The latest news, trends, analysis, interviews and podcasts from the global food and beverage industry

In Europe’s functional food and supplement market, innovation sometimes means looking to the past. Dr Arturs Rubens, chief operating officer at BF-ESSE, explains how reconstructing decades-old 'lost' formulations allows European CMOs to preserve craftsmanship, recover forgotten processes and turn legacy knowledge into market-ready functional products.

In Europe’s fast-moving functional food and supplement market, the word innovation often means creating something new: a reformulated product, a novel bioactive, a faster process...but sometimes true innovation means something far less glamorous – resurrecting what has been lost.

Across the continent, decades-old formulations and manufacturing techniques are quietly disappearing as companies merge, relocate or upgrade their production lines. The focus on efficiency and modernisation often comes at a cost: the loss of inherited process knowledge, equipment calibration data and even the human craftsmanship that once defined product quality.

At BF-ESSE, we encountered this reality firsthand when a long-established European brand approached our R&D team with an unusual request: to replicate a sugar-coated tablet that had been produced for nearly half a century – but whose recipe, process parameters and tooling information had all vanished. The factory responsible for it had changed ownership, the old machinery had been discarded, and the skilled staff who once mastered the technique were gone.

Rebuilding this 'lost formula' became both a technical challenge and a reflection on what the manufacturing world risks forgetting. Because in the rush toward progress, there remains a growing archive of legacy products that cannot be replicated on modern equipment – and a generation of know-how that must now be rediscovered rather than replaced.

When modernisation erases memory

When factories modernise, they rarely plan for what gets left behind. Production upgrades are supposed to make things faster, safer and more cost-efficient – yet in practice, many transitions also delete something irreplaceable: the tacit knowledge that once kept long-standing products alive.

It often starts innocently. A company changes ownership, a new management team brings fresh strategy and a decision is made to 'optimise' production. Outdated lines are sold, unused machines scrapped and the staff who knew the quirks of those older systems quietly retire or move on. Months later, the brand receives an order for a legacy product – and suddenly discovers that the entire process has vanished.

That is exactly what happened in the case that inspired this article. A European company, whose sugar-coated tablets had been produced reliably for almost 50 years, faced sudden problem which happened during corporate consolidation. By the time production obligations resurfaced, half the critical process infrastructure had been lost, along with the documentation and the people who understood it.

What remained was a product with half a century of market trust – and no practical way to make it.

This situation is not unique. Across Europe, dozens of brands hold archives of discontinued or 'dormant' formulas that could, in principle, still serve their consumers – if someone could translate that lost craftsmanship into today’s controlled, compliant and scalable processes.

Reverse-engineering the past

Rebuilding a discontinued product is a mix of science, investigation and intuition – a process that often feels closer to archaeology than R&D. In our case, the project began with two surviving tablets and a simple request: 'Can you make these again?' There were no formulation sheets, no tooling data, no coating specifications and no manufacturing site. Only the physical product itself – a small, sugar-coated tablet representing decades of craftsmanship.

The first step was analytical. Our laboratory team dissected the samples to understand their internal structure, layer by layer. Basic physical testing revealed key metrics such as hardness, density and disintegration time, which helped us approximate the original compression profile. But the excipient composition and coating sequence had to be rediscovered through controlled experimentation – dozens of small pilot batches testing different filler systems, binders and press forces.

Here, Latvia’s industrial heritage became an unexpected advantage. During the Soviet era, sugar coating was a common pharmaceutical technology – used widely across Eastern Europe to mask taste and protect active ingredients before modern polymer coatings existed. While most of Europe’s large-scale producers phased it out in the 1980s and 1990s, fragments of that knowledge survived in Baltic facilities and among technicians who trained under the old system. That legacy, still traceable through regional expertise, helped us understand the logic behind the lost process we were trying to recreate.

Once a viable core tablet was established, the next challenge was the coating – a process that has almost vanished from modern nutraceutical manufacturing. Traditional sugar coating requires patience and manual skill. After a six-month search, we located a partner factory with experienced technicians still capable of layer-by-layer hand coating, colour matching and polishing – a skill set more akin to confectionery art than industrial production.

Early trials were imperfect. The gloss was wrong; the colour memory didn’t match the client’s recollection. We reformulated pigments, adjusted drying curves to improve coating adhesion. Two full development cycles later, the results were finally indistinguishable from the original – not just in appearance, but in taste masking, gloss and stability.

This reconstruction wasn’t just a success for one product. It became an act of documentation: every formulation variant and every observation were archived, transforming what had once been an undocumented tradition into a repeatable, validated process. The lost formula was no longer a mystery – it had become a mapped technology.

When innovation becomes archaeology

In research and manufacturing, we often speak about innovation as a forward-moving process – a constant search for the next formulation, the next material, the next technology. But occasionally, progress demands that we look in the opposite direction. Some of the most valuable lessons for the future are buried in what the industry has chosen to leave behind.

The project to reconstruct a lost sugar-coated tablet was not an exercise in nostalgia; it was an act of industrial archaeology. Every fragment of knowledge we recovered – from compression curves to the rhythm of coating cycles – revealed how much human skill and empirical understanding had once been embedded in production. It reminded us that innovation and preservation are not opposites, but parts of the same continuum.

In the rush to modernise, companies often discard old equipment, processes or documentation, assuming that what’s obsolete no longer has value. Yet as we learned, forgotten methods can hold the key to solving new challenges. Reconstructing them requires the same creativity, analytical discipline and technical precision that drive entirely new developments – perhaps even more.

For us, this project became proof that innovation sometimes begins not with invention, but with rediscovery. Manufacturing isn’t only about efficiency; it’s also about continuity – preserving the tacit knowledge that gives products their identity and history.

Sometimes, what appears to be progress in one sense is a kind of amnesia in another. And sometimes, the most forward-looking thing a manufacturer can do is to look back – to treat lost formulas not as relics, but as maps that still have routes worth retracing.