Suppliments Made in The USA

Collagen Supplements have become a big thing in America and sales have been growing over the past few years. One look on a store shelf or on the Internet and you will see a wide variety of supplements. But do you ever look to see where the supplements are made? What difference does it make if the supplements are made overseas? David Kramer, the plant manager of Sue Biochemical and SB-Edge a type 2 collagen supplement manufacturer discusses why collagen supplements made in America are not only better for your health but also supporting a wide variety of jobs in the United States.

 

Dave has a lot of experience in the manufacturing of dietary supplement ingredients and has seen a lot of things and has learned a lot about the industry and comparison to foreign produced products.

 

The Problem Begins

Well, when Sioux Biochemical started making chondroitin sulfate, there was not much being made in China. But throughout the late 1990’s the Chinese manufacturing started kicking up and they became our biggest competitor which drove down the price of chondroitin not the price that people paid in the store, mind you, it drove down the wholesale price, so it mainly affected the US. manufacturers, which was us of that product.

 

The problem is that a lot of the chondroitin coming out of China is considered counterfeit or adulterated. Instead of making a 90% product, they were shipping it in at as low as 5%. They found that there was a certain seaweed sugar that would mimic chondroitin sulfate on a lot of the tests that were being used to analyze it. Independent labs were finding that at best, some of this product was 50%, but there was a lot coming in that was five and 10% and was just adulterated with other things.

 

These facts didn’t change how many distributors and resellers were continuing to buy off-shore chondroitin. They liked the low price and felt that if the foreign company had a CFA that says it was good that was all that was needed to justify the purchase. This creates an uneven playing field for manufacturers and a less effective product for customers.

 

The good news is that a lot of the counterfeit stuff was fairly benign, so it wasn’t poisonous or anything. Now, there have been situations with adulteration where they adulterate people adulterate it with something that is actually harmful. But if you're buying a supplement based on what you've heard, that says it should do X, Y and Z for your body, but essentially, you're taking a sugar pill, it's not going to do X, Y and Z and actually hurts the supplement industry, because it was like when it was made in the United States, it was all under control. So that's probably one of the main important things for the consumer to be concerned about, is that these adulterated ingredients just don't give the effect that you might have been expecting or might have heard about or even just nutritionally.

 

What Else Does Foreign Made Supplements Affect.

Most people would never support a company that mis-lead them about a product, and today many would not support a company that treated its labor force poorly or unfairly and would never support a company that was causing environmental damage from their business practices but that’s exactly what you are doing when buying supplements made in China or even Brazil.

Take for example the environmental factors of how cattle are raised, in Brazil. Here in the United States, most of the cattle are raised in the Midwest, upper Midwest, in feed lots and small operations. But in Brazil, a lot of the rainforest has been cut down and burned to create cattle grazing. So, the idea that some people just say, well, these are pasture fed cows, well, that's true, but the pasture isn't as important If you had to burn down a rainforest to get to it

 

Quality Control & Safety

The United States has very stringent regulations from agencies. The FDA regulates anything like food and drug and supplements fall under the FDA's purview. So that's the primary person that regulates. But if anytime you're using a product of animal origin, like our collagen product, the USDA regulates those animals that you use that you can utilize for your raw material. One thing that we often don't think about too is OSHA. A lot of the conditions which these supplements are made in foreign countries would fail an OSHA exam in a heartbeat. So, they're unsafe working conditions as well for a lot of people who don't have that protection. And obviously then we have OSHA and the legal rights of a worker in the United States exceed that of many foreign countries.

 

Supporting American Jobs

Many people do not realize the impact of buying products made in the USA. When your dollars go to buy US made products , the money goes to pay not only the workers at the manufacturing plant but to the supplier company workers, truck drivers, lab testers and more. In fact, the supply chain for our product will easily impact several hundred workers beyond our 7 employees.

 

In Summary

It is important for consumers and even supplier to take notice of where their supplements are manufactured and realize the small up-front savings leads to poor quality, less health benefits but also helps support foreign countries instead of supporting all the people involved in producing and taking American made products to market.

 

Dave Kramer has over 25 years’ experience in the industry and is currently  the plant manager for Sioux Biochemical which manufacturers SB-Edge Collagen Supplement.

Website: https://sb-edge.com/