Drops, capsules and tablets: what each format needs to exist

Format is a manufacturing decision before it is a marketing one

Every dosage format has a shopping list of things it needs before it can exist at all. A capsule needs a shell. A tablet needs something to hold it together and something else to break it apart. An oil needs an oil.

That list is what fills up an ingredient panel, and it is what decides how finely you can dose, what a day costs, and how the product ages. None of it is about whether one format is better than another. It is about what each one requires.

What each format needs in order to exist

A capsule

A shell. Gelatine, from bovine or porcine collagen, or hydroxypropyl methylcellulose for a vegetarian one. Either way the shell is an ingredient, it appears on the label, and for a microgram-dose vitamin it is usually the heaviest thing in the pack.

Contents that flow. Capsule filling is a volumetric operation done at speed. Powder has to move through the machine without bridging or sticking, which is what anti-caking and flow agents are for — silicon dioxide (E551), magnesium salts of fatty acids (E470b).

Enough bulk to fill the volume. A size 0 capsule holds several hundred milligrams. Twenty-five micrograms of anything is invisible at that scale. Something has to occupy the space, so a bulking agent goes in: microcrystalline cellulose (E460), rice flour, maltodextrin.

Which means a capsule of a microgram-dose vitamin is, by mass, almost entirely not the vitamin. That is not a scandal. It is the arithmetic of putting a very small quantity into a container built for a much larger one.

A tablet

Everything the capsule powder needs, minus the shell, plus the consequences of compression.

A binder holds the compressed mass together so it survives the bottle. A disintegrant makes it fall apart again after it is swallowed, which is a genuinely opposed requirement and the reason tablet formulation is harder than it looks. A lubricant stops the mass welding itself to the press. Many tablets then take a coating, for appearance, to mask a taste, or to control where the tablet breaks down.

One coating note: titanium dioxide, E171, was removed from the EU list of permitted food additives by Commission Regulation (EU) 2022/63. A white European tablet coating is now doing its job with something else.

In exchange for all that, a tablet carries mass. You cannot put 400 mg of magnesium in a drop — the volume does not exist. High-dose minerals are tablets for a physical reason, not a commercial one.

Drops

A carrier. Vitamin D and vitamin K are fat-soluble and will not disperse in water, so they need an oil. Ours is medium-chain triglycerides from coconut oil, and it is 96.5% of the bottle.

A bottle that keeps light and air out, and a pipette.

Structurally, that is the list. No shell to manufacture, no powder to make flow, no mass to compress and then persuade to fall apart. It is why our label runs to three lines: MCT from coconut oil 96.5%, cholecalciferol 2.5%, menaquinone-7 1%.

The costs of the format are real too. An oil meets air every time the pipette comes out. Nothing masks the taste. And you have to count drops rather than swallow a pre-counted unit, which is a small demand but a daily one.

Dose granularity

How finely the format lets you divide a dose is the difference people notice only when they need it.

• Drops. The unit is one drop, so half a dose is genuinely available. Two drops is two doses.
• Tablets. Divisible only if scored, and a score line is a deliberate design decision, not a decoration. Splitting an unscored or coated tablet gives you two unequal pieces and no way to know the ratio.
• Capsules. Not divisible. The dose is whatever was filled, and opening one gives you loose powder and no measurement.

This matters when the amount you want is not the amount the pack assumes — usually because a doctor or pharmacist has said so.

Cost per dose, done properly

Pack prices are not comparable. Cost per dose is, and the sum is one division that almost nobody prints.

Ours: €29.00 divided by roughly 1,700 drops in a 50 ml bottle, at one drop a day, is about 1.7 cents a day. The same €29.00 spread over a 60-dose pack is about 48 cents a day. Identical money, different denominators, and the denominator is doing all the work.

Two things go wrong when people do this sum.

Counting units instead of doses

A 60-capsule pack at two capsules a day is a 30-dose pack. Read the recommended daily portion before you divide.

Using the wrong denominator

This one cuts against us, so here it is. The honest denominator is not the number of doses in the pack. It is the number you will actually take before the best-before date. One drop a day out of about 1,700 is roughly four and a half years, and the best-before date on our current batch, A0206BODDK, is 06/2028 — sooner than that. A single person will not empty the bottle inside its date. Two people in one household will, comfortably. Divide against the date on the pack, not against the pack.

Shelf life

The formats fail in different directions.

An oil’s enemy is oxidation, and the whole bottle is opened every day, so the packaging works by keeping light and air out and the cap does the rest. A solid dose’s enemy is moisture. A blister exposes exactly one unit at a time and protects the rest absolutely; a bottle of tablets is opened repeatedly and usually carries a desiccant to compensate.

Neither is better in the abstract. What matters is that the date on the pack is a date for the pack you have, stored the way the label tells you to store it.

Who each format suits

• Drops suit anyone who wants to control the amount, anyone who would rather not swallow a capsule, a household sharing one bottle, and anyone who wants the shortest possible ingredient list. They ask you to count, and they taste of what they are.
• Capsules suit people who want a fixed dose with nothing to think about, people sensitive to taste, and travel. The trade is a longer ingredient list and a dose you cannot adjust.
• Tablets suit milligram and gram doses — minerals, mostly — where the mass has to go somewhere and compression is the only way to carry it. They are the most engineered of the three and the label shows it.

The honest summary

Format has never been the reason a supplement is worth taking. What it decides is what else ends up in the pack, how finely you can dose, what a day costs, and how the product ages once it is open.

Those four things are all checkable before you buy, on any product, from the label and one division. That is the whole point of knowing what each format needs in order to exist.