Nutrient Systems (nutrient premixes) integrate functional ingredients from vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nucleotides, and nutraceuticals. These mixes are very cost-saving and beneficial to manufacturers, researchers and developers in the food and pharmaceutical industries worldwide. This is a booming business and is part of the multi-billion dollar nutrition industry worldwide. Many everyday foods and pharmaceuticals are derived from nutrient premixes.
Nutrient premixes, or "nutrient systems" are custom-designed premixed blends containing any of a wide variety of nutrients associated with health and wellness – used in the fortification of food, drinks, and pharmaceutical products.
Premixes are complex blends of ingredients. There is a science to developing the optimum premix for food or drink applications – identifying and achieving desired specifications, selecting proper market forms, ensuring quality and consistency - all without compromising taste or texture in the end product.
This problem is modeled as a classic model in dynamic programming and is known as a blending problem or cutting stock problem. Recently, it has taken much attention in other fields of optimization such as optimum design and supply chain - and in other industrial applications dealing with non-deterministic dynamic demand from customers.