Most compounding pharmacists add a small amount of color to their capsule powders to help determine if the ingredients are fully mixed before loading capsules. They commonly add 25 mg of color to a batch of 100 capsules, or 0.25 mg per capsule. That is almost too small to measure and the risk of any negative reaction to that amount is a close to zero as you can get.

The Compounder pharmacy has discontinued using artificial food colors in all capsule made for humans, but we still need something of color to help validate proper mixing. We have been switching all old formulas with food color to ones where we use either riboflavin (pale yellow) or charcoal (very light grey). Again, the amounts per capsule are 0.25 mg.

We are notifying all of our customers because some of their capsules may look different in and we want to assure everyone that there is nothing to be alarmed about. The change from food color will not alter the strength or effectiveness of the capsules.

Additionally, we don’t use gelatin capsules, only ones made from cellulose – the same material we use for our fillers.

We also avoid using soy products, anything derived from soy, artificial sweeteners, parabens, and lactose.