REAL IS RARE EP 4 - Dustin Elliot with NND Nutrition

This episode is a masterclass in modern supplement innovation. Dustin Elliott, Chief Branding Officer at NNB Nutrition, joins the show to break down what actually matters right now—next-gen ingredient tech, real clinical validation, and how to ride trends without getting burned. From HydroPrime glycerol and Genius Pure Alpha-GPC to the truth behind GLP-1 hype, post-GLP-1 support, premium creatine, and the future of hydration, Dustin delivers nonstop insight. The conversation wraps with bold takes on longevity ingredients, fermentation, influencer misinformation, sweeteners, and why quality, testing, and branding are becoming the ultimate differentiators in supplements.

Thank you Dustin for taking the time to visit and share so much value for the listeners. We're excited for what's next between SL and NNB!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Chief Marketing Officer Dustin Elliott with NMB Nutrition. Good to see you, man.

SPEAKER_04 0:11

Good to see you as well. Absolutely, brother. And if I could add a twist to that, I actually changed it to Chief Branding Officer. Oh. I didn't want to get caught up with the idea of just being posting ads and looking at cost per click, you know, all the metrics that you think of with marketing. My bread and butter strategy. So branding officer, as I like to call it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Branding officer. Well, it's good to see you either which way, brother.

SPEAKER_04 0:36

Thank you so much for having me. I've been meaning to uh come out here and hang out with you guys for a long time. You know, I've known a lot of manufacturing facilities uh in my day. And um, you know, meeting you at the show, Eric from NB sort of teed me up uh who you were as a person, what you meant to the industry, what you meant to manufacturing. And uh you didn't disappoint um you know who you were as a person, uh seeing your facility, how you guys go about things, um, didn't disappoint at all. So I'm definitely happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Oh, well, thanks. It's uh very humbling. Yeah, um, kudos to our team. They they run a great operation here. But uh yeah, it's it's always great to have you know our partner vendors come out here, kick the tires, you know, kind of see behind the scenes, see what we can uh do for each other. But yeah, I mean we've been using a lot of uh NNB materials for many years. Actually, I think the first one we ever used was the grains of paradoxine material.

SPEAKER_03 1:33

Grains of Paradise, yeah. And we standardized for a paradoxine.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yes, yes, and uh that was the first time I think I've heard of NNB nutrition. Okay, and then from there it just opened up doors and we started, you know, using tons of other things over the years. And personally, one of my favorite materials from you guys has been the hydroprime. I mean the the glycerol that was a game changer. Um, you know, most people know over the years it is a very hydroscopic material and it's very hard to work with and keep you know, keep um you know, in a flowing powdered material over some time. But as soon as I started messing and dabbling around with the hydroprime, it was completely different. Yeah, we started changing all of our formulas over to using the hydroprime and never looked back or had any regrets since then. So yeah, your team did uh an amazing job on keeping that material very stable.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

Thank you, thank you. I mean, I think we all remember um if we go back far enough in the industry, the original just glycerol monosterate, even before the 65% existed. I mean, it was the best thing for looking full, looking pumped during your workout, but every container was like rock solid. You're shaking it, you're banging it against your fist, trying to get it going. Then it just sort of disappeared from the industry entirely. Some raw material vendors bring it back at 65%. It's a little bit better, still poses issues. And um, you know, I've been with NMB for a year and nine months, so it was already rocking and rolling when I first came in. And I was seeing some of the brands that you guys worked with, they went from we love glycerol, but can't use much of it or need to use it in a liquid, to just making a tub of it and selling. Like that was if you had told me 10 years ago that that would happen one day with glycerol, I wouldn't have believed you.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Yeah, and uh and back in the day when it was just the standard glycerol, it was very granular. People would always complain, what are these little white specks on our product? It's not dissolving fully. I'm like, that's the glycerol. Yeah, but yeah, then over time the 65% material started coming out, and you know, it was working good, but again, it was you know, if it don't uh they don't clump, it don't pump. That's what people used to say. I remember that phrase, yeah. But I and I I had heard her hydroprime for a while, and I just kind of stayed away from it because we just started using you know other materials for a while, and then finally I said, you know what, let's let's try it out. So I talked to my RD team, we put some stuff together, we actually started doing stability on it right away, and everything was holding stable. And yeah, after that it was uh a game changer. So yeah, you guys did a great job with that. But NB is known for that. You guys are known for developing certain technologies on keeping materials stable, like uh your alpha GPC. Yeah, that material is great, it is a great material, uh Genius Pure. And that is, you know, everyone knows that alpha GPC can become hydroscopic, it could be difficult to work with in certain capsule formulas, it could turn into sludge over time if not used properly or manufactured properly. But you guys nailed it out of the park with uh the genius peer. So um, yeah, kudos to you guys. What uh what great information can you share with us with uh Genius Pure?

SPEAKER_04 4:43

Well, that one was a surprise for me too. So again, first coming in, I see that we're carrying alpha GPC at 90% and 99%. My first assumption is this has gotta just be for beverage, right? You need to find some fancy way to ship this thing across seas, and then once you do, you gotta mix it uh, you know, right away. That's what I'm thinking, right? That it's a gimmick. I'm learning more about it. You know, we have a polymer technology that we use for all of our non-hygroscopic ingredients, reduces the amount of filler, you could say, necessary to buffer or to, you know, make an ingredient less hygroscopic, make it more resistant to water. So the competitors out there, you see, for them to maintain stability, we all know that they're at 50%, the material's half and half. So for us to even get to 90% is amazing. But on top of that, uh, a big factor in our industry is everybody moving away from soy. So on top of doing 90%, we did it soy free. So for the longest time before me, and then during the beginning of my tenure with NB, the great thing about this material that we started calling Genius Pure was the fact that it was non-hygroscopic, soy free. That was great. Made it like, you know, kind of like a B tier alpha GPC on the market as like an alternative if you were looking to use higher dosages. That was sort of like our niche. You want to use a really high dose, this is the alpha GPC you use. The game changer for it, human clinical study, you know, uh close to 30 participants, young 20-something-year-old individuals who were trained. Now, this was interesting because this demographic was different than any other choline ingredient on the market. You have, you know, the CDP choline, you've got older choline bitartrate studies, decades old, you've got other alpha GPC studies, older individuals typically suffering from cognitive decline, four to six weeks of continuous use. Now, what's tricky about this, on top of all that, is typically you don't want your ingredient or your claims to be associated with someone in a disease state. And a lot of these choline ingredients on the market were being studied in people with Alzheimer's. So that alone makes some of the claims a little bit tricky. So where we went different was is because we had a more concentrated alpha GPC, because we wanted to differentiate it from all these other choline ingredients in the market, pretty much every energy drink pre-workout, almost all of them, secondary to caffeine at this point, have some choline ingredient in there. So if the use occasion is one serving and you're expecting a result, it doesn't make sense to use a material that is researched over four to six weeks. So we do this human clinical study, you know, 20-something people, 20-year-olds, trained, single use, and we use what's called a stroop test. It's a cognitive function test, one of the top you know standard cognitive function tests that you would use to determine factors of uh memory, um, problem solving, mental acuity, what all the things that we would lump under focus as a claim. So the overreaching idea here for this stroop test is focus. We do this test and we get a 108% average increase score across the board. So that is equating to doubling your focus, and this is within that 30 minute to one hour time frame. So, in addition to the fact that our alpha GPC has more use cases because it's less hygroscopic, in addition to the fact that at the 350 milligram dose, you're basically using double the active alpha GPC versus using a competitor that's at 50%. Now you're talking about having a claim, a published human clinical that was run, by the way, by the president of the ISSN to add credibility to this. So now you have this claim that you can now use on products. And what is the importance of this? Well, it's being used in pre-workouts, it's being used in energy drink, it's being used in all the things that a trained 20-something year old would expect a result with one serving. And we are the only choline ingredient that has that claim. So we have the functionality and the ability to deliver in multiple formats with the ingredient, but now on top of that, we have you know industry-leading claim to go with it. So now it's best of both worlds as an ingredient.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Amazing, amazing. Well, yeah, thanks for the information. It's like I said, it's a great product. We use it in a number of uh different finished goods, and we get nothing but you know positive results and comments from our customers from it. So yeah, you guys did a great, great job on that. So outside the genius peer, you know, there's a lot of trends going on these days, you know, GLP1 being one of them. Everyone's working on some type of GLP one formula. What uh what kind of materials do you you guys carry that you would suggest using to help utilize those claims?

