NOW Foods

In 1968 a degreed physical chemist named Elwood Richard, who had been running a small chain of Chicago-area health-food shops called Health House, founded NOW out of a 4,500-square-foot operation tucked inside the larger Fearn Soya plant. He believed, on the strength of his own research into nutrition and human performance, that the natural-products industry had room for a manufacturer who put the materials science before the marketing. Almost six decades on, NOW remains owned and run by the Richard family — across the second and third generations — and is one of the most-cited natural-products manufacturers in the United States.

The firm makes more than fourteen hundred products across dietary supplements, functional foods, sports nutrition, essential oils, and personal-care lines, manufactured at the corporate facility in Bloomingdale, Illinois into which the firm moved in 1998 and expanded into in 2012. A 2003 distribution facility in Sparks, Nevada — LEED Silver-certified by the US Green Building Council in 2013 — handles western-United-States fulfilment and is the firm’s principal Reno-area operation. NOW’s products reach the natural-foods retail channel, the practitioner channel, and an extensive network of independent and chain health-food retailers across North America.

What distinguishes NOW Foods in its sector is the combination of family continuity and laboratory discipline. The American natural-products industry is, at its scale, dominated by private-label manufacturers and consumer-marketing-led brands; NOW has remained a manufacturer-first operation under multi-generation family ownership, with in-house analytical and microbiology laboratories, on-site quality control, and a commitment to testing every incoming raw material before it enters production. The firm’s category breadth is unusual for an independent manufacturer of its kind.

The practice has worked with NOW Foods at the Sparks, Nevada distribution facility on Lean process implementation across operations.