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Transcript
- 03:07 About Innate Response
- 04:21 Difficulties of Creating a Food-Based and Organic Supplement
- 06:49 Why Food-Based Supplements
- 10:01 Concentration
- 13:41 History of Innate Response
- 15:42 Cutting-Edge Advances in Supplementation Technology
- 21:44 Testing and Quality Assurance
- 23:21 Staying True to the Intention of Food
- 24:30 The Supplement Industry
- 30:08 Studies of Supplementation
- 35:16 The Future of Innate Response
Wendy Myers: Robert, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Robert Craven: Thank you, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about your story and how you came to head a supplement company.
Robert Craven: Sure! I’m pretty blessed to run a pretty cool company. The path actually to get here is truly winding and it all kind of lead to where I’m at today. I started off with Proctor & Gamble in sales leadership training – you know, carrying a bag, setting store shelves, calling on grocery stores right out of college. And then I spent some time at Boston Scientific, which is a medical device company and learned how the healthcare system works, the backend of hospitals and purchasing and insurance and that kind of stuff, which is great, all kind of leading to health.
And then I worked for a strategy company. I was doing best practice benchmarking and learned how the best of the global 2000 really run their businesses. It was very boring because you would do strategy work and you do all these benchmarking and they’d say, “Hey! We’ll work it out right under our 5-year plan.” And so on the side, I was helping entrepreneurs in the West Palm Beach area just write business plan and I just did it. Instead of playing golf, I was just having fun helping entrepreneurs write business plans.
And one of the entrepreneurs I met was a guy named Jordan Rubin. Jordan Rubin is the founder of Garden of Life, a whole food supplement company. This was almost 15 years ago or over 15 years ago now. I helped Jordan. He was running a little company called Garden of Life out of his home and I helped him write a 3-year business plan. I just waved at him in church and we just kind of stayed sort of friends. We weren’t tied or anything, but I helped him over the course of a few months write his business plan.
Three years later, he called me and said, “Okay, that’s done. We hit all the objectives. Now what?” He was young enough and I was young enough and I said, “Just hire me as your CEO” and he did and we built a great company. We had a lot of fun building Garden of Life in the early 2000s. I fell in love with this industry, I fell in love with the natural industry and whole food supplements and I’ve never been ever since.
I actually worked with another guy named Jethren Phillips who was a real pioneer in healthy fats. He was the founder of Spectrum Oils. And so Jethren and I started a company that bought and sold organic ingredients for manufacturers. So we would buy from the farmers from all over the world and then sell it to the manufacturers, great manufacturers making the organic products. So I learned the whole foods side of the industry.
And then a few years ago, when they called me up to run – the name of our company is Food State (we have two brands, Innate and MegaFood. I know we’re talking about Innate today). When they called me to run that company a few years ago, I was ecstatic because I knew the history of the company and how they poured into it and they actually buy from farmers. And so I was able to mesh all of that, incredible sales and marketing from Proctor & Gamble and knowing the healthcare space from Boston Scientific and best practice business stuff and then buying from farmers. My experience with Garden of Life is all kind of culminated right where we are today.
So a long and winding road, but I love what I do and it’s been a really special time in this industry.
Wendy Myers: It’s interesting that Garden of Life and your company, Innate Response are one of the only organic food-based companies that there is. There’s not that many organic food-based supplement companies.
Robert Craven: Correct!
Wendy Myers: It’s difficult. It’s difficult to do, I imagine.
Robert Craven: Absolutely! I think we are the only company I know that actually buys from farmers. We’ll buy half a million pounds of organic produce this year and now we’re starting to tell the story of those farmers in a deep way. Uncle Matt’s Organic is where we get all of our citrus and [inaudible 00:03:35] out of Oregon are the first certified sustainable farm. We’re buying our beech from them, about to buy some other produce from them.
That’s part of my job that I love. I get to go out in the farms and meet the families and hear their history. It’s fantastic!
