Nutrient Systems 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

Health

Health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. In humans, it is the general condition of a person's mind, body and spirit, usually meaning to be free from illness, injury or pain...

 and wellness – used in the fortification

Food fortification

Food fortification or enrichment is the process of adding micronutrients to food. It can be purely a commercial choice to provide extra nutrients in a food, or sometimes it is a public health policy which aims to reduce numbers of people with dietary deficiencies in a population.Diets that lack...

 of food, drinks, and pharmaceutical products.

Premixes are complex blends of ingredients. There is a science

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

 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

Taste

Taste is one of the traditional five senses. It refers to the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food, certain minerals, and poisons, etc....

 or texture in the end product.

This problem is modeled as a classic model in dynamic programming

Dynamic programming

In mathematics and computer science, dynamic programming is a method for solving complex problems by breaking them down into simpler subproblems. It is applicable to problems exhibiting the properties of overlapping subproblems which are only slightly smaller and optimal substructure...

 and is known as a blending problem or cutting stock problem

Cutting stock problem

The cutting-stock problem is an optimization problem, or more specifically, an integer linear programming problem. It arises from many applications in industry. Imagine that you work in a paper mill and you have a number of rolls of paper of fixed width waiting to be cut, yet different customers...

. Recently, it has taken much attention in other fields of optimization such as optimum design and supply chain

Supply chain

A supply chain is a system of organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. Supply chain activities transform natural resources, raw materials and components into a finished product that is delivered to...

- and in other industrial applications dealing with non-deterministic dynamic demand from customers.