All-One-Dollar Supplements

All-One-Dollar Supplements
by Loren Israelsen

Last week I stopped at the local dollar store looking for a deal. What I found was an endcap display offering Ginkgo biloba extract, glucosamine, garlic, St. John’s wort, multi-vitamins and much more for $1 a bottle. That’s right—$1 a bottle. I scrutinized the labels. The Supplement Facts Boxes said “These products contain standardized extracts at the preferred ratios,” and the label copy was typical of what you would find at better health food stores. But, like most consumers, when I opened up the bottles and looked at the pills, I had no idea if what I was looking at was the real deal. Unfortunately, this is just the tip of a far bigger iceberg that pervades today’s supplement industry, i.e., confusion about price, quality and the true health benefits consumers are so eagerly looking for.

There is no other consumer product category that has a 10-fold retail price variance. Various brands of milk are not offered at prices ranging from $0.50 to $5.00 a carton. Nor are loaves of bread sold at prices from $2 to $20.Yet, this enormous price variance is typical within the supplement sector. What are consumers to believe? Perhaps they are beginning to believe that dietary supplements indeed are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or anybody else, and that there are no GMPs (good manufacturing practices) or product quality standards. Is a very recent Seattle Times article correct when it calls dietary supplements the “wild, wild west of the pharmaceutical industry”? How else can you explain the All-One-Dollar phenomenon?

The industry continues to wait for FDA to issue a final GMP regulation. No one should take comfort that FDA’s political travails seem to be bigger than our own at the moment, with the resignation of Commissioner Lester Crawford and other top FDA officials, as well as accusations of sloppy drug safety review work. It is not a happy day for natural health consumers when the credibility of the supplement industry and FDA are at all-time lows. Having sunk to the one-dollar level, it is time to invoke the Harry Truman standard, “The buck stops here”. (Pun intended.)

The fact is, high quality research and rigorous manufacturing come at considerable costs. These costs are not simply raw materials, administrative overheads, profit and distribution margins, but include investments in analytical method development, third party certification, organic and good agricultural practices, robust inspection and auditing of suppliers, and finding and using the most competent contract analytical lab possible.

As 2006 quickly approaches, dietary supplement companies should review their upcoming operating budgets and make provisions for the following:

• Vendor visits and audits.
• Contract analytical lab visits and audits.
• Certificate of analysis modifications for specificity and transparency.
• Third party certification.
• Heavy metal testing.
• Herbicide and pesticide testing.
• Analytical method development.

There is one more change to consider. Move the purchasing department compensation and incentives away from raw material price reductions and towards measurable improvement of ingredient quality as a core incentive. Obviously this cannot be done unless the company has the expertise and technical tools to measure product quality. It is an unpleasant truth that many buyers don’t know black cohosh root from canvas, but they do know how to say, “Your competitor is 30-percent less than you.” By and large, buyers are doing just what they were told to do. That is the problem. If I found out that the companies making the foods, medicines, cars, appliances used by my family were cutting corners on quality and safety, they would lose my business immediately. I believe the majority of people in our industry feel the same. This just begs the question: why would we do anything to jeopardize our relationship to our consumer?

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