SPEAKER_04 9:31

Yeah. So in the early days of the GLP one rat race, I think what everybody wanted was to have a natural GLP one alternative because we can see the sort of the degradation, the top-line sales of the category with everybody turning towards pharmaceutical solutions for weight management. So the first thing the industry wants to do is okay, we want to have these claims on our products. And so everybody is finding some way to squeeze out or justify some GLP1 claim on their product. Now you have, you know, the Kardashians with their lawsuit over an ingredient they used that showed a 13% increase in GLP 1, but this 13% spike in the study, it was temporary. A GLP1 drug is exponentially more GLP1 levels and it's sustained over time. So to try to put a GLP1 claim on your product, although it may help to support changes in GLP1, when you know that you're trying to draw on everybody's association with the GLP1 drug, at any extent it's very misleading. And that's where this lawsuit came from. People see GLP1 on a product, they're associating it with a drug, but really all you're delivering is a temporary spike in GLP1 that will not deliver the same results as the drug. So where we're headed is you know, berberine is an ingredient that has research to show that it supports GLP1, amongst, of course, supporting healthy blood sugar levels via AMPK. So berberine, top ingredient for blood sugar, top ingredient, you know, in terms of being a natural ingredient for supporting GLP1. And it has to convert first to dehydroberberine in the intestines to be absorbed. There's a conversion process. Berberine, high dosage, 1500 milligrams a day, upset stomach, side effects associated with, you know, uh a power that a powder, you know, that'll have like color issues. So as N and B does with any ingredient, we find out what an ingredient converts to, or we find out what the active constituent is in an ingredient, and we make just that. Automatically, that means a lower dosage, automatically that means greater absorption. So we just started making dehydroberberine. So instead of 1500 milligrams a day, you're talking 200 at max 400 milligrams a day that you need. But it's not even equivalency, right? It's not even 200 milligrams, 400 milligrams to equate to 1500 milligrams. A 100 milligram dose of dehydroberberine increases blood levels of berberine five times more than berberine at 500 milligrams. A 200 milligram dose of dehydroberberine increases blood levels of berberine in the blood 20 times more than a 500 milligram dose. So we're not even talking about equivalency to berberine at this point, we're talking about exponential potency, which is something that N and B sort of hangs its hat on for all of our innovative ingredients. So now going back to your question with GOP1s, how are we approaching it? Well, we have this ingredient, knowing that it increases berberine in the blood far more than berberine alone, knowing that berberine is associated with GOP1 levels, the path that we're going with it, and we have human clinical studies ongoing right now for weight management, for blood sugar control, looking at the GLP1 response to food. But from a regulatory standpoint, what we're working on is instead of saying that this is a natural GLP 1 replacement, which is what a lot of people are looking for, which is what the FDA is going to come down on a lot of people for at some point.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

You know it.

SPEAKER_04 13:04

We're talking about okay, six percent of the population is using a GLP 1 drug. That is huge, right? Six? Six percent. That means you get 20 people in a room, one of them might be on a GLP 1 drug. That is a huge number. But over 80% of these people stop using the drug in less than one year. Either due to doctor stoppage, they reached their their weight loss goals, they've lost too much muscle, or they start having gastrointestinal issues that outweigh the benefits. So people are trying to perceive on the supplement side that the market they should be going after is trying to take a piece of the GLP1 pie because it's so big. But they're not going to be able to do it with supplements and they're gonna be doing it facing massive repercussions from a legal standpoint. Where people need to be looking is okay, yes, a large percentage of the population is using these drugs, but it's for less than a year, right? They have their whole lives after for you to target them. So the lucrative window for the supplement industry isn't trying to convince somebody not to use a drug that is definitely going to cause them to lose weight and try to offer some natural alternative that won't offer the same results. The answer is target them after their GLP 1 story is finished, and they're wondering what's next. How do I maintain this weight loss? How do I keep eating so few calories? Yes, GLP 1 uh through digestion, you know, gut brain access, um, it'll lower their desire for sweets and things like that going forward. It'll help them with their patterns of eating, but still the weight gain rebound is there, it's real, and it's out of control for some people. So the answer is what's next for them. So because we have an ingredient that controls appetite, that controls blood sugar, that can cause temporary spikes in GLP1, our answer is, and we've worked with our regulatory so that you can say this, saying things like post-GLP1 window, GLP1 recovery, post-GLP1 support, right? You're not implying that the ingredient is a substitute for GLP1. What you're saying is that if you were using GLP1, this is the next phase of your journey. And so, with that, that's what we're gonna target the hydroberberine with is we're gonna target post-GLP one. And so we're still gonna have a huge piece of the pie, but we're not gonna try to steal share from GLP1. We're just gonna be the next phase in that customer's journey.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Wow. That is a lot of information.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Yeah, and on top of that, we have a lot of doctor brands and weight loss clinics, and that's exactly what they've been doing, right? They've been using it as a post. So, you know, they're actually prescribing the GLP1 drug, and then after that, they're giving them meal plans and then the supplements. And I mean, we've seen some of these brands really take off, and you know, a lot of them they use the the glucovantage and all those ingredients. So, yeah, it's been it's been good, and I've been seeing the the reorders and it's only getting better, so it's working.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Yeah, we use it for a number of accounts, and and honestly, uh the material is really easy to work with. Most people that are trying to cram 1500 milligrams of standard berberine hydrochloride in the capsules, it's tough. It's like fitting, you know, five pounds of shit in a two-pound bag. It's it's tough. It's breaking machinery. Uh, yeah, it it's a nightmare. So we we always try to use gluco advantage as much as we can, opposed to using the generic, but it also depends on you know everyone's price ranges and yeah, you know, their demographic and all that stuff. So it just really depends on a on a case-by-case basis. But yeah, it's uh again, kudos. You guys did a great job on that material. So everyone knows it works very, very well.

SPEAKER_04 16:56

So yeah, thank you, thank you. Credit going to Sean Wells, who's behind you know the vast majority of the ingredients that we've come up with. So um, you know, uh shout out to his brain here for uh coming up with that ingredient. Yeah, Sean actually had a uh another major podcast to go to uh up in Northern California. So he's actually in Sacramento uh doing a podcast with an influencer, but uh bigger than real is rare.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_04 17:22

Well, more like uh diversifying, you know, um you know divide and conquer. It's all good.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Next time he's in town. Yeah, for sure. He's a busy man. I know. I know, I know. Okay, excellent. Well, appreciate that. So, you know, what else do you see that's you know growing right now? All these different, you know, commodities, all the different trends. You guys have yeah, you guys have been growing your portfolio, portfolio month after month after month. Um, what's what's the next big thing for NNB right now?

