The cost of clean
Underwritten by:
The Road to Natural 2019
story and images by Rick polito
The standards are that high. The requirements list is that long.
But then he’ll say it’s worth it. Clean ingredients is another avenue to set his brand apart.
“It’s an opportunity,” Lifton says. “I think it’s an opportunity for us to differentiate and to lead and, again, to emphasize quality. We want to be at that cutting edge.”
Message in a bottle
Seated at a conference table built for 20 and occupied by two, Dan Lifton explains the “mom and dad rule” that guides much of what he does as CEO at Quality of Life Labs.
He can walk through the clean room at the warehouse down the road from the office in Harrison, New York, and show me the safeguards. He can point to the certificates of analysis posted on the company website. He can talk about taking magnesium stearate out of all Quality of Life products, abandoning tablets to eliminate excipient concerns, the tough job of hunting down herbal ingredients free of maltodextrin, even skipping a blue capsule for a sleep product because the team couldn’t find a dye that met the company’s clean ingredient standards.
But all of that is details. What shepherds those details into a coherent product philosophy is that mom and dad rule, a rule as simple as it sounds.
“We formulate every one of our products as though we were basically developing a product or producing a product for our parents,” he says.
“I think it’s an opportunity for us to differentiate and to lead and, again, to emphasize quality.
We want to be at that cutting edge.”
-Dan Lifton,
Quality of Life Labs
That’s an easy rule to explain, he says. It’s a tougher ideal to realize.
“In herbal extracts, getting maltodextrin-free products has been extremely challenging. We’re paying a premium,” he’ll say. Or he’ll talk about phasing in glyphosate testing and which ingredients might be considered “high risk” for contamination and might need to be pulled from the formulations, or even the catalog.
“If we have the least bit of concern, the ingredient or the excipient has to come out of our products,” he says. “And once it does, it does so permanently.”
And then there are “plants or pulses where the supply chain has been so contaminated, everywhere, that getting guarantee non-GMO becomes very challenging.” Then he smiles when he observes that formulators and contract manufactures “always tell us that we’re the most difficult line to work with.”
Each of those hypersegmented segments gets to define what “clean” means for them, Vigeant explains. And that means Plantfusion has to formulate to meet multiple definitions for multiple markets. Vigeant talks about a “funnel” that grows increasingly narrow as multiple boxes get checked off for multiple definitions of “clean.”
And then those definitions change, with the trends, with reports in the media, with whatever the latest influencer said. It’s not a moving target. It’s100 moving targets. Vigeant puts it simply: “Clean means different things to different people.”
Those different people with their different definitions also ask different questions. Back in his office, with wide windows looking out over a sprawling parking lot, Vigeant talks about consumers who are “more consistently curious.” They won’t just ask where the stevia in a Plantfusion product came from but how it was extracted. “Is a solvent used? Or is it water extraction,” Vigeant says, describing a level of consumer sophistication all but unknown just a few years ago. “Consumers are consistently raising the bar for themselves. And as a result, they are raising the bar for us.”
Walking down halls and through doorway after doorway, past the labs, past the giant mixing drums and past the packaging rooms and the loading docks, Vigeant doesn’t typically spend a lot of time thinking about the differences between his time running up and down the aisles of his parents natural food store and his days navigating the sprawling Edison, New Jersey, plant as CEO for Plantfusion and Reliance Vitamin.
But when asked, Vigeant will say that it’s “more demanding.” He just won’t say that’s a bad thing. The stakes are higher in a company with 200 people and the expectations from consumers, and regulators, are higher too. He’s glad they are.
“It’s really evolved to a whole other level,” he says.
For Plantfusion, the flagship protein brand, the expectations are not just high. They fall into niches.
With clean ingredients, clean is on the plate of the beholder and there are more plates, more niches, and more beholders than ever before. Vigeant says.
