NOW Foods was founded by Elwood Richard – a trained nutritionist – in 1968. Since then, the brand has become a big player in the natural products industry.
The company sells everything from general health supplements to sports nutrition products.
As a “value provider”, the company says it has always focused on offering high-quality supplements at the lowest-possible prices.
Its large headquarters is in Bloomingdale, Illinois. This space includes a 24-hour manufacturing facility where it employs current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) at “every step”. Videos posted on the NOW website describe the in-house factory processes in detail.
Employees start the process by gathering the right ingredients to create a specific NOW product. All ingredients are tested on site for quality before each batch is taken for processing. The batches are then “blended and mixed” to precise dosages, before they’re made into a form that consumers can use easily.
The specialized machines in the factory include tablet presses which use pressure to mold ingredients into tablet form. With several of these machines on site, NOW produces thousands of capsules per month.
The NOW facility also includes sections for bottling and packaging, where “state-of-the-art equipment counts out exactly the right amounts”, before labelling and safety-sealing all containers.
NOW even handles shipping and distribution in-house. Warehouse staff enter each batch into a sophisticated “inventory-management system” before they’re stored in a “precise location”. The company ships to every zip code in the USA and to 60 different countries across the globe.
By handling every part of manufacturing, packaging and distribution, the company says it can cut costs without cutting quality – and therefore passes its savings on to the customer. In fact, it claims to offer prices that are 25-30% below [its] average competitor”.
The brand has also won several awards in its long history. These include Better Nutrition “Best Supplement” awards for different products every year from 2013 to 2018. A number of NOW products also won Clean Eating Magazine’s “Clean Choice” awards in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.
NOW Foods’ best-selling private-label products include Arginine (100 caps, 500mg), Carnitine Liquid (2 x 16oz) and N-Acetyl Cysteine (100 caps).