But then we actually literally bring those in our backdoor. We’re the only company I know as well that makes our own ingredients. So we make ingredients out of the produce. We make our own tablets. We put them in our own bottles and we ship them out. So it’s completely vertically integrated all the way back to the farm.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And it’s so rare. I’ve been looking at food-based supplements for a long time. I think just recently, organic food-based supplements have come on the market because I guess the technology just wasn’t there even a few years ago I imagine.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell us a little bit about that, about why it’s so difficult to have a food-based supplement company and have it also be organic?
Robert Craven: Yeah! I mean, the whole food, it goes back way up. The bulk of all supplements made and sold, 90% plus of everything – you know, the ones you buy in CVS and Costco and the big buckets of vitamins – they’re all made in a lab. So they’re all made to try to mimic that isolate like a vitamin C. Vitamin C is made up of sugar and alcohol, ascorbic acid. They’re trying to mimic the vitamin C isolate from an orange. An orange has like 40,000 different co-factors and they’re finding more every single day.
So what men have tried to do over the last probably 60 years from a vitamin standpoint is isolate and bring it down to the smallest component that men feels is effective. And a lot of time, it’s been shown through science to be effective. I mean, there’s lots of science behind specific isolates. But instead of staying natural and true to the food, men in our infinite wisdom have decided to kind of pull this down and tried to make it as small and as cheap as possible.
So 90% plus of the vitamins out there, probably 95% plus are really made in lab. And people don’t actually know it, but some of these supplements are made from things like petroleum, things that aren’t all that healthy, but you’re mimicking that nutrient, right?
Back in 1973, our company was founded. We started really trying to get more towards whole food. We were really the pioneer form the whole food standpoint. Back in the late ‘90s, other companies like Garden of Life, a new chapter started kind of coming on to the scene and really doing it their way. And then the three of us really are the main companies that have kind of grown up in the whole food space since about 2000 really, 1999 and 2000. And now, it’s the fastest growing sector in the vitamin space.
People are starting to really understand taking my vitamins through food – we like to say we like to stay to the intention of food. And the true intention of food isn’t just for nourishment. It’s about energy and it’s about how your body is assimilating these things and how they get it. We believe that in a deep way.
And while our three companies are very different, I would say those are the three companies that are kind of out in the frontlines of whole food supplementation.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about why it’s preferable to take food-based supplements?
Robert Craven: Well, it’s logical, right? I mean, if you think about an orange – and there’s lots of science actually behind – I could send you a quick list of all the scientific articles written that has compared food versus an isolate. So if you get your vitamin C straight up ascorbic acid versus you get your vitamin C in an orange, if you get your folate in the broccoli with the broccoli delivering that, there’s lots of science that says that food is more effective.
The problem right now with our food supply and our food system is the food that we’re eating today doesn’t look a whole lot like the food of the 1960s – over-spraying, it’s very hard to get organic soil, even with organic soil, the soil health is nowhere near what it used to be.
We don’t buy local anymore. A lot of what we’re buying is processed, packaged foods – lots of sugar, lots of refined flour. I don’t have to tell you this. You know all about it. I think that the quality of our food that we’re getting today isn’t very good in general. And even if you do have a farmer’s market next door, it’s still hard to get all the nutrients you need.
So first, you need supplements. It’s just very difficult to get all the nutrients that our body needs to be nourished because the food supply is just not all that great. And so when you think about it, how do you want to deliver your nourishment?
There’s one way, which is to take an isolate, a multi. A multi is basically 40 different isolates. A good multi might have 40 different isolates or you can take an isolated B or an isolated D. What we believe is it’s more powerful to take your nutrition in the form of food.
So in some cases, we deliver just straight food. And in other cases, we’ll take that isolate and we’ll put it back into the food. So for example, a good, high quality ascorbic acid, which we want a certain dosage of, people have come to expect a certain dosage, we put that back into the whole orange. So you get all the 40,000 co-factors that go with that vitamin C and that’s really the difference between a typical vitamin and what you would be delivering in whole food.
