Optimum Nutrition

E-sensing instruments to enhance product development & insure food quality

Optimum Nutrition is the only sports nutrition company to manufacture items in every product category. Whether it's nutritional bars, protein powders, ready-to-drink sports beverages, or vitamins, essential minerals, and herbs, Optimum Nutrition is able to control the integrity of all products through in-house manufacturing.

Better products thanks to e-sensing instruments

Product Development is optimized through utilization of Alpha MOS's Electronic Sensory Evaluation System, the Ultra-Fast GC HERACLES Electronic Nose, and the Electronic Tongue, ASTREE. The two systems share their database to create a complete sensory chemical fingerprint of Optimum Nutrition's gold standards to insure strict quality control for incoming raw materials including flavors and finished products.

Peter Poteres, Vice President of Quality Assurance states: “We are very pleased with the results achieved with both systems and we have found them to be very beneficial in meeting our objectives and qualifying the selection of new suppliers”.

Dr Reza Motamedi, Quality Assurance Lab Supervisor states his findings: "With the fast results and simple software fingerprinting data processing, we can perform qualitative and quantitative analysis plus create an enriched database to build on and flag the off spec and qualify them by identifying the molecules and the off odor associated. Alpha MOS's Arochembase library has over 44,000 compounds; this enables us to perform both discriminating and descriptive analysis that identifies the outliers and their sensory characteristics. We can then optimize those qualities that we desire and eliminate those ingredients that fail to meet our standards."

“We have found the two systems to be very beneficial in meeting our objectives.”

Next steps…

Optimum Nutrition continues to grow at a rapid pace. Their mission is to make every effort to produce premium quality innovative products for this dynamic highly competitive market.

The next step is to further streamline their supply chain by bringing their suppliers on board with Alpha MOS's Electronic Nose and Tongue instrumentation. Optimum Nutrition provides their suppliers with lab demonstrations to show the level of quality that they require. This supply chain approach further streamlines their overall processes and procedures and maximizes their return on investment.

With the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act FSMA that requires 90,000 companies in the US alone to perform hazard analysis and implement preventive controls. The enriched databank that Optimum Nutrition has developed with Alpha MOS's Heracles II and ASTREE, can trace from farm to fork their raw materials to finished products which helps them to meet the challenges of the FSMA.