“Consumers are consistently raising the bar for themselves. And as a result, they are raising the bar for us.” Phil Vigeant, Plantfusion
Redefining clean, again and again
Away from the consumers, GMPs, and transparency requirements mean more documentation, more tests to be ordered and analyzed, more documentation to be created, categorized and collated. That’s the “more demanding” part that comes to mind when he looks back across the decades that separate the CEO from the kid in the health food shop.
But then he talks about a flipside to that evolution. More things are also possible now. There are clean ingredients to replace the questionable flavors or sweeteners. The extraction methods are cleaner. The ingredient testing is more accurate. Better transparency allows his team to peer through the layers and see the links in the supply chain.
The market is more demanding, but now he can meet those demands.
“It’s more demanding,” he says. “It’s also more possible.”
“There’s a lot more demand from the consumer. They want organic ingredients. They want it non GMO. They want, you know, these different certifications.” Bill Betz, Penn Herb Co.
“There’s a lot more demand from the consumer. They want organic ingredients. They want it non-GMO. They want, you know, these different certifications,” Betz says. Penn Herb offers USDA organic certified when they can and answers questions around wildcrafting when certification isn’t always possible. Oregon Tilth helps them nail down organic wherever they can. Betz’s grandfather likely answered no shortage of questions too. Betz smiles when he says he remembers a time when selling herbs was seen as “the equivalent of being a witch doctor.”
But now the answers come with more documentation, more test results, more transparency.
The factory where the herbs are packaged and the hundreds of house-brand formulations are manufactured and stored is 15 miles away from the retail store and relatively “new” at 25. It lacks the gleam, but Betz is excited to offer a tour and explain the clean ingredient standards, the testing, the different formulations Penn Herb creates from the Swiss-sourced Oblas branded essential oil brand. It's a less flashy place than the store and a good match for Betz’s low-key demeanor.
That demeanor says a lot about how Betz and Penn Herb Co. approach the question of the clean ingredients. They don’t stand on a soapbox or put up billboards. They talk about the company behind the brand and the character steeped into that company over the course of 95 years.
Documentation matters, Betz says. But reputation and connection matter too.
“People come to trust the company that's been around that long,” he says.
Family values
The Penn Herb Co. shop on Second Street in Philadelphia is as gleaming and carefully curated as any supplement-focused store in the United States. Well organized and flawlessly lit, with a stunning array of supplements and extracts paired with organic personal care and bulk herbs in sealed bags, the store is inviting and engaging, a stellar retail experience entirely up to date.
And it stands on the spot where Bill Betz’s grandfather sold herbs 95 years ago when he founded Penn Herb Co.
As a third-generation leader of the company, Betz believes that longevity has meaning. Clean ingredients wasn’t a standard that was being set it was just the standard way of doing things. It still is for Penn Herb, he says. “That’s how we’ve always done it,” Betz says.
That doesn’t mean Penn Herb isn’t ready to answer questions. They certainly hear those questions, he says.
Read Day 3: Clean impact
Underwritten by:
The Road to Natural 2019
Inherent in that opportunity, however, is another challenge: getting people to notice, then getting them to care and then getting them to pay the premium meeting all those other challenges require. Lifton calls it “the biggest challenge.”
He also calls it one that’s increasingly drawn the brand into the digital realm, where the marketing team can share more information than fits on a label. They can control content on Amazon, market through Facebook and Google Adwords, deploy social media campaigns, find influencers.
“I think this is the best time to be able to do this type of messaging,” he says. “Once people understand what we’re talking about, at least our sophisticated, science-driven consumers who are willing to pay a premium, it very much resonates.”
That’s why clean ingredients are so important to the brand, Lifton explains. When the magnesium stearate is removed, when the maltodextrin has been taken out of the equation when the glyphosate has been eliminated, “only then can we have meaningful messages to the customers about what the brand is about.”
The kind of messages mom and dad would want to hear.
“Markets have become even more hypersegmented. It used to be just vegetarian, people that wanted to eat well and people ate junk, right? Now, it's keto, vegan, paleo, Whole 30 and it goes on from there.” Phil Vigeant, Plantfusion