We believe that the body logically recognizes that. It will just logically recognize that food and the nutrition, all the components of it and that your body is not just looking for the isolate.
That’s why a lot of isolates just kind of go right through you. Everybody has experienced that before where you take a vitamin and you know that it’s gone through you. That’s normal because your body is just not picking it up. And that’s why you have to mega-dose, right? You have to take a lot of it, so your body will take some of it.
So the people that I know that take whole food supplements, that’s what they would say. It’s the main reason that they appreciate it.
Also, it’s a premium product and if you’re going to pay that much for a premium product, you should be able to feel that. So everybody that takes our multi or our vitamins, I ask them. I’m like, “Do you feel it?” Nine times out of ten, they say, “I feel it when I forget it. If I go on a trip for two or three days, then I start to feel it.” It’s kind of like watching your kids grow up. You see them every day, but you go away for a month, you come back and you see them grow, right?
You should be able to feel your vitamins. And if you’re not feeling your vitamins, then your body is probably not recognizing it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Also, I think recently the advances in technology of creating the food-based supplements have made it so that you can concentrate the formulae more. In the past, it seemed like you would have to take so many pills to get the recommended dosages that you need. Is it also because people need to take less of a food state nutrient?
Robert Craven: It depends. I mean, I think it has to do with your diet and your lifestyle. We always recommend if someone is trying to affect a certain outcome versus just overall health and wellness, kind of more of a foundational approach versus more of an allopathic if you’re trying to affect a certain outcome, you should certainly do that with a naturopath or a doctor. Get an MD that can kind of monitor your levels and make sure that you’re getting what you need out of the supplement. So it just depends.
I think that if someone is eating a healthy lifestyle and you’re taking your nutrition, you’re going to feel more energy and you’re going to feel that that nutrition is getting into your system. And if you’re trying to affect a certain outcome, I work with a naturopath, I work with doctors all the time who are tracking my level.
I’ll give you an example, my dad. I’m here on vacation with my dad. His iron was low. I mean, it was very low. So we shipped him off some of our blood builder product. He went back and it’s all good.
So getting that testing is vitally important to understand where you’re at or if it’s just a general health and wellness nutritional approach, you should absolutely be able to feel it and the nutrition. You should feel the extra energy that comes from having a proper nutrition.
Wendy Myers: It seems like that now, the food-based supplements today, they’re more concentrated because I think in the past, it was really hard to design supplement programs for people because there was less compliance because you had to take so many of a pill. For a multivitamin, you had to take eight of them a day. But now, it seems like the pills are more concentrated.
Robert Craven: Yeah. And also, powders are big now. As you know, the boom in smoothies. Everybody is putting kale on their smoothie, there’s a big boom. Everybody is juicing. I’ve got lots of friends now who are starting to juice and do smoothies.
So we’re seeing a lot more demand for powders so that you can get that food with the concentration levels needed. And then you’re adding it to the levels that you need for your body and your own situation.
So just to answer your question more specifically in terms of the dosages, we make three different types of food state nutrients we call them. We make 36 ingredients basically and we call them ‘food state nutrients’.
One classification is just food. So cranberries, just cranberries. We have a cranberry-blueberry blend. We’ve got several just food type blends. Then we’ve got a second category of ingredients where we actually infuse a high quality isolate into the food and we infuse it back into the food. So you’re getting all the co-factors, but you’re also getting a dosage that the science might say is effective.
And then the last category is really our minerals, so things like zinc and calcium. We deliver that on saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast matrix. Yeast has been used in the body forever and the body really recognizes it and takes it up as food and so we infuse that yeast. We get that yeast to basically eat that mineral because your body doesn’t really assimilate minerals very well, but infusing it with the yeast, your body will take up more of it and recognize the minerals.
So those are the three types that we create. And then you use the different dosages depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Wendy Myers: And how long did it take to conceive the idea of Innate Response and bring the company’s product line to fruition?
