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My name is Rich Goudis and I'm the chief operating officer here at Herbalife. Today we welcome
you to our quality labs here at Torrance, California. This is a very sophisticated,
very expensive operation of our business that allows us to ensure the quality of all of
our products, from the point where we source the material from the farm to the point where
you can to the point where you can soup the product, we have very sophisticated testing
throughout the entire process, so enjoy today’s tour, enjoy some of our experts, scientists,
biologists, chemists, PHDs, who are going to give you an in depth tour to the journey
to ensure quality for all our Herbalife products. Hi, I’m Garry Swanson, Vice President of
Corporate Quality at Herbalife International. To ensure the quality in our products we begin
by testing raw materials and making that they meet or exceed purity standards set by the
industry and the regulatory agencies. Sometimes vitamin ingredients deteriorate over time
so also test our products to make sure that they meet stability standards. For example,
if a label says that a product has 15 milligrams of vitamin C, we must ensure that there’s
15 milligrams of vitamin C at the end of its lifecycle. We are very serious about ensuring
the safety and quality of our products. As a result we made a significant investment
in the quality control laboratory. During the past year, we spent millions of dollars
in new equipment and renovations to the laboratories. Our facilities are now equipped with state
of the art testing equipment. These technologies provide the highest level of accuracy, these
rigorous testing and validation processes mean that our findings, our objectives, and
our products can be trusted. We conducted research in this laboratory to determine whether
there are new benefits on old products or even the new ingredients that we can use to
help improve basic nutrition and health. Some of our best ideas come from our distributors
and once we’ve developed products, we submit those prototypes to sensory development. We
do 3 primary types of testing here at sensory development, the first is called difference
testing. That’s when we examine our production variability over time to ensure that we’re
producing a consistent product that we deliver each and every day. The second type of testing
to do is called preference work and that’s when we go to distributors like yourselves
who are in various markets born in Europe or South America and we test the flavors,
the texture, all the sensory properties of a product and make sure they meet market needs
preferences. The third type of testing that we do is called psychometrics testing and
that’s where we’re testing to ensure the products deliver upon the claims that they
state that they have. For some of our tests we rely on trained expert panelist in our
sensory booths while we collect our data real time on automated computer system and those
are predominately our difference test where we make sure that the products are consistent
all the time. Maybe one of the best ways we can get the experience for yourself is that
I took you into the booths here at Herbalife and you tried it for yourself. Let’s give
it a go! So when we test with distributors, we always number our products with three digit
random codes to blind the sample identity to the distributors and when they’re ready
we open up the blinds and pass our samples through. The panelists respond online for
real time data collection. Our mission for nutrition does not stop after sensory lab,
in fact it goes on. Our vision is seed to feed and for that entire process we want to
control as much of a supply chain, the production, the development, the quality oversight as
we can.