The Industry’s Best-Kept Secret: Why Supplement Brands Must Start Marketing Their Quality

(upbeat music) - You are listening to Supplement Source, the official podcast of the Council for Responsible Nutrition. And now your host, Jeff Ventura. - Hello, and thank you for listening to Supplement Source. I am Jeff Ventura, the Vice President of Communications here at the Council for Responsible Nutrition. And I am delighted today to have Elon Sunberg from Alchemist Lab, CEO of Alchemists with us today. We are gonna be talking about the industry's safety record. And I'm gonna let you kick it off, Elon. I know you have some thoughts. I'd love to kind of get into with you. - Perfect, well first, Jeff, thank you for having me and thank you for your inputting on. I'll start with the fact that I should have stayed a business marketing major in college. I probably would have graduated many, many, many years earlier, but I had to go through my chemistry degree to do what I do now. And so I have a chemistry, but I love for business and marketing. And I have since the beginning of my time in this industry been surprised at how little our industry markets are quality. We are sort of plagued with this misinformation that we are unregulated, that we are-- - Something we're working on here, continue to work on. - Greatly appreciated. The other one is that we are unsafe, which is completely false. And then we are untested, which goes to the regulations, but that's also false, 'cause I'm still here running this company 28 years later, which is testing all the plans and fungus in this industry. So it constantly is prized that this industry doesn't do a better job of capitalizing on that spend. That's basically my stock box moment right there. - Why do you think that is? Because I have to say that one of the issues that we've been looking at is the regulate, the sort of notion that we are regulated, and you're right. I mean, in the two years that I've been at CRN, that has been an unbelievably recurrent theme in mainstream, and not trade press, of course, but in mainstream media, certainly that as if the FDA is not even in existence, I mean, oftentimes they'll just say that we're completely not regulated and we have to remind them. And we've been doing like whack-a-mole, contacting reporters after we see this kind of misinformation and correcting it. But what do you think it takes to sort of reverse that? Is it just money and marketing? - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, it's gonna take money and, well, no, it's not gonna be a lot of money because here's the thing, this industry already spends a lot of money on quality. And I can speak for my own data as CEO of Outcomes Labs, and when I go visit a client's facility, I won't name names, but a couple years back, I visited one of the biggest players in this industry. The global company, tens of thousands of employees, a huge mongers for print on products that span from, you know, a fitness to just basic supplements and vitamins. And I tore their facility and they were very excited to show me their amazing lab. And they're very excited to show all the, you know, state of the article, mint, and I asked a question, you know, what do you spend on testing your products? Are the ingredients going as product? And they were very excited to share millions and millions and millions of dollars. And I then asked a loaded question like, what do you, you know, what's your lab staff? Like what your quality control staff? They were very excited to show how big their staff was. And then I asked this question and they fell into my trap, like, well, what are you doing to share that with the consumer? And their answer was nothing, it was cricket. And still to date, that company has very, very little sharing of that quality story. My point is that if I suddenly asked everyone to do the testing that weren't doing testing, well, you're going to spend a lot of extra money, you weren't spending last year, and the CFO is going to get excited and the accounting department is going to try to fire people and all this, whatever. But the fact is the industry, for the most part, is already spending that money. We're just not talking about it. So the spend to correct this to your question is not a lot. It's really, you know, just some of your marketing campaigns tell a little bit more of the quality story. In our industry is sort of plagued with this misinformation that we're not tested, not safe, not regulated, but the fact is we are, we are, we are. And the data's already there. You just have to tweak the marketing campaigns. And I think perhaps I have this phrase I like to use instead of reference materials, marketing material, marketing compound. You know, the marketing people in this industry like to attach to something and market that, whether it's a reference standard, a sort of the magic bullet that's the active ingredient that we don't like, we don't talk about in this industry because we really can't. So they spend a lot of money trying to almost mimic pharmaceutical products without actually saying that the product does something worth as a thing in the product that does something. But we dance around that. Perhaps we need to dance around the fact that we have an amazing safety record. I'm reminded of a slide that our friends at CT recall Rick Kingston shared some years ago showed a pie chart of all of the recalls for FDA regulated categories, veterinary products, food, drugs, medical devices, dietary supplements, and the dietary supplement slice of the pie was 2% of that entire pie was 2%. And then on top of that, 50% of that 2%, so only 1% was actually drugs mimicking herbs. So we have 1% of the entire FDA pie chart of recalled things from our industry. The fact is we have an amazing arena with not alternate medicine, original medicine, and this industry needs to tell the story of quality. They're spending the money minus we'll capitalize on it. - Listen, since you're not shy, let's talk a little bit about the political climate that we find ourselves in today, as it relates to what we're talking about, is there an opportunity now to do some of the stuff that maybe the industry would have been reluctant to do earlier? And what do you feel about that? - So it's no secret that I'm a fan of our case, and I know already that's controversial, and his boss is controversial in the whole, everything's controversial, but I have found affinity for his movements long before he was working for our current president. They put that aside, he is where he is now, and the president is who he is now, and a lot of interesting moves have been made recently, food dies, and a lot of other things. The questions have been like, "Well, why isn't he coming for lead and calme meal?" And this man, I'll circle back. We have an amazing safety record. Our case not worried about our industry. He's worried about potentially poisoning his food dies and unsafe drugs. Our industry is amazing, and doesn't need his help right now. Of course, we've put all the trade association leaders that put together really great wish lists that have been shared with our K&S team about what we want from him and them. One example would be, "Dictorice supplements are not accepted by food stamps, because the food stamps people think that were drugs." "Dictorice supplements are not acceptable for health and savings accounts because the health and savings folks are calling us foods." So it's like they're both conflicting, and if we just tweak those rules, we would be able to use, as a country, use those funds to buy really, there's no question where vitamins are important. We're not disputing this anymore. The people need them, and they could be given access if they change their rules. So that's one thing we were hoping you'd get, but to circle back, our industry's amazing. It's the safest of all the FDA-regulated things. So what's happening right now is, no, they're not looking at us too much. They're looking at changing food, making drugs more safe, better tested. And as a result, people are kind of confused about where's our champion now? Why is he's pretty busy with really, really important things that are, in fact, hurting people? - When you talk about the marketing of this notion of safety, and that the industry's got such a great track record, so much has changed in the way things get marketed. 