A stick pack looks like the cheapest object in the supplement aisle. It is a strip of film with a few grams of powder inside, no bottle, no gelling system, no press tooling. That impression is wrong in one important way: of the four dosage forms a Chinese contract manufacturer will quote, the powder sachet carries by far the most active ingredient per serving, and almost every problem it develops — caking, an off colour at month nine, a probiotic count that misses the label — is decided by blending and barrier decisions made long before the film is sealed.
In Chinese factory paperwork the category is written as solid beverage (固体饮料), and it covers any powder that the consumer reconstitutes in water. This guide covers what that filing category actually means, why payload is the reason the form exists, and how to read a manufacturer’s registered scope before you send a brief.
Solid beverage is a filing category, not a format description
Buyers reach for whichever English word fits their product: drink mix, powder sachet, stick pack, effervescent, greens powder. Chinese regulatory paperwork uses one term for all of them. Solid beverage is a named product category with its own national product standard, GB/T 29602, which sets the headline technical requirement for the class — a moisture ceiling of 7 g per 100 g. A revision to that standard has been in public consultation since 2023, so treat the edition as something to confirm at quote time rather than a fixed reference.
The practical consequence is that the category must appear, in those words, in the manufacturer’s registered scope. A factory whose filing names gel candy and tablet candy but not solid beverage cannot legally export your powder, however capable its blending room looks on a video call. This is the same scope-reading discipline that governs every other dosage form, and it is worth settling before the formula is written — the wider question of which dosage form your product should take at all should be answered first.
The category also has sub-divisions that appear inside the scope wording, and they matter more than buyers expect. The ISO 22000 scope held by Guangci Nutraceuticals in Dongguan, for example, reads “other solid beverage [plant solid beverage, probiotic solid beverage]”. The bracket is not decoration. Probiotic solid beverage is called out separately because live-culture products carry their own handling, and a scope that names plant extracts but stops short of probiotics is telling you something specific about what the site is cleared to produce.
Payload is the reason the form exists
Every other supplement format runs into a wall on dose. A gummy carries a low to moderate active load before texture collapses; a pressed tablet carries more but is limited by what a consumer will swallow. Powder has no such ceiling. Protein at 20 to 25 grams a serving, fibre at 5 grams, electrolyte blends, collagen, greens and meal-replacement bases exist as powders because no other form can physically hold the dose.
That capacity is bought with consumer compliance. A gummy is eaten; a powder only works if someone measures it, mixes it and drinks it. Brands that migrate a product from gummies or tablets into a sachet to raise the dose are trading an easy consumption moment for a harder one, and the packaging format is the main lever they have to make that trade less painful.
Freight economics point the same way. Powder ships dense and you are not paying ocean rates to move a gelling system, a bottle of headspace or a rigid closure. The number that governs your carton cube is bulk density, not net weight, and it varies enormously by formula: a fine mineral blend and a puffed protein base at the same fill weight will not occupy the same volume. Ask for the bulk density of the finished blend before you model landed cost, because the figure feeds directly into cartons per pallet and therefore into your landed cost per unit.
Blend uniformity decides whether every stick is the same product
A powder blend is a mixture that wants to separate. Particles of different size, shape and density segregate during every transfer — out of the blender, through the hopper, down the auger into the film. The ingredients most at risk are exactly the ones your label claim depends on: a vitamin D at a few dozen micrograms, a B12 at a milligram, a single probiotic strain, all of which sit inside a five-gram matrix of maltodextrin or protein that outweighs them by three orders of magnitude.
Manufacturers manage this in ways you can ask about directly. Micro-dosed actives are pre-blended into a carrier and stepped up in stages rather than tipped into the main blender. Particle size of the actives is matched to the base so the two travel together. Some actives are granulated specifically to stop them behaving differently from the bulk. Transfer steps and drop heights are minimised because each one is another chance to separate.
What this means for your specification is that a single certificate of analysis proves very little. A composite sample drawn once will pass; the question is whether sticks pulled from the start, middle and end of the run all pass. Ask for content uniformity across the batch, and write the sampling plan into the specification sheet you send the factory rather than negotiating it after the first shipment. If you are running a factory assessment, uniformity practice is one of the more revealing things to probe — it sits alongside the other questions in auditing a supplement factory.
Moisture is the failure mode that arrives after the container lands
Powder fails slowly. Most hygroscopic ingredients — and that includes many botanical extracts, most amino acids, and nearly every fruit powder — pull water out of the air, and the results appear weeks or months later as caking, a hardened pack, colour drift or a probiotic count that has quietly fallen below the declared figure.
Two distinctions are worth carrying into the conversation. Moisture content and water activity are not the same measurement: content is how much water is present, activity is how available it is, and it is activity that predicts shelf life. And the 7 g per 100 g ceiling in the national standard is a category limit, not a target — a probiotic formula usually needs to be far drier than the ceiling permits.