SPEAKER_04 17:50

Um, a couple of big things on the horizon. I think you mentioned commodities. So we all know creatine's the biggest commodity in the game. And uh there are a lot of people out there right now who are trying to, well, not even right now. I would say for like a decade, they've been trying to, you know, what's better than creatine monohydrate. I don't think anybody has like a clear answer at this point. We have options for greater solubility, so trying to lower the dosage on creatine monohydrate, and those seem to have some shown some forms of success. But for the most part, you know, I don't really see anybody doing better than creatine monohydrate, you know, at the at the present time. So for us, you know, when it comes to commodities and our reputation for modifying commodities, making commodities better, we have this uh sub-segment of the industry that is looking for greater quality. The issue with any commodity item, you know, most of our materials are coming from China and India. Quality starts to come into question. You have a large portion of the industry that cares less about quality as long as it passes minimum safety standards of testing and it has the right price point. And then you have certain parts of the industry, practitioner brands, people are selling to athletes, um, you know, especially in Europe in particular, where the EFSA, EFSA, has um some higher standards for materials, you have people looking for higher quality materials in terms of testing and standards. And so that's where you get this uh pharmaceutical grade creatine that's become popular within the industry. And, you know, even though it's not going to take over creatine sales anytime soon, you've seen sort of like the popularity, depending on who the brand is, of using this type of creatine and having the trademark being used because it speaks to the quality of the product. Well, for us, with our technology manufacturing out of China, we're able to take creatine material and we're able to lower the levels of DCD, DHT, creatinine. These are typically common toxins associated with creatine. And you know, toxicity is really like in the dose. So for a lot of creatines, especially with the existing safety research that we have, there's not necessarily been sugar. Shown a toxicity issue that's a short-term or a long-term issue with creatine. But with that being said, you still have the higher clientele and you have some of the premium products that still want to go even lower when it comes to these toxicity levels. And so that's where this pharmaceutical grade creatine has become popular. Well, we find that we can have lower levels of these toxins, still have the lowest levels of heavy metals in a creatine, but do it for half the price of our competitors. So now for these practitioner brands, now for these like pharmaceutical level brands, now even for European brands that want to meet these standards but are having issues with supply or don't want to pay, you know,$20 a kilo for creatine. Now they have this happy medium where yeah, we're more expensive than commodity creatine, and we still sell commodity creatine at a low price to customers. But now we have a creatine where they can slap a logo on it. They could say lowest levels of impurity ever, which is true. We have third-party testing on it to prove that, and they're gonna do it at half the price of uh what you could buy premium creatine before. So that's gonna be huge for a market that just seems to be growing exponentially.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

And the name of this creatine is Purist Creatine. Yeah. Yes. Uh I've actually messed around with the purest creatine myself, and it's it's great, but I don't have any con any complaints. And like you said, it's it's more than your standard generic material, yeah, but a lot less than some of the uh trademark material that's out there. So, like you said, if you want something that's you know, where you have clinical studies, you have testing, you have logos, you know, a good patent ingredient, yeah, purest creatine, I think is gonna be one of the hot ones for people to look out for here very, very soon.

SPEAKER_04 21:48

One thing that happened um that I didn't anticipate is that when going with this higher quality standard, the solubility of the the creatine, how fine it is as a powder, yeah, um, is just so much higher, and it just mixes so much easier. And then when people ask me about like the situation with creatine, it's like, well, do you think current creatine is unsafe? And I'm like, no, it's not. You know, I buy basic creatine already. But what I think is is as the demand increases, a lot of these toxins and these byproducts like creatinine, they result as they come as the result of trying to speed up manufacturing due to heat, of using, you know, manufacturing practices that use water that's unfiltered because that adds cost. Um, these are some of the things that result in higher heavy metals and toxins, trying to move faster and uh lowering the um the quality or the filtration of the equipment being used. And so as creatine demand rises, the question, and I don't know the answer to this, and no one does, which I think lends to the importance of pure creatine in the marketplace, is as demand continues to grow, that incentivizes manufacturers overseas to make it cheaper and faster. So will the safety studies that we have on creatine that are several years old, can those be applied to creatine three, four years from now? You know? Um the answer might be no, you know, because what lots were being used in those safety studies, right? And what will creatine manufacturing look like a few years in the future when people are trying to make it cheaper and faster? So because I don't know the answers to that, nothing may go wrong, but it could lend to the importance of the uh the people who are older and more concerned for their health paying a little bit more for their creatine.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

Interesting. And and nowadays, too, with costs obviously place being a big factor, you know, the standard has always been five grams of creatine. Yeah. We'll do it 30 servings, 60 servings, 100 servings, you know, people are doing in stick packs, people are doing in beverages, but now there's all these clinical studies that are coming out where people are testing out 10 grams per serving or per day or 20 grams per day. I mean, that's just, you know, obviously it's gonna suck up a lot more allocated material, but it's also gonna drive the cost up. So when people are looking to get a good quality product and they want to use that higher dose, you're definitely gonna want to find the right product at the right price instead of some of the higher patent materials that are out there currently. So yeah, I think you guys hit the nail on the hammer. Um, the price is is very reasonable. And uh yeah, we're we actually already have I don't even know, 10,000, 15,000 kilos on order waiting for the material to to arrive here very shortly. So we're excited. And only some of that is allocated. So we we do anticipate there's gonna be a lot of orders coming, and I'm actually working with your team to put in some additional blankets for some future runs here too. So yeah, we're excited for that.

SPEAKER_04 24:41

Nice. Uh as we are as well, you know, we're already starting to see that compared to what we're bringing into the country, compared to some of the um, I guess you could say, customers who are anticipating using this material, we're definitely seeing um uh a gap that we're definitely prepared to fill. So we're excited for it. Very cool, very cool.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Now, you are in town because of the big BevNet show, right?

SPEAKER_04 25:03

Yes, just came from BevNet from yesterday.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Did did uh was creatine a huge, you know, was it spoken about very often during the show? Is anybody talking about it right now?

SPEAKER_04 25:14

Um at BevNet, no. Uh and the there's sort of a reason for that. You know, we are now seeing creatine that is being pitched as being water soluble. But even then, you know, when you look at the stability, there's degradation over time requiring a high overage.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:28

