How Are Craft Probiotics Made?

When you are looking online or in the store for probiotics, how do you know what to look for? How do these brands know what exact probiotic strains are in their pills? We breakdown how we at Craft Microbiome hand-select our probiotics and test to confirm that what’s on our packaging is actually what you are going to get.

How do we know what we have, is what we have? First, we have to know what we are looking for. What is different, what is unique and what is your regular run of the mill probiotic? There are a few ways to do this. 

The hard way, take a sample (if you’re thinking it, you know it, sample is what comes out our rear-end), pulverize it, and break all the probiotic DNA into little bits, no longer than 160 base pairs. From there we attach synthetic DNA with special coding that only an illumine sequencing machine can read. We place the sample with the special coding into a Illumnia next gen sequencer, and after about 12 hours the machine will give about 12gb of data that we parse through and try to understand the entire population of bacteria. If we would like to see how the bacteria in the digestive tract changes over time, we sample more often and attach more special coding to understand how bacteria change in response to an event, be it a race, an academic test, or a stressful acting performance. 

After growing the samples, we begin to pick colonies and place them on a special plate. At the same time, we create a replica sample that continues to grow in a small chamber. We send the plate to a third-party company to confirm the sample bacteria ID is actually what we want. This process is critical to ensure we are providing you with key performance probiotic strains.

After the ID is confirmed, and the replica is growing, we track the growth into a small batch in the ideal growth conditions. We work in small batches as this provides you with fresh, newly isolated probiotics. These probiotics are then sent back to confirm their ID for production.

You may be thinking that this is TMI, but we want to be transparent with how we do things around here!