Robert Craven: Well, many, many years ago (I think we’re up to about 10 to 12 years ago), our VP of R&D, Richard Lafond actually crafted what we now call the ‘slow food process’ and we did it with the University of New Hampshire.
And at the time, I think we launched with high 20’s like 26 or 28 ingredients where they work with the University of New Hampshire to master the art of this infusion, infusing the isolate into the food or infusing that mineral into the yeast, for example. And so they work for two or three years of mastering the method of creating our own vitamins and minerals in our food state nutrients.
And then we launched Innate Response – I don’t know, probably 10 years ago now, 8 or 10 years ago as a way to give practitioners in particular an alternative. The Innate Response line is really aimed at practitioners that are overseeing patient health and helping the patient to manage toward a certain outcome.
We’re known in practitioner channels as kind of more connected – connected to the farmer, connected to the earth, connected to the supplement and the nutrition that you’re taking because of the food. And then we provide a number of different educational materials to help the practitioner educate the consumer on not only how to use supplements, but how to think about health and wellness in a general way.
Supplements are a part of the answer. A lot more, the answer is lifestyle, what you choose to eat and how you treat your body and sleep and rest and mental. You can eat everything healthy, but if you’ve got something in your mind, you’re stressed, it’ll still damage your body. We recognize that and we want to help practitioners spread that knowledge to their patients.
Wendy Myers: Well, that’s where Innate Calm Response comes in, right?
Robert Craven: Oh, yeah. It’s a great product. I love that product.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I do too.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about some cutting-edge advances in food-based supplementation and technology? What are some of the things that you’re doing today to even improve upon what you’re doing in your company?
Robert Craven: We are working on – wow! What can I share with you? We’ve got some really cool new products coming out. I want to make sure that I share with you what I can. We just launched a line of inflammation products with turmeric and curcumin (curcumin is the extract from turmeric). There’s stacks and stacks of science on curcumin. The benefits of curcumin is through the roof. We’re also a big believers in the whole form of that or turmeric.
So we’ve got several new products that – well, we’ve got one particular new product that we just launched around turmeric and curcumin from an inflammation standpoint and we’ve got some more coming in the next quarter or so around that.
Inflammation is big. Everybody is walking around with low grade inflammation. And so whether you feel it or not based on what you’re eating and the nutrition you’re putting in your body, you’re probably walking around with low grade inflammation.
And our partnership with Dr. Andrew Weil, he’s a big proponent of the anti-inflammatory diet. And so we ascribe to that and try to educate around that as well in addition to offering up the turmeric and the curcumin. So that’s one of the big things that we’ve done.
We’re in the process right now – I don’t think this is a secret.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, tell us your secret please.
Robert Craven: Actually, I put it on Twitter. I put it on Twitter. So I think I already messed up. I was in our factory, I was in our plant when we were running a test path of turmeric. We were making our own turmeric. So it’ll be another ingredient that we’re producing. And we’re about to announce a big partnership with a farmer that’s supplying us turmeric. And so that’s exciting to us.
I mean, if I can walk into the plant, actually see it and smell it and we run it down the dryer. Our dryer technology is very unique. And to be able to see that and be at the end of the dryer and taste it and have it taste like turmeric and smell like turmeric, that’s the key to our process is that dryer, the dryer technology not only infusing the nutrients and binding them to food, but how we dry the nutrients down the dryer is also very critical to our process.
And then we have a whole part of the slow food process, which is how we tablet. We tablet very slow, very low heat. Our tablet presses are from 1950. They go really slow. I mean, really, really slow. We want it really slow because speed means heat. We want to keep the heat away from the food. We want to keep air away from the food, moisture and heat. That’s why we use amber glass bottles because we want to make sure that we’re keeping the light and the heat away from our product. So it’s very interesting.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you guys get everything right. You get everything right because there’s so many food-based supplements, you get them on a plastic, clear bottle or there’s just always something wrong – it’s not organic or what-not. So you guys, I’m really commending you. You’re getting everything right.