Barrier film is the main defence, and the specification language is worth getting right. A true foil laminate, with an aluminium layer, offers a moisture and oxygen barrier close to zero. A metallised polyester film looks similar, costs less, and does not perform the same. Plain PET or polyethylene structures give almost no protection at all. Because a single-serve stick has no room for a desiccant, the film is doing all of the work, and specifying “foil” loosely is one of the more common ways buyers end up with a product that ages faster than their stability data predicted.
For live-culture products, ask a further question: what overage is being added at production, and what stability data supports it. Declared colony-forming units are a claim at end of shelf life, not at fill, so the factory is deliberately overdosing the batch to land on the label figure eighteen months later. That overage should be a number someone can justify, not a habit.
Stick, sachet or canister: the format changes the machine
Format is usually discussed as a branding decision. It is also an equipment decision, and it changes fill tolerance, line speed and packaging cost per gram.
| Format | Typical serving payload | Fill accuracy sensitivity | Where it wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stick pack | 2–15 g | High — narrow web, tight tolerance | Single serve, on-the-go, premium shelf presence |
| Three or four-side seal sachet | 5–40 g | Moderate | Larger doses, sampling programmes, lower tooling cost |
| Canister or tub with scoop | Multi-serve, 300 g–2 kg | Low at fill, shifted to the consumer | Lowest packaging cost per gram; protein and greens |
| Bottle or jar | Multi-serve, small volume | Low | Rare for powder; used where a brand shares a bottle format across a range |
The canister row hides a compliance question. A scoop moves dosing accuracy from the factory to the consumer, so the serving size on your nutrition panel has to reflect what a scoop actually delivers with your specific bulk density — not the scoop’s nominal volume. Confirm the scoop is weighed against the finished blend before artwork is signed off. Powder cartoning, labelling and secondary packaging then follow the same rules as any other category, covered in the guide to packaging manufacturers in China.
Reading the filed scope before you send the brief
Three documents decide whether a factory can make your powder, and in all three the useful information is the scope wording rather than the certificate number.
- Export food producer filing. Issued by the local customs authority and listing the product categories the site may export. Guangci’s filing 4400/11384, issued by Fenggang Customs on 15 July 2022 with long-term validity, names tablet candy, gel candy, hard candy and solid beverage.
- ISO 9001 and ISO 22000 certificates. Read the scope paragraph. Guangci holds ISO 9001:2015 (0070023Q53783R2M) and ISO 22000:2018 (007FSMS1700177) from Zhongjian Certification, both valid to 7 October 2026, with the food safety scope naming plant and probiotic solid beverage and identifying the production workshops on the third and fourth floors.
- U.S. FDA food facility registration, where the United States is a destination. Guangci’s number is 17267166330, renewed every two years. It is a registration and nothing more — the FDA does not approve food facilities, and any supplier describing itself as FDA approved is describing something that does not exist.
What each certificate does and does not prove is a subject in itself, set out in the comparison of ISO 22000, HACCP and GMP. On the destination side, the labelling and entry requirements that apply once your powder lands are covered in importing dietary supplements from China to the USA. And if you are still deciding how the commercial relationship should be structured before any of this begins, the distinction between OEM, ODM and private label determines who owns the formula you are about to pay to develop.
Common questions
What does solid beverage mean on a Chinese factory quotation?
Solid beverage is the Chinese regulatory term for any powdered product that a consumer reconstitutes in water, covering stick packs, sachets, canisters, drink mixes and effervescent powders under a single named category. It has its own national product standard, GB/T 29602, and it must appear by name in a manufacturer’s export filing and certificate scope before that factory can legally produce and export your powder.
Why do powder supplements cake or harden in the pack?
Powder supplements cake because hygroscopic ingredients absorb moisture from the surrounding air, and the barrier properties of the packaging film determine how quickly that happens. A true aluminium foil laminate holds moisture out almost completely, while metallised polyester and plain plastic films do not, so caking that appears months after shipment usually traces back to film specification rather than to the blend itself.
How do I make sure every stick pack contains the same dose?
Ask the manufacturer for content uniformity testing on samples drawn from the beginning, middle and end of the production run rather than a single composite certificate of analysis. Powder blends segregate during transfer and filling, so micro-dosed actives such as vitamin D, B12 or a probiotic strain are the ones most at risk, and only across-batch sampling shows whether the blend held together through the line.
Can one factory make gummies, tablets and powders?
A single factory can hold all four dosage forms in its registered scope, but you have to verify that rather than assume it, because each form is filed separately. Check that the export food producer filing and the ISO certificate scope name the specific category you need — a site cleared for gel candy and tablet candy is not automatically cleared for solid beverage, and the reverse is equally true.
What should I send a factory to get a realistic powder quotation?
Send the full formula with dose per serving, the target serving weight, the packaging format and film structure, the destination market, and any label claims you intend to make. A quotation built without the film specification and the destination market is provisional, because both drive cost and both determine whether the product survives its shelf life. The mechanics of moving from that brief to a physical sample are covered in the guide to requesting a sample from a Chinese factory.
Powder carries a dose no gummy or tablet can hold. What it will not forgive is a vague brief. Settle the blend, the barrier and the filed scope in writing, and the rest is ordinary contract manufacturing.