And there were some energy drink brands that I saw at BevNet, you know, some startup brands, they were big fans of creatine. They used creatine in their product, but they have concerns over the testing of their product, right? Three, four months from now, will there be any creatine to test for in their product? So I think creatine's a concern because even when you look at beverage grade creatine that's more stable, the question is if most major distributors want 12 months of shelf life, you're probably gonna have to put overages in your creatine. That's it's gonna affect the water solubility of your product, and that could be an issue. So uh creatine overreaching for the industry, still a super hot trend. Creatine for beverage, not being mentioned as much because a lot of manufacturers and flavor houses and all these beverage uh incubator companies and these brokers that deal with these small brands don't want to touch it. And a lot oftentimes these small brands they have an idea of what they want, but they don't necessarily know how to execute it, so they're not gonna bring up creatine. The manufacturers and flavor houses aren't gonna bring up creatine. And so even though creatine's the most research and probably the most efficacious ergogenic aid in the industry on the planet, in the beverage industry, not mentioned that much.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Interesting. Interesting. And to backtrack a little bit, I I don't want to come out here and acting like I'm bashing all the other trademark creatine monohydrate companies and brands because I'm not, you know, they're they have you know great studies, the material's great, the quality is amazing. But as I was saying, you know, in this day and age, you know, price is is a huge thing right now, and everybody wants you know high quality at a cheaper price, and it's hard to do. And I think you guys definitely did that very well. So again, not bashing all the other creatine suppliers out there, but yeah, the purest creatine I think is going to be a big home run for you guys. So you better keep a couple containers paved for us. We definitely will, definitely will. But yeah, so uh moving on to some other other items, you know. Again, uh there's a lot of trends these days, but uh one that just seems to only get higher and higher out there is is the hydration error. You know, there's there's everything is hydration now. I mean, you're mixing creatine with hydration, you know, focus with hydration, weight loss with hydration, detox and hydration. It's it's it's all over the place right now. You guys, have you already launched your hydration product? I know that we were working on the electroprime. Okay, I I didn't want to say anything yet because I wasn't sure if it's already been out there or not. But yeah, so we are, you know, as as I had mentioned earlier, we were working on a collaboration with NNB. Yes, with um with that material, and that could also be another home run. You know, it normally when you see something like that with everything that's in there, I I was a little little skeptical at first, like how is this gonna taste? Are we gonna be able to mass this right? But you know what? It was a home run. We we sent the samples out to your team. I think they they approved them right there on the spot, and that's definitely gonna be one for people to keep an eye on soon. But yeah, uh, we're working on sticks with your team right now, and I I believe though we'll be ready for the next uh big trade show coming up soon. Yeah, expous. Yeah, expous.

SPEAKER_04 28:46

I was surprised about how good they tasted on the first past being naturally flavored. I mean, the uh the glycerol is like slightly sweet, you know, a bit neutral. So I think that definitely helped with things. And um yeah, also the the glycerol added sort of like this smoothness to it, you know, that's hard to describe that I really, really liked for the mouthfeel for the overall flavor. Yeah, so yeah, we were the first past alone was really great with that one. I really liked it.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Great. So it's it's glycerol plus a combination of all the different salts, correct?

SPEAKER_04 29:15

Yeah, of all the electrolytes. So what we're doing there is with the electroprime, we do have a trademark sort of like standard template version of it, but then also us being able to do pre-blends for customers, customers can customize the ratios however they like. Oh, okay. So with the electroprime, what we're anticipating once we get it rolling out, maybe not everybody will use electroprime per se. It may be hydration plus the hydroprime, the glycerol that's within the electroprime. But for the most part, the electroprime, regardless of whether or not, you know, how it shakes out with whether or not people use the ratios that we are providing with it, we're using the World Health Organization two to one ratio of sodium to potassium. Whether or not people want to use that, it still forms the template for you know what we feel is going to be efficacious to the consumer, even though we can manipulate the electrolytes however they want. They already have in mind exactly what ratios and what amounts they want. Because really, what it is with this one and why we're excited about it is you know, Liquid IV was one of the brands that was at the forefront of this re-emergence of the importance of hydration. And they did it, you know, with the 13, 14 grams of sugar per serving. Now you have brands out there trying to bash the sugar content per serving, but it's a double-edged sword, right? It is, it is. On the one hand, you have people who are like, oh, I don't want to use that amount of sugar per serving. On the other hand, this rapid hydration claim they have is because the sugar uh helps to pull water and drive osmotic pressure and helps to drive water into the cells, which is behind the concept of hydrating faster with a liquid IV versus just a high sodium, zero sugar electrolyte product. So there is some credibility for the use of sugar there. So people want to go sugar-free, but all the sugar-free brands are saying that liquid IV isn't healthy because it has sugar in there. But what the sugar-free brands aren't telling you is that they can't hydrate as quickly as liquid IV can because they don't have something to cause the osmotic pressure to drive fluid into the cells. So both of them, you know, on one has sugar, the other one is saying the one with sugar is bad, but they're not quite telling the whole truth. The beauty of electroprime and the use of the glycerol in electroprime is we've known, uh, at least on the industry side, on the science side for a long time, that glycerol drives osmotic pressure. A big part of that pump that glycerol is causing during the workout isn't just blood volume like with citrulline or nitric oxide ingredients, it's fluid being drawn to the muscles similar to like the way creatine fills you out. So that's been known about glycerol from a research perspective, but nobody has been using glycerol with electrolytes. Nobody would dare use glycerol in packets because the tooling to fill the packet would just turn that thing to glue. So the advantage here is that when it comes to low sugar or sugar-free electrolytes, the glycerol provides the tool required to drive osmotic pressure as if it was a high sugar electrolyte product to cause rapid hydration, even what we would call hyperhydration, to draw more fluid into the cells. And we've seen with the glycerol research, you retain more fluid for longer. You know, the incidence of urination is lower because you're the fluid is not passing through your system, it's maintaining hydration and within the body, it's staying within the body longer. And you can apply this to electrolytes, and you can have a superior electrolyte product without the use of or with a lower use of sugar being associated with it. So that's the huge thing behind. I mean, you talked about how much you liked hydroprime earlier. That's the bread and butter that makes electroprime superior, is hydroprime is in there with these electrolytes.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

It's brilliant. You took uh two children and fuse them into one. Basically.

SPEAKER_04 33:03

And uh that's what we're gonna be launching with you guys um, you know, at a show early in uh 2026. Yeah, we're gonna have packets of that with tyrosine. That'll help with, you know, everybody's at a conference, everybody's out drinking, everybody's out staying out late. So uh not only does hydration help to support the recovery from a night out um and help to support someone in the morning in terms of like energy and getting them going, but the tyrosine with supporting dopamine will help with that as well. So that's gonna be a really cool combination we'll launch with you guys at a future show.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

Heck yeah, looking forward to that. And and you just mentioned you know tyrosine. You know, you guys carry a product called pure tyrosine? Tyropure. Tyropure, excuse me. I apologize. Um, I haven't got the opportunity to actually try it myself. I know we use it in a couple of products, but what what makes it so superior?

SPEAKER_04 33:50

Yeah, so with the Tyro Pure, we're not necessarily going for you know superiority, similar to the creatine. Superiority is not necessarily in the efficacy. One of the things that we've been big on at NB and that China has big on as a whole, that isn't talked about enough, right? Because a lot of people have the 1990s perception of China, like manufacture at all costs, pollute the air, melamine, extended, yeah, extended labor hours. But fermentation is getting huge in China. And fermentation, you know, equates to sustainability. You know, instead of trying to harvest plants from whatever country to make this ingredient, fermentation means that you're getting yeast and microbes causing reactions in a lab and you're coming up with the ingredient. That's as sustainable as sustainability gets, right? You know, in terms of the environment, in terms of the amount of land that you need, because you don't need land and you're not harming the environment, and the process is natural. So with the Tyro Pure, you know, you have uh solvents that are used for the starting materials that tyrosine is harvested from. And, you know, if it's tyrosine, that's you know, you've had things like duck feathers, random animal parts that these amino acids are coming from. You're applying chemicals to draw this amino acid out of these animal parts, and that's how you get your amino acid. Well, with the fermentation, we're talking about a pure uh starting material without the solvents, without the harsh chemicals. And so that's the real difference maker with uh the Tyro Pure. And the reason why that's important, you know, we spoke about creatine earlier. Hey, yeah, we have great safety studies for creatine, but now people are talking about using 10 grams per serving. Well, with the tyrosine, you're now talking about because of the dopamine that it supports, you have brands out there that are now using two, five, you know, telling people to use 10 grams per serving ridiculous amounts. So with those higher amounts, if you can remove the chemical solvents, if you can have a natural starting material, this is a better tyrosine for using at high dosages in terms of its purity, its sustainability, but then of course its safety versus maybe some of the other tyrosines that are on the market.