Robert Craven: We have a set of core values. One is do it right. It’s a simple one. And everyone think like an owner. So we try to think not only like an owner of the company, but kind of owner of the planet. We want to make sure that we really honor the planet.
And we’re a small company. For example, I know a lot of product companies put their bottles in a box for the marketing. That’s all well and good, but we’re a small company. We’re a smaller company. If we were to do that, we would be producing 16 dumpster-fulls of boxes a day – and we’re a small company.
So for us, little things like that, not using a box for our bottles, staying in amber glass (which is more recyclable, actually glass is a lot more recyclable than the plastic and it protects our product). We like to do the little things right.
It’s very unique because we’re vertically integrated. Most companies are not. Ninety plus percent of the brands in our industry (except for the bigger guys) are contract manufacturing their product. They’re picking up the phone and calling someone else who’s making their products. They’re shipping it to them and they ship it to the doctor or to the retailer or whoever it might be versus we go all the way back.
I mean, you can come in New Hampshire and tour our plant. I’d love to have you up. You can actually see us making the ingredients. You can see us blending and batching all the formulae, putting them in the tablets, the slow presses and then running it down the bottle line and then our whole shipping and facility. It’s all right there in New Hampshire.
We love being in New Hampshire. And the fact that our company has been there for 41 years is something we’re very, very proud of.
Wendy Myers: I love that you have live webcams in your factory.
Robert Craven: Yeah, we believe in trusting relationships and part of that means transparency. I mean, the more transparent you are, the easier it is to build trust and have good relationships with people.
A few years ago, we installed live cams. What’s really funny is if you go to most facilities, any manufacturing facility really on the planet, they make you check your cameras at the door and there are signs everywhere that says, “No pictures allowed.” So we encourage pictures. We just want you to tag us when you tweet it or put it on Facebook.
That keeps our quality at a very high level because our operational people know they’re being watched.
Wendy Myers: No one is dipping their finger in the turmeric.
Robert Craven: Exactly, exactly. And they’re also very proud of what they do. We like to show off what they do because our employees, we call them ‘the family’, our family members are very proud. It’s very artisan, what we do. There’s a lot of handcrafting and love and attention that goes into our product. We’re very proud of it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. It’s not easy to do. I mean, I was reading your website you’ve recently bought $3 million of equipment. It’s just not easy to source this product from start to finish it and test it for the correct amounts in each tablet.
Wendy Myers: Do you also test for heavy metals by any chance?
Robert Craven: We test for everything. In fact, we just bought a new machine. It’s called an HPLC. It’s a machine that’s got an argon flame that’s hotter than the surface of the sun. And so the test for minerals, you have to burn it. That’s where fireworks come from. The color of the mineral is what gets used – you put it through the flame and that’s what tells you the purity of the mineral. So we just upgraded our machine most recently and the team loves it because now, instead of parts per million, we can go to parts per billion on our minerals.
We have a full lab in-house, which is also very unique. And so we test everything coming in and everything going out. I mean, there’s a couple of test we have to send out for, but by and large, we test pretty much everything – all the botanicals.
You’d be surprise how many times people try to cut a botanical. So if you get a botanical like an herb, for example, people will mix it with something else. It still smells like the herb, looks like the herb and taste like the herb. But if you don’t test it, you can’t see the purity. So we test every herb that comes in. We test our powders and ingredients throughout the process. We test our tablets. And then we test our finished goods before they go into the final product.
So we’re very, very confident that what it says on the label is what’s in our pill. It’s what’s in the bottle. And that’s on live cam too. You could go and watch that on live cams because we actually show our lab on live cam and it’s fun. I mean, it’s a pleasure to work for a company where everybody takes such pride in what they do and they’re willing to show it off and be very, very transparent with what we’re up to.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And that’s what I just love about your company. You’re just on the cutting-edge of technology and producing the highest quality supplements. There’s not that many people doing what you’re doing because it’s very expensive and very difficult and uses proprietary technologies.
