certifications are in place, and all the i's are dotted, t's are crossed with the new manufacturing partner qualification program. But we also go the extra mile to ensure that we have done extra analytical testing using our own internal and third-party labs to analyze any results on C's of A's and make sure that identity, purity, potency standards are there.

We actually only align with manufacturing facility partners – and we truly view them as partners – who share our missions and passions to provide the highest quality ingredients that are minimally processed, sustainable and so that really helps with allowing us to have good control, and it's an important part of our vetting process as well. Our customer relationships are similar to that in that it's a true partnership. So they can rely on us to provide additional testing, education on test method differences, things like that, as well as marketing support around all of the science and research that we're doing.

So taking on a new ingredient is something we take very seriously, and we're excited to announce, just recently at the SupplySide Global show that one of these new ingredients that definitely made the cut was WholeCal, our new whole food calcium supplement ingredient, as well as food and beverage ingredient. So that is something that went through all of the steps, and we're thrilled to be partnering with our manufacturing partner there and supplying that as well.