SPEAKER_01 35:53

Great answers. I appreciate the info on that. Is how's the solubility on that? Is it more used for capsules or more on the powder side?

SPEAKER_04 36:02

Or you can it can be used for capsules and powders, but unfortunately the solubility isn't higher than regular tyrosine, it's about the same. So we have you know seen where we need, you know, to take extra steps, especially if it's used being used in like an RTD or something like that, uh, taking extra steps to prevent settling. So unfortunately, the solubility is the same, it's not higher. Really, the uh the differentiator is in how it's created and how natural, sustainable, and safe the process is.

SPEAKER_01 36:27

Yeah, I was just curious if it was more soluble than standard tyrosine. I mean, tyrosine is great. I love it. It works great. You get the dopamine feel, like you say. But yeah, if you're you know putting two or three grams in, you're shaking it up, you know, you're drinking it, it's fine, but you sit it down on the table, two minutes later, it just all just settles down to the bottom, and then you got to reagitate it all.

SPEAKER_04 36:47

Yeah, unfortunately, that hasn't changed much with the fermented version.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Well, can you guys fix that? Can somebody please fix that for gosh sakes? We got some people on 10 or 20 grams per serving in their in their container, and I'm like, Yeah, are you sure you want to do that?

SPEAKER_04 36:58

So far, it's been you know the standard playing with uh uh silica things for stability to uh to sort of fix that. So unfortunately there's no uh built-in fix yet, but it does speak to the accuracy of fermentation. You know, fermentation didn't change the molecular makeup of the ingredient, it's still tyrosine, still functions as tyrosine. So um, you know, blessing and curses is that that's a sign that it's the real deal, even though it's fermented.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Other trends right now, uh anti-aging. Yeah. Anti-aging is always a big one, spermodyne. Everyone's going with spermidine these days. But uh what kind of information do you got for that?

SPEAKER_04 37:36

That one's starting to pick up because for the longest time it was always I don't want to say theory. There was research, especially like in vitro research, you know, showing spermidine's connection to autophagy and you know the healthy recycling of cells pointing to longevity. But now we're starting to see like population data, American population data. So we have a national health institute that tracks data and surveys to track like the health of our population. They have one recently, it's only a couple years old, that shows that those who consume spermidine more in their diet have higher markers for longevity and life expectancy. So we're still waiting for that golden human clinical, which is going to be difficult. I mean, Nutri Ingredients just recently released an article the other day talking about the difficulty of longevity research because you need a huge population, you need to follow them for a long period of time, you need a lot of controls within their diet and their lifestyle, which is very difficult to do over a long period of time, and all that equates to a ton of money. I mean, easily N and B will drop three, four hundred grand for a study that's only four to six weeks. Imagine trying to do a longevity study. So there's a lot that's still up in the air in terms of um things that are definitive with spermidine. But one of the things that we're seeing is in terms of like population data, and we're seeing this with uh ergothionine as well, that in population data, populations that consume more ergothionine or more spermidine, that their life expectancy is longer. So, I mean, the one that I can remember off the top of my head for the uh ergothionine, which we sell as uh mitoprime, the population data show that like the US was consuming less of it in their diet because you get it from things like mushrooms, and uh their life expectancy was down in like the 70s, and then you looked at another country, especially we always talk about the Mediterranean diet for longevity. Well, they have higher levels of ergothionine in their diet, and they're living like 80 plus, so there's like a seven-year gap between us and them, and there are a couple of countries in between, but there was a nice upward curve between the ergothionine consumed in the diet and the country in terms of uh life expectancy. And so um, not only is that a great number to look at since we don't have a lot of human clinicals with ergothionine, it correlates to where we are with spermidine as well. Where you know the in vitro studies are saying that it improves the health of cells. You know, the animal studies are saying the same. And now we have population data showing that, hey, the more vacuum consume in your diet, the better. But um, you know, consuming it in the diet, now you can get a dosage of a couple of milligrams in these longevity products, and it's the equivalent to uh high consumption rates in the diet, so that's huge.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

That is massive. And yeah, your your material pure pyramidine? Pyramidine is what it's called. Pyridine, yeah. Very well priced. I mean, it's still very expensive. But compared to some of the others that are out there, when I first got that price months ago, I'm like, what the heck? I should have been using this thing a lot sooner. It's it's it's a big price savings. But yeah, uh, I've heard nothing but good results from that stuff. So great.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Amazing. What do you what do you want to see stop trending? What are some trends you don't want to see right now?

SPEAKER_04 40:52

I mean, it's difficult for me because with the way that preventative health is going, you do love to see it, even though the misinformation is sort of leaking in there. Um one of the things that I would love is, you know, the biohacking community has been like a huge driver of a lot of these trends, which has been amazing. But um one of the things that I would like to stop, that I'm seeing that you know the uh the FTC is starting to get on top of is um the claims that influencers are making to sort of like pedal their products and ingredients. And so, you know, we have influencers out there who are trying to slow down the influencers, like the credentialed people with the PhDs are trying to slow down the non-PHD people with their claims. Because the thing that I think sort of pisses me off the most right now is when people take things that do you could say, like, for example, like the seed oils and stuff like that. Yeah, sure, you can question the safety, you could question the source, you could say that doesn't belong in our diet, you could say that we should be seeking alternatives, but they're connecting it to a lot of things where a lot of Americans should be taking steps to improve their health even before they get to trying to eliminate seed oils and buy expensive products. I'll give you an example. Standard template for any influencer today, walk into the grocery store, walk up to common items, and say, this is killing you, this is the source of your problems. Not that Americans are sedentary and we're not moving enough, not that our caloric uh intake is exceeding what we believe it to be. Um, not that, you know, our lifestyles and you know, um, just like our our eating patterns, our movement, our lifestyles, our food choices, our food education, all of these things are killing us faster than like this one particular ingredient that's being used in a food product, right? Because even if we use like the seed oil or the high fructose corn syrup, um even when we use these examples, at the end of the day, when it comes to obesity, it's calories in, calories out. And so, yes, if you avoid these things, you can have greater blood sugar control, you know, you'll have greater satiety by choosing foods that have high fiber. But it's not necessarily that seed oil is causing you to be fat, it's the external factors around your food choices when you're choosing foods that contain seed oils versus not. And so, because they're not being 100% truthful about the connection, or maybe they're just not aware because a lot of these people don't have education credentials, what's happening is that it's making it easier for these people to sell their alternative products versus telling people to change their lifestyle and their choices. You want people to not use seed oils? Cool, but then their pitch always ends with some expensive item that's a substitute that only they have. Because to complete my earlier thought about what the standard pitch is nowadays, again, we're grinding a little bit, you show them that the common thing that they have is killing them, and that you say, I am the only person that has the solution and the secret and the answer to this, buy my thing, and then their thing is always gonna be super high margin, a little bit overpriced, you know, only can get it from them. And so that's the thing is these influencers with a big following, they have the attention of the consumer, they have the opportunity to teach them a better lifestyle, but they use it to pitch a product versus telling them, you know, these are the lifestyle changes and choices that you can make to better. And don't get me wrong, a lot of them do it, some of them still do that, but they put too they give too much credit to that um you know mysterious thing, right? Yeah. That's killing us all. They give it too much credit, more than it deserves, when accountability is the biggest issue.

