Rowe founded the company in 2002 by Will Rowe with Dr. Bruce Holub at the University of Guelph and initially focused on commercializing an omega-3 diagnostic test.
“Omega-3 as a category was super hot at the time, so a lot of the actual supplement companies in the US were saying, ‘This test is so cool: We have new omega lines. How do we couple it?’” Rowe told NutraIngredients.
“That really helped with prominence in the US, but then we realized a couple of years in that companies wanted to make claims around omega-3, and at that point in time, there wasn’t near the literature there is now, there weren’t these monographs established by governments and health authorities. So, companies needed clinical trials to support their claims.”
This was the genesis of Nutrasource as a contract research organization (CRO), and the first clinical trial the company ran was, unsurprisingly, an omega-3 study that compared the Zone Diet with omega-3 to the Zone Diet alone and other diets, Rowe said.
“That was the first study we ever put together, and I believe that one did get published back in the day, so, from that perspective, it was fun and interesting,” he said.
The science then led to an opportunity to create a regulatory division to support brands wanting to register with Health Canada as Natural Health Products (NHPs).
A few years later, the booming omega-3 category started to attract more scrutiny, and concerns were raised about heavy metal content and other contaminants. To address this, Nutrasource created its International Fish Oil Standards (IFOS) program.
Having built an extensive business around omega-3s, the company looked to the wider dietary supplements category and began working with multivitamins and minerals, infant formula and probiotics.
“Then beyond that, we said this model actually works for functional food and beverage, for cosmetics, for pharmaceuticals,” Rowe said. “We really diversified across the global health products industry. Companies from all over the world can still show up to this day and say, ‘Hey, we’re here and we want to get there’.
“We really try and get into the strategic side, the business objective of the client’s needs, so that we can really tailor,” he added. “We call it custom home building […] I think that’s where we’ve really excelled is not just taking projects and saying, ‘Here’s your clinical results. Have a nice day’, but by asking what their commercial intellectual property objectives are and tie this back to the clinical work.”
SGS arrives
The growth and diversification of the business led to a 2023 acquisition by Swiss testing, inspection and certification giant SGS.
With the business in a “really good place,” Rowe made the decision to “wrap things up and retire.”
“What I’m excited about with this succession plan is it’s from within,” he said. “SGS is also very excited that it’s from within.”
Josh Baisley, who has been with the company for 12 years and served most recently as senior vice president of clinical operations for Apex Trials by Nutrasource (the clinical trials division), has been named as the new head of Nutrasource.
“What I’m looking forward to in the future is really preserving the foundation that was laid, continuing the culture that we have, maintaining our good retention rates, because really it’s about the people in the company,” Baisley said. “It’s their knowledge, it’s their passion for this industry that continues to drive it forward into the future. It’s quite exciting.
“Of course, having SGS behind us now gives us a lot of resources, but ancillary resources that we may have been outsourcing before.”
Watch the video for the full interview.
