Word: supplement
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More than 100 supplement companies dot the terrain alongside I-15 snaking through Salt Lake City, Utah, generating $4 billion in annual sales--four times the revenue of the state's more famous ski trade. The herbal health business is so prevalent in this area that it has been nicknamed Cellulose Valley, after the primary component of green plants...
...those claims has been conclusively proved, but similarly worded pitches--made in e-mails or other direct solicitations to independent marketers have helped XanGo pass $200 million in sales in 2005. The four-year-old company is just the latest big player in the country's $23.5 billion dietary-supplement trade--much of it based here in an arid stretch of Utah called the Wasatch Front...
...Utah? For one thing, the dry air is ideal for storing precious powders. For another, politicians like Senator Orrin Hatch have helped create a fertile regulatory climate. Then there's the long-standing environment of support for the products. Many Utah supplement companies are owned or operated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). In the 1800s, LDS founder Joseph Smith blamed traditional medicine for his brother's death and his own traumatic leg surgery. Early Mormon writings praised the "plants and roots, which God had prepared to remove the cause of diseases...
...privately held company aims to hit sales of $1 billion by decade's end. "We're ahead of projections on our fourth year," says co-founder Gordon Morton at his orange-hued headquarters in Lehi, Utah. "We're very bullish we'll hit our goal." (Some publicly traded supplement firms also use MLM sales, among them Usana and Nu Skin, with fiscal 2005 revenues of $328 million and $1.2 billion, respectively...
Though wildly successful, the MLM business model has opened supplement companies to a persistent complaint: the stuff doesn't work as claimed. Because independent marketers are not scrutinized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the business has long been criticized for pushing unwarranted claims through its network of sellers. "While you have the FDA breathing down your neck about what your company can legally say, distributors like Bob and Mary can tell their friends whatever they want," says Dan Hurley, author of the forthcoming exposé Natural Causes. He writes that aside from fish oil, vitamin D and a handful...