Using a unique process honed by veterinarians and engineers over 25 years, SCCL is able to collect colostrum from healthy dairy cows and dry it to create a safe, efficacious, stable, pure and potent product.
Colostrum Collection
Our colostrum is collected from dairy farms that are licensed to produce milk for human consumption.
SCCL requires its donor dairy farms to maintain these same high standards when collecting and storing colostrum as they do during milk collection. All utensils and containers that come into contact with the colostrum are kept clean and sanitized.
Each farm collects fresh colostrum from cows soon after a new calf is born. The farm reserves what they need to feed the calf (SCCL encourages all donor dairies to follow the Recommended Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Dairy Cattle, as published by Agriculture Canada, which specifies the amount of colostrum that should be fed to newborn calves). Any excess colostrum is immediately placed into a sanitized plastic pail provided by SCCL, labeled for identification, and placed into a freezer for storage. Immediate freezing preserves the important ingredients naturally found in colostrum. Our pail labeling system gives us complete trace back capability to the farm and cow of origin.
The frozen colostrum is transported to our processing facilities that are inspected and approved by the CFIA and the USDA. Here all pails are held until a sample is taken and analyzed in our quality control laboratory. Testing is followed by grading. Pails that meet our product specifications are released for processing, those that do not are not processed.
Our focus on testing and grading each pail before processing helps ensure that our final products retain the highest levels of safety and bioactivity.
Colostrum Processing
Our products are made only from natural bovine colostrum collected from healthy cows up to 24 hours after birth.
We do not change it because we believe that all of the ingredients found in colostrum are important and contribute to its wide spectrum of biological activities.
In short, colostrum is more than the sum of its parts, and in order to retain its full spectrum of activity it is important to preserve the natural ratio of all ingredients. Therefore we do not remove any components, such as colostral fat. Nor do we add other ingredients such as blood, serum, whey or chicken eggs, as is sometimes done by other manufacturers.
Our colostrum processing involves a series of steps designed to ensure product purity, potency, safety, and stability. The main steps include the following:
- Heat treatment – This key procedure is a multiple-step, proprietary process that achieves pasteurization equivalence without damaging any of the important immune, anti-microbial, and growth factors or nutrients found in colostrum. Carefully timed heating and cooling cycles are both applied under strict controls. Testing is done both during heat treatment and on the final products to ensure that pasteurization equivalence has been achieved and key colostral components are intact.
- Spray drying – This carefully controlled procedure turns the liquid colostrum into a fine powder that is stable for prolonged periods.
Colostrum Packaging
After processing, the colostrum powder is again tested for purity and potency and is then packaged into individual packages or bulk containers. After packaging each product, it is again tested to ensure that it meets rigorous quality control standards. Once packaged, the products are stable at room temperature for three years.
