Powder and sachet supplements, from formula to delivery

What we build in powders

Large serves and flexible packs: tubs, pouches, stick packs and single-serve sachets. Popular for gut health and probiotic powders, greens, electrolytes, collagen, protein, creatine, and pre- and intra-workout. Choose a powder when the serve is too big for a capsule, or you want sampling and trial packs. From our records: a probiotic powder with a prebiotic and electrolytes, an immune powder and a performance powder, in packs including a 14-day pouch and a brand's own pouch.

For drops, tinctures, shots, syrups and oral sprays, see liquids.

A tub, a pouch or sachets?

Packaging has minimums of its own. Each pack format has a minimum from the packaging supplier, and single-serve sachets typically need around 150,000 sachets, so a tub or pouch is usually the better format to launch with. Stick packs and sachets come into their own for sampling and trial packs. More on what a first run costs in our development cost guide, and on packs in packaging and labelling.

Medicine or food?

A powder can be a listed medicine or a food, and the difference decides the ingredients, the claims and the label. The Belly Solution's travel gut-health powder is a TGA-listed medicine; a sports brand's performance powder went to market on the food pathway; Ora's range spans TGA-listed medicines and premium functional foods. We settle the pathway at the brief, before the formula. See medicine, food or cosmetic?.

Protein and pre-workout powders made for sport are usually built as foods (sports supplements). Sports powders have their own food standard, Standard 2.9.4 for formulated supplementary sports foods. It sets the label statements and, since 9 June 2026, caps caffeine at 200 mg in the amount for one day, as directed on the label, and below 5% of a powder, with a transition period to 9 June 2028. But a sports supplement presented for a therapeutic use, or likely to be taken as being for one, is declared a medicine if it contains, or is said to contain, a substance in the Poisons Standard, an added substance on the 2023 World Anti-Doping Prohibited List, added dendrobium or methylliberine, or something with the same pharmacological action, or if it is sold as a tablet, capsule or pill (since 30 November 2023, unless it contains only glucose). And whatever its presentation, a powder that contains, or is promoted to contain, isolated HMB or its salts is declared a medicine, as is a shark cartilage powder unless it is a wholesale product for use as a food ingredient. More on the food pathway.

Examples from our records

• The Belly Solution: a travel gut-health powder combining the clinically studied probiotic yeast Saccharomyces boulardii, a prebiotic and electrolytes, in a 14-day pouch. A TGA-listed medicine with a 36-month stability program, then a national pharmacy distribution trial with more than 30 new stockists in its first week. More in our probiotics guide.
• Nivari: a founder's first product, a powder supplement taken from idea to launch-ready and packed into the brand's own pouch for a mid-August 2026 launch.
• A sports brand's core range: four capsules reformulated from scratch, plus a food-pathway performance powder.
• BWellness: an immune powder built on Wellmune®, one of nine products for the same practitioner brand. The immune claims a product like this can make are in our immune supplements guide.