Are Your Probiotics Cool During The Hot Summer Months?

Summer is a time we can all use a little relief from the heat. But for probiotic products, staying cool isn’t a matter of comfort—it’s a matter of life or death. Probiotics are colonies of living organisms (measured in colony-forming units, or CFUs) that must reach your gut alive in order to confer their many health benefits. But these organisms are vulnerable to dramatic changes in temperature, especially heat, while in transit.

Temperatures inside a delivery truck can reach 150ºF for sustained periods during the long journey from factory to distributor. And when you add the time that the product might sit on a hot loading dock before being shipped in yet another truck to your retailer, it’s easy to see how many of these vital yet fragile organisms might not survive.

Some manufacturers anticipate this high attrition rate and attempt to compensate by packing 50 to 200 billion CFUs in each container. The problem is that only a fraction of these cultures (as few as 2 million of an original 200 billion, or 0.001%) may remain alive by the time they reach you, the consumer. And those that do must survive the harsh environment of the stomach before they reach your gut. It’s not only a daunting journey—it’s risky and wasteful.

We at Probulin^® believe there’s a better way.

We begin by selecting only the hardiest probiotic strains for our products. We then protect our products by shipping them on ice in specially designed packaging to keep our cultures at life-sustaining temperatures as they travel from factory, to retailer, to you. Our “Always Ships Cold + Protected” label means that the probiotic products Probulin^® ships arrive alive, with their full health benefits intact.

Each Probulin^® probiotic product gets packed in ice inside a fully insulated container, keeping the probiotics at a consistent, cool temperature throughout their journey—protecting our products from heat both in vehicles and during potential layovers at warehouses or loading docks. Other industries, like those dealing in farm produce or juice concentrate, have long recognized the value in shipping their products while refrigerated to preserve freshness and reduce product attrition in transit. But Probulin^® is the only probiotic manufacturer to make this investment in the life and quality of its products.

Yes, shipping our products on ice does incur an added expense; however, Probulin^® is able to keep costs low. How do we do it? By reducing our attrition rates we don’t need to jam-pack our products with billions of cultures only to sacrifice the vast majority during shipping. And because we select robust, healthy probiotic strains and ship them in a protected environment, we know our products will reach you in the same condition as they leave our factory.

We’re also abundantly aware of the strain that packaging places on the environment as a whole. That’s why at Probulin^® we ship our products in specialized insulated boxes made from recycled blue jean textile waste material. This byproduct has the same R rating as Styrofoam but is biodegradable and environmentally safe! This process saves us money, which saves you money.

At Probulin^® we care about the health of our products the way we care about those who consume them. The extra care we take to package and ship out probiotics in a temperature-controlled, life-sustaining environment actually saves us money—and allows us to keep our products both effective and affordable for consumers. No other probiotic manufacturer can make that claim.