to be assigned to each lot of organic product to allow for a comprehensive audit. Testing by gas chromatograph and mass spectroscopy are also required for any possible pesticide residue contamination. Additionally, NOW requires that every new organic shipment must be frozen for three days and then tested for micro levels. Since NOW is one of the very few natural food brands to have an in-house microbiology lab, we are able to determine results as quickly as possible. Finally, all procedures used on organic products must meet the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (Recommendations to the Secretary of Agriculture) and the Guidelines for the Organic Food Industry, which is produced by the Organic Trade Association. Organic products are the wave of the future for good reason: our bodies work better and live longer without artificial preservatives, chemical additives, fertilizers, fumigants and pesticides. A final quality frontier was passed in 2002 when NOW became certified Kosher for a limited number of products. Kosher regulations are very strict and require manufacturers like NOW to do an incredible amount of paper chasing to verify vendor claims and assure proper processing methods. The whole Kosher system stems from an odd verse in Exodus 23:19 which says. “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.” Over thousands of years Rabbis have expanded the interpretation of this verse and it is still not agreed upon today. Basically, the idea is to keep any meat products separate from any milk products so that an animal is not cooked or consumed with milk. Within the Jewish community today there are different levels of Kosher certification, some more strict than others, on production equipment, sanitation, documentation and processing. NOW chose to be certified by the strictest branch, Circle U, which is accepted as Kosher by all Jews. To the average Gentile, this merely means that NOW’s Kosher products are the cleanest possible products, having passed the highest levels of Kosher laws. GOING INTERNATIONAL As NOW grew to be a larger concern in the early 1990s, international sales started to become a major area of growth for the company. Initially, NOW didn’t have the manpower to reach out to international markets, so customers somehow managed to find us. As early as 1992, NOW sold to customers in Canada, Israel, Japan, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, Taiwan, and the UK. Ten years later exports have increased many-fold and dozens of new countries have opened their markets to NOW products. International sales are NOW’s biggest growth potential simply based on population and the newness of supplements in many countries. Selling to many international markets makes one appreciate the nutritional freedoms we have in the U.S. Countries like Canada had regulated products like vitamin C and vitamin E as drugs and required Natural Product Numbers (NPN’s), which means much higher costs of doing business. Other countries, like many in the European Union, have such difficult trade barriers that it becomes very expensive to do business with them. On the flip side, NOW is a huge importer of nutritional products and buys nearly half of all its products produced overseas. Psyllium Husks from India, dried fruit from Thailand, Tea Tree Oil from Australia, Lycopene from Israel, Organic Stevia from China, Hoodia from South Africa, L-Carnitine from Switzerland, and Pycnogenol from France are some of the better known imports NOW sells in health food stores. What is less known is that many more traditional products are now produced in far away 1997-2002 89
