15.07.10
Nutrition Business Journal, the leading nutrition industry publication in North America, offering unbiased and extensively researched strategic information, featured Ascenta in the July issue in a spotlight article on traceability. The article showcased Pure Check as an industry-leading program that addresses consumer concerns regarding the purity and potency of their supplements. Ascenta is the first omega-3 manufacturer to provide this level of reassurance to consumers. Read an excerpt from the article...
Meeting Your Herbs, and Your Fish Oil Too
As supply quality issues grow,
Gaia Herbs and Ascenta Health bring sophisticated traceability tools online to assuage consumer, retailer concerns
In testimony before the U.S. Senate this May, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published the results of its investigation into herbal dietary supplements. By focusing on products often targeted to elderly consumers—ginseng, garlic and ginkgo biloba—the GAO hoped to expose some of the deceptive sales tactics at play in retail aisles across the country, as well as test the efficacy and safety of the supplements in question. Through its investigation, the GAO found trace levels of heavy metal toxins, including lead and mercury, in 37 of the 40 supplements tested, though no single product tested by the GAO reached levels significant enough to pose an immediate health hazard.
Regardless of those findings and the actual scientific value of demonstrating soil-level toxicities in soil-grown products, the GAO report—and subsequent media and Congressional attention paid to it—once again raises important ingredient quality and traceability questions for the dietary supplement industry...
Ascenta: ‘Let Us Show You’
Of course, traceability is not just important for garlic and schisandra. Fish oil supplements—which generated $976 million in sales in 2009, according to NBJ research—carry their own quality concerns for consumers, who are being bombarded with messages about the potential toxicity and oxidation associated with fish oil. Ascenta Health—based in Nova Scotia and maker of NutraSea, Canada’s leading fish oil brand—has developed its own web-based traceability tool called Pure Check to assuage those concerns.
With Pure Check, Ascenta provides real-time access to independent, third-party testing for every batch of product it makes, something Rene LeClerc, vice president of sales, believes is unique to the category. "People can’t believe that we are this transparent, putting everything out there for our competitors to see and for our consumers to see," said LeClerc. "Pure Check is simply a philosophical belief that we make a high-quality product, and we believe it’s the best product on the market. We’re going to show you that it is what we say it is."
The company organizes its quality control data into three buckets: label claim, oxidation and purity. With label claim, Ascenta provides strength representations of EPA and DHA, and the data often exceed dosages marketed on the bottle. Oxidation tests measure the freshness of the product and the care with which it was manufactured, reporting compound levels of peroxides, and value levels of p-anisidine and totox. The company measures these results against the Council for Responible Nutrition’s (CRN’s) maximum limits, as set by its Voluntary Monograph on Long Chain Omega-3s. Purity tests speak to toxicity and contamination by measuring dioxins and furans, PCBs and dioxin-like PCBs (such has lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic). Again, these values should compare favorably to maximum limits set by CRN or the World Health Organization.
The Pure Check platform launched in June 2007 and is now front-and-center on Ascenta’s website. It features heavily in all of the company’s packaging, marketing materials and advertising. Tests results are conveyed online in a consumer-friendly format, with succinct explanations of the more arcane terminology involved and bar graphs to visually demonstrate the company’s commitment to ingredient quality. Ascenta is able to present this data because the company makes its own product—something many large retail brands cannot match because they co-pack ingredients from different suppliers.
LeClerc sees Pure Check as the primary way for Ascenta to distinguish itself in the crowded and competitive U.S. market for fish oil supplements. "I don’t have one batch of product in the marketplace anywhere where you cannot get the third-party report for that batch on our website. That is by far the most powerful point of difference for our line," said LeClerc. With 45% of the Canadian health food channel already in its pocket, cracking the U.S. market is a top priority. "It’s a special time for us in the U.S.," noted LeClerc, who described the company’s growth prospects as "sipping from a firehose of opportunity." When he speaks to buyers inundated with me-too fish oil products, LeClerc said that he hears a uniformly positive response to his company’s clear and impactful approach to quality. "Pure Check is a breath of fresh air," he said. "Buyers tell me, ‘You’re driving the category. You’re building the category. You’re bringing in new consumers.’ "
When Traceability Goes Viral
According to Alexandra Orozco, Ascenta’s marketing director, more than 10% of NutraSea customers now use Pure Check to validate the quality components of their purchase. Gaia’s traceability tool is too new to provide meaningful statistics as yet; but given the marketing campaign surrounding the platform, clicking customers are very likely to come. In looking at web-based traceability as a marketing trend gaining traction across the nutrition industry, Gaia’s Greg Cumberford offered the following: "You are going to continue to see this as a trend among companies that have nothing to hide. You are beginning to see it more broadly already in organic dairy and organic beef." In fact, WhiteWave Foods plans to introduce its own traceability tool in September, allowing consumers to enter a UPC code on the company website to learn more about where and how the soybeans in their Silk soymilk were grown. Sara Loveday, marketing manager at WhiteWave, sees it as a way to tell Silk’s "crop-to-cup story."
Just how valuable might such traceability be? In compiling the research that led to Meet Your Herbs, Gaia’s branding group surveyed 2,100 retailers and consumers. "One of the most amazing numbers that came out of that survey," according to Marshall, "was that 83% said they would prefer a brand or a company that offered traceability. They wanted proof. They wanted absolute proof and certainty in what they were getting."
Several common threads link Gaia’s and Ascenta’s approaches to traceability. These include a fearlessness of transparency; an honest relationship with the consumer; a strategic business commitment to quality from the onset; early adoption of verifiable quality controls for core ingredients; and a savvy willingness to share their competitive strengths online.
Another common thread is both companies’ desire that the overall industry adopt similar approaches to transparency. After all, a rising sea lifts all ships. "We want to force a divide between the companies that want to operate this way, and those that don’t," LeClerc said. "I hope that we can bring more people to our side."
NBJ Bottom Line
Gaia Herbs’ Meet Your Herbs and Ascenta Health’s Pure Check programs put both companies in good standing for the potential fallout to come from heightened scrutiny of supplement manufacturers. Those companies that make safety and quality priorities will have to adapt less, if at all, to a stricter regulatory environment and should be rewarded for their good behavior, as transparency and disclosure increasingly lead to market differentiation.