SPEAKER_01 44:38

Yeah, very well said. I I know what you're what you're talking about. I see a lot of these influences going out there and just you know, putting out their two cents, and maybe, maybe some of them are right. Maybe some of them are full of shit. I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 44:49

Maybe some of them have PCs, but maybe the biggest issue is that the best lives, 60% of it have truth to it. Yeah. So when we're talking about um, you know, their credibility, I know that the first thing people are gonna say is, well, all these things they say are true, and yes, they are, but um, the best salesmen uh the best sellers of snake oil will give you a hundred percent well, you know, they'll give you all truth until the very end when they sneak in their thing. So yeah, a lot of these people know what they're talking about, and they've helped a lot of people, and people I'm sure are doing better despite buying the more expensive items because their lifestyle changes around the expensive items, but uh, you know, still there's some BS in there that just doesn't float well with me.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

Hey, and I'm I'm all about, you know, natural, clean, you know, everyone's got their own thing. Yeah. Curious on your take. What do you think of sucralose? What is your honest, honest opinion?

SPEAKER_04 45:42

Yeah. So the average weeds and seeds natural person would be like sucralose is gonna kill you. Yeah. They will also say sucralose is making you fatter. And this kind of comes back to the same thing that I was saying before is if somebody the the most difficult thing for people to accept is that two things can simultaneously be true. The pro-sucralose crowd points to the real world data that it doesn't increase insulin, you know, there's no like registered calories, and that there's you know healthy safety data for it. And then you have the people on the opposite side who will point to the sugar industry supporting some study where they give a mouse the equivalent to consuming thousands of pounds of sucralose in one sitting and it got cancer or something, and then they'll say that it's bad. I think the real smoking gun with sucralose and artificial substitutes is we don't know the long-term effects on the gut biome for non-nutritive ingredients that simulate sweetness, right? We don't know. All of our safety data, sure, safety from a standpoint of like disease and illness and things like that, but you know, the gut biome, we're still mapping it. It's like a second brain for us. We're still trying to figure out, you know, how to improve the bacteria and which bacteria within the gut have what you know um affect which specific functions. We're still having emerging science over the gut biome's effect on things like Alzheimer's in the brain and how we can prevent disease with healthier guts and how the gut changes with exercise. So we're still learning about the gut. We have these non-nutritive sweeteners, you know, we have these non-digestible sugar alcohols and things like that. We don't know what changes it causes long term to the gut. I'm not insinuating that it causes disease, but on the flip side, we don't know if long-term sucralose use has anything to do with cognitive decline or our food choices or you know how we think and feel. Like we just don't know these things. These things are so difficult to test for. So, me personally, I'll use uh I use both natural and artificial sweeteners. Um, but I do have in the back of my brain, I'm not gonna go full-on sucralose all day, every day, because I just don't know what the long-term effects are. But on the flip side, I can't listen to a weeds and seeds person talk about it because they make up the dangers of sucralose. And then on the uh educational side, you know, they'll point to all this safety data, but they oftentimes ignore nuance. Like the PhD crowd will say things like, the seed oils are fine and the sucralose is fine because of all this data. And it's like, I mostly agree with you, but there's nuance that we're not addressing here right now, right? We're not addressing how uh these things can affect our decision making and how they affect our gut biome. And so, you know, both sides are taking clear stances, and very few people are looking at the nuance.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

I like your take on that. I appreciate that. And you're never gonna make everyone happy. No. First, let's do sucraless. No, I don't want to do sucralos. I only want to do stevia. Okay, great. Let's do stevia. Oh, you know what? Stevia is bad for you now. All these claims came out. Let's just use monk fruit. It's just constantly changing and changing and changing and changing. So yeah, it just really depends at the end of the day, you know, what the consumer wants or what the brand wants in the product, you know, you know, who their narrative is, who they're directing their business towards. But you're never going to make everyone happy. Everybody always asks me my opinion. Well, if it was yours, what would you do? Well, it depends. Who's your demographic? Is it the soccer moms? Is it the bodybuilders? Is it for children? I mean, everything's different at the end of the day. A lot of the bodybuilders, they want it to taste great. They want it to taste like candy because they're chugging and chugging and chugging, and that's fine. You got the soccer moms. They want everything completely all natural, you know, no calories, gluten-free, non-GMO, tastes like candy. But yeah, every everybody's different at the end of the day. But, anyways, you're um, you know, you're a very knowledgeable guy, and I I appreciate your input, but I just thought I'd ask you that question because it comes up all the time. Is sucralose safe for me? Well, I'm not a doctor, I don't have a PhD. Shit, I barely graduated high school, but somehow was able to build build this company. But I cannot direct people specifically when they ask me questions like, is sucralose safe? I tell them, I I hear it's safe, but I can't actually give a definitive answer for it. Safe is a relative term.

SPEAKER_04 50:14

Yeah, it is toxicity is in the dose. There you go. Is lead safe for me? It's an element, it's in everything, but a certain amount will kill you, alter your brain chemistry. You know what I mean? So Oh man, you bring up that lead thing.

SPEAKER_01 50:25

I tell you, this crap comes out on the news two months ago, and all of a sudden I'm getting all these crazy text messages. Are you putting lead in our proteins?

unknown 50:35

What the fuck?

SPEAKER_01 50:37

People not understand. Nobody puts lead in your protein, it doesn't just get added specifically to your product. If anything, it's naturally occurring, you know. Uh, it's coming from cocoa, you know, you got all these troll asshole out there that are just sitting there looking for products on the shelf to just slap you with a Prop 65 lawsuit. I see it all the time. But mainly the lead, you know, it it mainly would come from a plant protein base, you know, a pea, a rice, a pumpkin, a watermelon, because it's coming from the ground. So it just really depends on how much you're using and how much you know parts per million there are in there. You just have to add it all together and you know, make sure that it's not going to pop over the 60 Prop 65 claim. But, you know, my my friends are calling my wife. Hey, does your husband have anything that is that's doesn't have any added lead into it? And I'm just like, oh my God.

SPEAKER_04 51:30

It's like, is this lead free? Well, when's the last time you Googled what your body's made of? Are you lead free?

SPEAKER_01 51:35

It's it's it's insane. And I tell people all the time go to the goddamn grocery store down the street, go grab uh uh a stem of broccoli, go have it tested. That thing has got more contaminants, got more lead than everything in our facility put together. Yeah, but who's regulating that? You could sit there and just scarf down all this raw broccoli, but you're gonna piss and moan over, you know, something that goes over, you know, the Prop 65 limit in a protein shake. I mean, the world is unbalanced. It's ridiculous. You know, we're we're sitting here trying to do the right thing and test everything and make sure that we keep everything safe and you know, safe for all of our consumers, but you have all these grocery stores that just have crap lying all over the place and nobody's doing anything about it. I don't get it. I think the FDA needs to go visit all these, you know, go to Vaughn's, go to Alderson's, go to Stater Brothers, go test all their product, and then come back and test ours. Uh, it's just just it's not a fair level playing thing.

SPEAKER_04 52:34

They do not have the manpower. Yeah. But if anybody, if a new story can be made out of it, somebody will make a new story out of it.

SPEAKER_01 52:40

They now got this AI crap that's literally creating their own prop 65 letters and sending it to these brands. And they're calling me. I'm like, look, first off, this AI system is not working properly because the goddamn label already has a Prop 65 label claim on it.

SPEAKER_03 52:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

unknown 52:59

What the fuck?

