Melaleuca dumps old vitamins for newer formula
CBS KIDK News 3| Todd Kunz |
Approximately 15 tons of vitamins poured and piled into twelve dump trucks, not because they're defective, just ineffective.
"And once you know you've got a better product, you ought to get rid of the old and move to the new," says Melaleuca CEO, Frank VanderSloot. He believes in this so much, that's he's dumping 10.4-million dollars worth of inventory into the Bonneville County Landfill.
"I wouldn't take them and I'm not going to give them to somebody else," he says.
Why? Because Melaleuca claims to have come up with a better way to allow a vitamin to be nearly ten times more absorbable.
"And that's a major breakthrough, because the older products for Melaleuca and their competitors, in general, didn't have this formulation," says University of Iowa chemist, Dr. Garry Buettner. He is an independent researcher. He has looked at the old way...
"Once you took them into your mouth, into your stomach, they began to fight each other," he adds.
...And he's looked at Melaleuca's new method that keeps free radicals from being formed.
"And hopefully improve your health," Buettner explains. But to dump 200 pallets of product?
"I was quite struck by it," Buettner smiles.
"It's a big statement. It's a big statement. It's a tough decision, yet it's an easy decision. Once you know that, you wouldn't sell those products ever again," says VanderSloot.
The new product is already being sold. In fact, you may have already bought some.
When asked why this hasn't come about before now, Buettner replies, "well, research takes discovery and nobody discovered it. Melaleuca did."
As for the old...
"We think the whole world is going to be moving to this as soon as it's known that this technology exists.
Watching the actual dumping, VanderSloot replies, "it is really painful to plow under 10-million dollars worth of product, but it's really exciting to know where we are going, that we've really got products that will do the people a lot more good than the products they've been using for the last 50 years in nutritional supplements. So it's painful to do this, but I'm really excited about the future for us and for people in general, for humankind."
According to VanderSloot, this will bring more jobs to the Idaho Falls area and put the city on the map as one of the leading manufacturers of vitamins and minerals in the country.
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