Robert Craven: Well, it’s funny you say cutting-edge because to a large degree, we talk about our mission being, “We’re in the business of improving lives by staying true to the intention of food.” When you think about being ‘true to the intention of food’, it’s all about kind of going backwards. It’s less about isolating, it’s less about all that, but it’s about going backwards and capturing what’s really in the food and maintaining as much of that as possible.
I’ve never thought about it as cutting-edge, but you’re absolutely right. The technology it takes to kind of minimize the harm to the food, all that technology is pretty cutting-edge in order to get it back to the start and put in to a convenient form that your body recognizes and can assimilate. So yeah, it’s neat to think about it that way, but our goal is kind of go backwards, right? We’re trying to take it back to the start.
Wendy Myers: Back to the future.
Robert Craven: Exactly!
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about the supplement industry as a whole. What are some of the problems with other food-based supplement companies and what they’re doing and what they’re producing?
Robert Craven: Well, there’s a couple of definitions here. I would never, ever talk about another company, but I want t make sure that there’s some different strata. So, for example, Centrum – I don’t know if they still have them on the market, but Centrum had a food-based product out there. There’s a real difference.
Let me first start off with definitions. In our space, there’s a segment of our space we call ‘food-based’ and then there’s another segment that we call ‘whole food supplement’. We are in kind of the whole food supplement space and the major difference there is we’re actually integrating nutrients back into the food. We actually do a separate step that has a certain technology that you utilize a certain technology to get the isolate or to get the mineral or to get that nutrition back into the food.
Food-based, in our circles is really a company that takes an isolate and then a food powder and mixes it together and puts in a tablet. So there’s no effort to get the isolated mineral, the nutrient back into the food. You see what I mean? They just really mix it up with the food powder. So that’s one thing that’s a little bit of the difference.
The other difference is how you get your food powder. There’s very large companies – I mean, very large. There’s one in Illinois that I’ve toured before and I know good people there. It’s a great company. What they specialize in is drying food. So if you’ve ever seen Kellogg’s with the dried strawberries, the freeze dried strawberries, they do that. But they dry all kinds of food powders and they buy from farmers and they dry food powders.
The most common type of dryer that they use is called a spray dryer. A spray dryer, you take the food down to as liquid as you can get it and then you spray it through a very tight nozzle that goes past these very high heat flames and you do that in a chamber that’s got the right humidity. So when you do that at the top of the chamber and you spray this little, tiny nozzle, it sprays this really fine mist, it turns into powder on the way down.
That process is very harsh. It’s very, very harsh on the food and it doesn’t maintain the smell or the color or the taste really of the food that begins with it. And that’s why we use a window refractance dryer. The window refractance dryer is a 50-foot basically dryer bed that dries the food powder very gently. It goes over 50 feet very, very slow in low heat. And by the end, it starts off as a liquid or more like a slurry, so you’re getting more of the food. And at the end, it comes off like a flake. It comes off like a flake or a fruit roll-up, a little dry fruit roll-up.
It doesn’t overburn. It doesn’t overcook. It never really cooks. We’re just evaporating that water very gently out of the food powder. So the end, you can taste it. You can actually taste it and smell it and see the color that doesn’t get preserved in the spray drying technique.
So the vast majority of the food powders out there are spray dried or drum dried, which even burns the food even more.
And just to give you some sense of the cost, a typical bag of whole food powder might cost $10 a kilo – you know, the kind that’s spray dried. It costs us about $18 a kilo just to run our dryer. That doesn’t include the food on the belt. So it’s probably double, if not more, when you get down to it in terms of the difference in price just to get to the food powder.
So very, very different unique technologies out there around food-based and how food-based supplements are created.
Is that helpful or too much information?
Wendy Myers: No, no! Absolutely. No, I’m very, very interested in this and I’m sure the listeners are too because I think people – even myself, I take a lot of supplements and have for many, many years, always reading labels and you don’t really know how it’s made.
