How to Make Capsules by Your Hands

Vitamin and health supplements are important to your daily nutrition. By getting a bottle of capsules from a store, it’s easy to obtain dietary supplements and vitamin. Besides this way, do you know you can make capsules by yourself? The capsule filling at home is not that hard.

Making capsules by yourself helps you gain the fresh capsule ingredients, tailor formulas that you need to meet your health targets, as well as to save more money. However, how to make capsules by yourself? Here is a fast method to manually load capsules with powder.

What do you need before you make capsules?

Before making capsules, you need to prepare some essential materials and tools in order to successfully load capsules with powder.

Empty Capsules

You need some suitable empty capsule shells in your desired sizes. Among various capsule sizes, size 00 and 0 are the most commonly purchased, because they have sufficient space for filling. Ingredients contained in capsules 00 and 0 are about 750mg and 650mg.

 The picture below is a capsule sizes chart:

Blank capsules of these sizes can be bought online or in pharmacies. Moreover, some capsule shells are made from vegetation, while others are made from gelatin.

Capsule Ingredients

Select suitable health supplement ingredients that you plan to fill capsules with, such as vitamin, mineral, powder, oil, granules and other forms, according to different nutritional formulas. Make sure ingredients are pure and clean.

You can find ingredients online or in drugstores. After purchase, entirely blend them and place them evenly. If needed, use a pestle to grind ingredients into delicate powder.

If you have fresh herbs and not want to buy ingredients, dry your herbs. After drying, use an food processor to make herbal powder.

· A Scale

A scale of high sensitivity is needed, for capsules of various sizes have different fill weights. A scale helps you manage the capsule fill weight at a milligram-precise level.

· Auxiliary Tools

These tools include a spoon and a funnel, assisting you to easily access the fast method to load capsules with powder microdosing, avoiding material spilling and waste. If a funnel can’t be found, a piece of paper could be used to form one.

· Storage Containers

You need a storage jar, a glass container or a plastic sealable bag to store your filled capsules, in case that capsules get contaminated or dampened.

How do you fill capsules by hand?

Here are some easy tips to let your homemade capsules come out.

1. Scooping Method

It’s the most convenient way to make capsules by your hands. This way doesn’t even require any tool or complicated skill.

Step 1: Put powder or other fill material into a dry clean dish. 

Step 2: Get an empty capsule separated into a cap and a body, and put them on a dry clean surface. How to divide a capsule in half is as easy as having taps on a keyboard.

Step 3: Let the capsule cap and body sink into the ingredient powder.

Step 4: In a scooping motion, load the capsule body with powder, making the body fully filled. Meanwhile, don’t overpack the capsule cap with powder so as to smoothly seal a capsule.

Step 5: Align filled capsule bodies with capsule caps, and press them with slight finger force, thereby sealing capsules.

2. Paper and A Spoon Method

How to dispense powder to capsules? This easy way only requires a spoon, a funnel and alternatively a scale— your capsule filling kit. It’s simple to roll paper to form a funnel if a real funnel isn’t at hand. Additionally, this method ensures accurate capsule dosages.

Step 1: Put powder or other fill material into a dry clean dish.

Step 2: Get an empty capsule separated into a cap and a body.

Step 3: Roll a piece of paper into a funnel

Step 4: Insert the funnel bottom in a capsule body.

Step 5: Scoop powder with your spoon and gently pour a slight amount of powder into the funnel, in order to fill the body with powder. After this, do the same to a capsule cap. Alternatively, a scale mentioned above lets you get the accurate dosage of powder before capsule filling.

Step 6: Align filled capsule bodies with capsule caps, and press them with slight finger force, thereby sealing capsules.

How to make capsules with a machine?

 In terms of starting up in the pharmaceutical industry or running a small or medium-sized pharma, Rich Packing supplies semi-auto and fully automatic capsule filling machines with multiple functions, such as the CGNT 209 semi-auto capsules machine and the NJP 200C auto capsules machine. Specifically, the maximum output of an NJP 7800D machine can be 468,000 capsules/h, if you really need this level of production capacity.

After adding supplement ingredients and empty capsules into a pill filler machine, this auto machine can rapidly make a lot of capsules with just several touches on a screen.

What needs your additional attention?

With the guide above, how to fill capsules with powder is no longer a problem. What’s more, there are still some precautions.

Hygiene concern

Keep hands and tools in hygiene status during loading capsules with powder, avoiding ingredients and capsule contamination.

Start with a small number

As a beginner of encapsulation, you had better not try to start making a lot of works at first. Try to make some samples in a small number to practice and test whether your process work or not.

Choose high-quality ingredients

Be sure that the ingredients you choose is of high quality, so as to turn your formulas and capsules into safe and clean ones.

Set a recipe

Set a recipe that can let you properly create capsules on the basis of your current health condition and demands, at the same time lowering the waste amount. Referring to diverse recipe recommendations on websites, select the one according to the nutrition in need

Dosage control

Carefully measure the amount of ingredients at each time you fill a capsule, guaranteeing the accuracy and safety of the dosage.

How to fill a capsule by yourself is not a difficult task, and the instructions above will guide you through making your first capsule. Unlike expensive health products on the market, producing homemade capsules will reduce your cost and give you more experience on health issues. Furthermore, if you are looking for an auto and multi-functional capsule filling machine, feel free to contact Rich Packing.