20 years ago, it would have been a magazine ad, or a national ad buy on a major, one of the three major networks, now with media. So even social media, where do you even begin to do your advertising, right? And yet there's an opportunity there too, in terms of influencers, really kind of getting the word out in kind of creative ways. How do you feel about that in terms of, like if you had 20 million bucks to spend on a campaign around the supplement industry's safety record, where would you spend it? - It's a tough question, 'cause I'm sitting in the cynical camp right now, where I'm a guy who helped build this company from the ground up. I put 10 years or 16 hour days in the first 10 years, and we're almost a year 30 now. - 'Cause you're not to interrupt you, but it's okay to interrupt you if you're gonna give you a compliment. You're a savvy marketer. I mean, you know your social media, your logo is incredible. I mean, you've done some really fabulous stuff. So I mean, I ask this because I also, as a marketing person myself, see you as somebody who really understands the space. - Thank you, so I appreciate that. So that actually goes into what I was gonna say next, 'cause I have trouble respecting these overnight influencers on various social media platforms. You know, I'm on LinkedIn most, a little bit Facebook, little Instagram for personal stuff. - I don't touch TikTok or Snapchat or whatever other things that I'm sure there's others. I just don't want to contribute to people who are important that are really not, importantly, just have good algorithm, or something like that. That's not to say that they're not good people. I'm sure they're very good people, but it's a very important thing. It frustrates me when hardworking people put in years, years, years in someone shows up with a cute face and a camera phone overnight success. And where I'm going is, these are the people telling us what to buy. And I can sort of eat my own words there that these are not health professionals giving us advice. But nor was the news during the pandemic. These are, I remember when news was Peter Jenner and Ted Coppel reading what happened, not their opinions on what happens. It switched to this sort of, everything's, you know, fantasy. Yeah, it's like out of the, you're not experts. Read what the experts have told us. And so it's funny that that's now shifted into social media. So to your question, what would I do with all this money? I wouldn't pay a social media influencers to hold up a product and say, here's what to buy it. But the fact is that might be super effective if our brands would say, here's our product. This is why you should take it. And here's the quality that we put in to make sure it is, in fact, what it says it is. And we'll, you know, be careful about saying effective. But if, you know, if you confirm that it is what it is, you confirm that the quality is such and you confirm that it's free of, you know, any pesticides and metals and what it's not supposed to be there, you're sort of indicating quality. I would tell our industry to double down on sharing surveys, on changing their website. The customers can look up a lot of numbers because they think this stuff's not real. They think it's not tested. They think it's not good. And they can very quickly find out if a brand was so inclined to have a look up table on a website to show the surveys. I'm going to circle back. This is data that they already paid for. These brands already have the surveys. They are, or they should, right? They should. All we need to do is paste in web developer, which is now basically AI to make the website so you can look up these things. So that's where my money would go. I wouldn't pay social media influencers to brag about a thing because these are just normal people who've got some algorithms attention. They're not allowed to. Well, and you know, you make a good point to just in terms of building up that sort of, I mean, it's important to create this sort of message of safety, I think. I mean, when you look at what happened in Japan as an example, I mean, God forbid something like that would happen here with the Red East rice, you know, Kobayashi, you know, when and if that were to happen, even on a smaller scale, you certainly want in place an overarching message that for the most part, there's this tremendous, you know, safety record because it's not you don't want a disaster like that to suddenly define, you know, everything, right? And so people are only thinking about the safety of it when that safety has been called into question. Exactly. I want them thinking about it in advance of that, right? So it's, it's all, to me, it's all marketing, it's all through education and the story's already been written. These companies, the best of our industry have this story. It's in a, it's in a drawer of a mid-level quality control professional and it's goal, it's a gold mine waiting to be taken out and compared to the other brands who may not be able to say that, right? And this game of, you know, like what are the, you know, the marketing differentiators in this industry? We can't say our products work more than anyone else's products. So it's branding, it's logos, it's celebrity endorsements, it's regenerative agriculture, it's organic, fair trade, all these are really important valuable propositions, but there's another one, it's quality. And there's not a lot of brands and that's the most important thing is quality because that infers efficacy, which we can't say, you know, the question is that. And certainly the brands who, you know, look, they're, I mean, we know there are a lot of, you know, some companies that maybe don't fall as squarely into the quality bucket as others, but the ones that do pay to your point for the research, do pay for the certification, do pay for the testing. Yeah, you're paying all this money, you might as well, you know, have the ROI realized with regard to that as a value proposition in your branding. I playfully play around with our finance partner that will be like for brands to take the, look at the PNL and see the costs that they spend to have those pesky little labs test all their stuff. Right. In a cost of doing business and move it into marketing campaign, right? And the marketing people will be like, whoa, that's our budget. No, don't give them a bigger budget. Start talking about that. Like, early somehow, twist that so it's not a cost. It's an asset because the quality is an asset and proof of quality is an enormous asset that is just waiting to be unveiled. Words of wisdom around a really, a really intriguing and valid, I think, point about marketing, quality and safety for our industry. Thank you very much for joining us today. Alon is always a pleasure. My pleasure, Jeff, thank you. Appreciate it. Okay. Take care.