Robert Craven: That’s exactly right.
Wendy Myers: It’s not so easy to find this information or truthful information about how supplements are made and produced and the difference and nuances, et cetera.
Robert Craven: Well, it’s a perfect point, Wendy because in the industry, I’ve done a couple of speeches. One of my speech is called Big T Transparency. I hate bad players in the supplement industry because nine times out of ten, if there’s an article in the U.S.A Today, it’s going to be a negative article on supplements. It’s going to be a negative article on science, the science behind the supplements. It’s definitely not talking about both sides of this equation at all.
Wendy Myers: But that’s paid for by big pharma.
Robert Craven: Well, yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I know you can’t go into that.
Robert Craven: I hate it when you hear the radio ads where these people are just making obscene claims about supplements. And then they make their money and they pay their fine and then they start another company. That’s really a small percentage of our market. A few handful of bad monkeys is making the whole barrel look bad.
And so I’m big on transparency because I think the more that we tell, the more we show and how we do it, the more other companies show and tell on how they do it. Especially good companies in the supplement space, I think we’ll build a gap between us and the bad players. We have to build that gap. We have to help consumers see that there’s a better standard, a higher standard and they should be looking for that standard.
So asking where the product comes from, where the produce comes from, how are you making it, show me this stuff, I think that consumers will do that more (not just with us, but every company), we’ll elevate the standard and hopefully create more distance between the good players in the supplement space and the bad.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And so you talk about these articles that are published about how supplements aren’t effective or what-not. These are coming from studies where they’re isolating a nutrient – vitamin C, ascorbic acid or vitamin D. They’re typically almost always synthetic nutrients.
Robert Craven: Correct.
Wendy Myers: Do you know of any studies on the horizon or if there will be any studies about companies using food-based nutrients to produce health.
Robert Craven: Sure! I mean, there’ s a couple of small studies. The real difference here is economic if you think at it because most of the whole food supplement companies are a fraction of the size – I mean, a fraction of the size of large pharma companies or even large supplement companies. So we’re very proud.
And this is news. I’m not sure that you know, but we were just bought. Our company was just bought by a company called PharmaBite. PharmaBite is a very large supplement company in the mass channel. They’re number one in mass. They’re actually very good at what they do – high, high quality in that side of it. They’ve got resources on science for science and studies and nutrition that they’re going to bring to bear for us. They want us to stay right where we are and the channels we are doing what we do and they want to help us do that at a higher level.
So to be purchased by PharmaBite is actually a huge boom for us because they’re keeping us as a whole meaning my team stays in place. They don’t want to cross channels. They don’t want us going into mass. They don’t want to come into our channel. But they’ve got a lot of experience with studies and they’ve got a lot more resources than we do to be able to help us mutate that to the next level.
So I’m giddy today. I mean, this was just announced a few weeks ago because I think it’s going to help us take it to the next level in terms of studies, but it’s economics. I mean, to do a great double blind placebo control study, it can cost of a quarter of million dollars. So when you think about applying that amount of money –
Oh, by the way, you can’t say anything about the study. So as soon as you get the results of the study, you can’t put it on a bottle because now, you’re making a drug claim and that’s against our regulations, the dossier Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. So we can’t even say anything from the study. So it’s one of those things where they don’t make it really easy for us to want to go out and do the studies, but I want to and it’s all about bioavailability.
I think the main thing that people think about logically when they think about a whole food supplement is bioavailability. My body is going to recognize it more, it’s going to take more in and you can feel that. I mean, we have a money back guarantee. If you take a 30-day supply of our multi or whatever and you don’t feel it, you can get your money back. You should be able to feel your multi.
And so for us, there’s some intrinsic evidence, some qualitative evidence and experiential evidence, but I can’t wait to get some real evidence and really go a little deeper on the science side of things.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, me too. There needs to be a lot more studies on food state nutrients, whole food nutrients, absolutely.