SPEAKER_01 53:00

And they don't they don't give you the results on these letters. Yep. Uh they they don't give you any of the definitive information that you would normally get from some of these trolls that actually do grab the products, test it, find out that it is above the Prop 65 claims. But I got people that that call me here and there that are getting these letters. I'm like, send it to my legal team, let us review it. And it's it's just all bullshit. It's all the exact same scripture, time after time after time, just with a different uh manufacturer's name and a different brand's name. It's ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.

SPEAKER_04 53:32

So painful process, and then it's always popping up in the news. This contains harmful amounts of lead. People start asking me about it, and I'm just like, it's in the sensitivity of the test. You have a sensitive enough, sensitive enough test, you'll find heavy metals to some extent in there. Yeah. And um unfortunately, do you not remember elementary school when it was on the periodic chart of things that are in everything?

SPEAKER_01 53:54

So exactly. Exactly. Yeah, when we first, you know, I think it was year two or three of Simpson Labs, we had this really small brand, it was 500 units, and they tried to come after us for a Prop 65 warning and uh or a letter because it it failed Prop 65. Meanwhile, it had already passed its expiration date. It was 500 units. First off, if you if you're buying 500 units and you don't sell that shit within two years, you're terrible at your job. Go out there and sell that shit. But the product was already expired. So there these trolls, they pulled this expired product off the shelf or wherever they got it from, and it it they sent the test results and it failed Prop 65. I'm like, okay, well, that's ridiculous because we had the test results. Yeah, we sent it out to three different labs, it all passed flying colors. After further review, I looked at the label and the label stated take one to two scoops per serving. Oh, okay. These fucking assholes, right? Yeah, yeah. So these assholes take two scoops. Okay, well, it was a chocolate protein, they knew exactly what they were doing, and it failed Prop 65. So I went through this nuanced freaking lawsuit, eventually ended up getting thrown out the window. But that's what these assholes do. They go out and look for stupid shit. So we have a very, very capable and qualified label review team here at Simpson Labs, and they go through everything. Nice. And we get that all the time. Well, we really want to put takes one to two, you could take one to two scoops on the label. And our team will tell them, do not do that for this exact reason. And let's say it's a pre-workout, right? Let's say it's got, I don't know, five milligrams of alpha Uhimbine or some cracked out amount, you know, 400 milligrams of caffeine. If you put take one to two scoops, and some idiot takes two scoops and he fucking downs it with a monster and has a fucking heart attack. Now everyone's looking for a lawsuit. So we want to make sure that we're telling our customers, you know, the proper way to label products so that they don't get hit with these crazy lawsuits. I mean, it's it's never ending. It's never ending.

SPEAKER_00 56:00

We get a lot of new customers that have used other manufacturers and they're like, we've never did this. And I'm like, Why you just said the labels without, you know, we check the labels before we tell them to go ahead and print it, and then when they come in, we actually check it again to make sure that sometimes they misprint it. So yeah, we go above and beyond people compliance.

SPEAKER_01 56:20

A wrong revision, they'll they'll print the wrong you know version or whatever it is, or they'll miss something. I mean, we keep detailed documentation when it comes to our label review team. As a matter of fact, we we walk by our boardroom earlier today, yeah, and it was shut. The whole room was in there doing a label review process training with some additional staff members. So, um, coincidentally, but yeah, labels is is a huge thing in our industry. So we we want to make sure, you know, our customers are being protected. We want to make sure that the company is being protective, but sometimes we'll get some of these crazy labels, and I'm like, what the fuck? Who the fuck would allow something like this in their facility? Yeah, I mean, it looks like a fucking five-year-old drew out the supplement facts table.

SPEAKER_04 57:02

It's some people are just doing it for the almighty dollar. That's where the importance of where facilities like yours are becoming more important. I feel like a lot of what we're doing in the future with the analytics and then what you're currently doing with the label review, I mean, the with the industry where the head the direction that it's headed in right now, the barrier to entry is too low for some of these people. Where these people are going into making products with no additional money for testing, with nobody to do label review, with no certificates of insurance. Like they're just thinking they could just launch something and make it. And um, if they're not coming to manufacture at a facility like yours, you know, they're headed right into trouble.

SPEAKER_01 57:39

Yeah, yeah, thank you. And and you know, that's why we built out our two million analytical laboratory. Yeah, we're testing probably 65-70% of everything ourselves in half. Everything else is you know being sent out because we're still in the middle of developing, you know, uh methodologies. We have a very large library of over, I don't know, 3,000 ingredients, I think. So it's it's a lot to take in. So our team is doing an amazing job every single day, you know, developing these new methods, and we're sending out to other labs to test and then compare it to ours and validate and quantify and qualify. It's it's very expensive, it's very tedious, it's a lot of work. But we have a great staff here that's you know taking it hands-on. And again, at the end of the day, it's to help protect our customers. Um, it's also to help save their money, you know, save money per unit price. It's helping them get their products on the shelf faster because now we're controlling the testing aspect and when it gets tested. You know, these these labs out there over the years, you know, with Amazon and everything that's been going on, these labs take on so much business. Delete times. And their backlog is so crazy. I mean, it got to the point where some of our standard micro results or heavy metals was taking four weeks. What the fuck is taking? Why would this take four weeks? It's absolute asinine. So our poor, you know, customer service team is getting bashed over the head by our customers. We need our product, but we can't ship it because we don't have the test results. And it makes us look bad like we're lying to them, like, oh, we didn't really manufacture their products. It's just sitting in the corner waiting to be encapsulated or filled or packaged or whatever. But that's never been the case. We would never lie about something like that. And then we get to the point to where some of them are getting, you know, so antsy, they're calling the lab themselves. Hey, we're a customer of Simpson Labs and uh we're waiting on test results. Like we're lying. Yeah, of course, the lab by law can never release any kind of information, but we've, you know, we got some of these crazy people that are just trying to make sure that we're not full of shit. So that, you know, when all that started going down, you know, two years ago, we decided we, you know, we turnkey everything else. Why not analytical?

SPEAKER_03 59:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:46

So we brought in, you know, a protein analyzer and started doing our own protein tests, and that ended up paying for itself after five months. So we said, you know what, we gotta go, you know, balls deep. Let's get everything, you know, the thermofissure equipment, HPLCs, IC. Um uh particle analyzer. So we've invested into a lot of heavy equipment, all brand new. Might I add none of its use, crap, garage sales, shit. I mean, it's all legitimate products. And and when we bring in new team members, microbiologists, chemists, you know, they they they they talk around amongst themselves, talking about, oh, we've never worked anywhere where they actually bought new equipment. Most people just grab some new shit and they're like, here, this is what you got to work with, make it work. I don't care. We don't want to, we we've never been that way. All of our equipment we ever bring in these companies, you know, and all of our facilities are always brand new. Why would we do anything different with our analytical testing? So obviously, I don't understand the analytical side like I do the operational side. I'm not gonna act like I know everything. That's why we hire the guys that do know what they're talking about. And you know, we've allowed them to go buy out the best of the best and help build out the you know the analytical team, you know, to their likings. And they took the bull by the horns and they did it, and they're they're doing a fabulous job. So it's it's something we're continually to grow on, investing into, bringing on new staff. Um, it's a lot. But to go back to what I was saying, these test results, they were taking forever. So let's say we have a Prop 65 issue and we need results now. We're sending it out, it's taking weeks and weeks and weeks. I'm like, oh my God. Well, now we can do it in-house. We can we can do you know the testing right there on the spot. If something fails, we can test it again and test again and test again. Okay, you know what? This is an issue. This failed. But sometimes these labs they'll we'll wait three or four weeks to get a test result. Oh, well, it failed magnesium by two milligrams. We're gonna have to retest it. Great, I get to wait another fucking month. What the fuck? Here we can look false positives happens all the time. Yeah, it's trying to figure out you know, the workaround and find out what happened, why was it a collection issue? Do we do a placebo test against it? You know, our team is very, very smart and they've they've been doing this for a long time. So, you know, they'll figure it out. But now that we can actually test things in-house, it just makes things go by so much quicker and we're not waiting. So yeah, um, the lab has been an ongoing process for the last two two years or so, but it's uh it's coming together. So we're excited for it.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:17