Robert Craven: I totally agree. And it’s economics. It’s all economics.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. A lot of natural health treatments so to speak, there’s not a lot of quality studies on them because there’s no one to pay for that.
Robert Craven: Well, it’s funny, I talk to people all the time. They’re like, “Maybe it’s all in my head, but I feel great” and I’m like, “Does it really matter then?” I’m not suggesting that it’s all in your head, but if you feel it, if you feel it and it gives you more energy and it affects your life in a positive way, that’s the bulk of the equation.
And we want more – I absolutely want more studies and to have access to that. We’ve got some studies teed up for this year that I’m very excited about.
And the other thing to mention here is most whole food supplements are a lot easier on your system. Most people can’t take an isolated vitamin on an empty stomach and you can certainly take our product on an empty stomach. So there’s that intrinsic evidence as well that your body is recognizing it, it’s not rejecting it, it’s not saying, “Whoa! Some mega dose of something.” So there’s more intrinsic evidence.
You should be able to take our supplements, our whole food based supplements on an empty stomach and not feel the ill effects.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. That concerns me. In the past, when you’ve taken a multivitamin, you get nauseated for a couple of hours afterwards if you take it on an empty stomach. So that’s what I like about your product. I can take them and not have any problem like that.
Robert Craven: Well, when you take that isolated supplement, you’re not real sure how it’s made. What’s in it? What was used to make that? And so we like to tell the story of our farmers because it makes it really clear, “This is where we got the beets. This is where we got the carrots and the carrots are in there.” That’s the fun part about working for this company.
Wendy Myers: Well, Robert, thank you so much for everything that you’re doing and providing health to the masses – hopefully more masses now with your buy-out.
Robert Craven: Yeah. No! It’s very exciting. They really want to keep us separate. They see this as their entry into a new channel, innovative channel. I feel like they’re going to bring some amazing resources to bear to help us tell the story and also, prove the story as well.
People believe because they can feel it, but I’m with you, I can’t wait to apply a little bit more resources to make sure that we can show it as well from a study standpoint.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit more about kind of what you have on the horizon or any other plans you have for the company?
Robert Craven: We are big on education. We’re a big believer that our mission is improving lives. And if you think about that as a top of the stool and there are three legs to the stool, the first leg is product. A good product can help change a life, but a product alone doesn’t do it, right? We’ve all taken a product and it doesn’t change your life alone.
The second leg of the stool is education. And again, education alone doesn’t necessarily do it. We’ve all read a book and applied it for two week and then kind of drop off.
But the third leg of the stool that we think is most important is community. So everything we do is all about delivering a product with education that helps build a community. And whether it’s a retail community or your community from the podcast or whether it’s a community from a doctor who’s trying to affect their community, we like to partner folks Dr. Andie Weil, Dr. Tieraona Low Dog. We’ve got other doctors and other thought leaders that we want to bring to bear on the education side. And then we do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to apply that education in a community setting.
We do events-in-a-box where we send you everything you need – posters, sign-up sheets – if you’re a retailer or a doctor or whoever it might be. So it’s not just about product. We’ve got some great products on the horizon. We look forward to innovating even more. This time next year, we’ll probably have 42 food-state nutrients. We’re at 36 now. We’ve got some new nutrients in process that we’re very, very excited about and that my VP of brand would kill me if I told you because I tend to tell the secret. So we’re excited about that.
But to us, it’s not just about product because if we’re really in the business of improving lives, it’s got to be more than just product and it’s got to be more than just education.
We’re also very big on community and try and build the trust and relationship that it takes to build that.
Wendy Myers: Well, Robert, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It was really informative.
Robert Craven: It was my pleasure. It’s really good to meet you finally. And good luck with everything.
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much. And listeners, if you want to learn more about detoxification and my version of Paleo, the Modern Paleo diet, you can go to myersdetox.com, sign up for the newsletter, you get to look at all the free information and podcast on my website.
And if you liked the podcast, please give it a review and rating on iTunes. I’d appreciate that so much. Thank you for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