I'm excited about that for you guys as well because when you hear about these stories on Amazon about how seven out of ten brands failed or something like that. It's crazy. The first thing that people think about is the brands being nefarious in their actions. But I mentioned it earlier about how a lot of these brands, a lot of these startups, they're not sending out finished goods for third-party testing. They're trusting what their manufacturer says. And then if it's a small brand, which often happens on Amazon because these brands that are winning the buy box are doing rock bottom pricing, and it's some brand you never heard of before, and they needed to do that to win the buy box, they're you working with small manufacturers, and small manufacturers are also not doing their own testing. So these small manufacturers, man, it's just like this waterfall effect. They're working with raw material vendors and they're trusting the COVAs and documents that are being sent to them. And then, of course, if they're trying to find the cheapest prices for basic raw materials, they're of course going to run into people who are doctoring documents. And so there's just this waterfall effect where, you know, the consumer assumes that the brand is being nefarious and that they're doing this on purpose and lying on purpose. But the reality is that everybody's asking for the cheapest price in this chain of custody, and nobody is testing in this chain of custody, and the person most at fault is the raw material provider, and then everybody after that, they're at fault, but mostly due to negligence or lack of investment. And so as this trend continues, if you're a startup brand, I know working with a larger manufacturer can be daunting because of the MOQs, but the soonest you can get connected with somebody like Simpson Labs, the better it's going to be for your brand long term. Because to be able to do all that in-house, I imagine you'd probably just build it into their product costs or something like that. Yeah, we do the pre- and they could just have this a one-stop shop and not have to worry about selling sand and snake oil to their customers.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

Yeah, yeah, no, I appreciate that. Uh a lot of times people, you know, our customers will ask, well, how much uh thank you for the quote, how much is it gonna be for the testing? I'm like, well, it's already baked in. We we amortize it. That's why I tell people, you know, the difference from 500 units to a thousand units to five thousand units, all that cost tier difference comes from two things. It comes from testing, yep, and then it comes from the efficiency.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:36

You know, the longer you're running on uh a capsule line, stick pack line, powder filling line, the longer you're running, the more efficient it starts becoming. You know, once you start passing that thousand units, you know, you start seeing that hockey stick effect. And now it's just running like water, it's flowing. But to get everything set up properly, you know, you can't.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:54

The same amount of people, whether you're running 500 or a thousand, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:57

And I tell people all the time, you know, it it takes us just as long to make a thousand units sometimes as it does to make ten thousand units. We still gotta, you know, pre-weigh everything, we still got to blend everything, all that's all the same timing. And our you know, with our high-speed equipment, it pumps things out quicker. But having to set up the equipment, having to break it down, you know, you test a product that costs, I don't know, a thousand dollars, let's say, and you know, you're running 500 units,$2 of your cost is just in the testing aspect. Yep. So we try to bake everything in. And then if they want to do something additional like gluten, you know, which we do in-house, um, you know, non-GMO, if they want to do other certain claims, kosher halal, you know, we'll charge a little bit more for some of that just for the additional documentation and time it takes to get all this information. But, you know, we we don't hit people, you know, on the side of the head later, like, oh, by the way, here's an extra invoice for$8,000 in testing. You know, we we will always give them a heads up before we do that. So, but yeah, um, I I know you got to get out of here and catch a plane here shortly. I think we we hit your time mark, but before we uh get off, is there anything you want to promote, launch, talk about?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:05

Um, no, I would just say the uh the last major thing that we're giving the industry a heads up on is we're currently in the process of looking for uh new partners for new ingredients we're launching. So the latest trend that we've had or that we've been following with NMB is yes, we modify commodity ingredients, but our bread and butter is this campaign we've launched called Pure Potent Precise, where we're finding the constituents of herbs and extracts, we're finding the actives of materials. I mentioned earlier the hydroberberine, we found that to be the active of berberine, and we're making that pure. So everything we're doing going forward is like pharmaceutical level ingredients where we're getting really, really small milligram dosages, we're having multiple times the potency of the original material that these constituents are coming from, and then we're gonna have consistency from lot to lot because we're not relying on farming or anything like that, we're like making these things in-house. So within that same breath, three of the ingredients that we're looking at. You mentioned grains of paradise is one of the first ingredients that uh you used. Well, we're making pure sixperidol. So today, grains of paradise 40 milligrams, it's got some research work and burn up to like 100 calories. Well, within those 40 milligrams, it's like 12.5% sixperidol. Now we're making just a pure sixperidol. So we're talking about like five, ten milligram dosages of the stuff. We're doing, I mentioned earlier how phenogreek was famous back in the day for enhancing creatine. We're doing uh pure four hydroxyisoleucine, couple of hundred milligrams now to enhance the efficacy of your creatine. And then, of course, we have icarin coming from horny goatweed, which is the PDE5 inhibitor within horny goatweed, we're making that pure. So you're talking about like a small milligram dosage for PDE5 inhibition. But the way that we're gonna launch these is gonna be a bit different. This isn't like an uh open public, you know, purchase the ingredient. We're looking for, you'll notice they don't have trademark names yet. We're looking for launch partners. So if you love the ingredient, if you think your brand has enough influencers, reach a big enough following where you can help broadcast this ingredient, get in touch with us at NNB. We'll talk through the concept, how you want to reach the marketplace, and we're looking for exclusive launch partners for these ingredients. We're gonna launch with somebody exclusively six months to a year. They'll be the only one that can use the ingredient in their product and their formula, and it'll be something that'll support both sides. For us, it'll help us to launch the ingredient and broadcast it for the industry. For them, they'll have a brand new exclusive pharmaceutical level ingredient that only they can use for the course of that year in exchange for um putting together a campaign that we find suitable. So that's uh the latest, greatest for NMV that we're currently working on right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:50

And then we can manufacture it exclusively too. Yep, and then you'll go to Simpson and manufacture it.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:55

Great plug by both of you. So awesome. Well, Ahmed, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Doesn't dude, you are a motherfucking breath of fresh air. You're so knowledgeable. Uh, I mean, you actually blow me away, man. So, and uh if you're ever looking for a new job, we could always use somebody super knowledgeable like you. So no, just kidding. Just k just kidding in and be. But anyways, not appreciate you coming down. Uh, it's it's always a pleasure to see you, man. And uh glad you could finally do the tour, you know, meet the team. Yes, I'm so glad I can make it out here.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:27

Yeah. I um I worked for contract manufacturers before, as I mentioned. I love the facility. I love the technology you have for efficiency, being able to scan QR codes and know when to order things, when to do things, maintenance in house. Um, I was impressed. I appreciate it for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:42

Thank you so much. All right, my man. Well, it's good seeing you and uh safe travels, and we'll see you soon. Thank you so much. All right, brother. Have a good one, guys.