Category Archives: Blast from the Past

Blast from the Past, Health + Wellbeing, Optimal Health, Reflections

Dr. Sam’s Journey with the Nutrilite™ brand and Amway: A Legacy of Healthy Living

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I was interviewed recently in acknowledgement of the Nutrilite™ brand’s 90th anniversary today.  It’s a lifelong legacy for me, and I’m excited to share the resulting story with you!

For Dr. Sam Rehnborg, Nutrilite is more than a supplement brand – it’s his lifelong passion. As the son of Nutrilite founder Carl F. Rehnborg, Dr. Sam was quite literally born into the business. From his earliest memories, he was immersed in his father’s work developing nutritional supplements.

To help celebrate the Nutrilite brand’s 90th Anniversary, and to accompany the release of The Nutrilite Story Third Edition, we sat down with him to discuss his legacy and continual growth with Nutrilite and Amway.

Can you tell us about your earliest memories with Nutrilite?
Dr. Sam as a toddler on Balboa Island.

I was in Nutrilite before I was born, really. My earliest memories go back to when it was just my dad, my mom, and me. We lived on Balboa Island in a small one room apartment.

We’d visit my father in his small laboratory down the street where he worked on his products.

He loved to swim, and I’ll always remember how he would swim across the bay with me on his stomach.

I was his first test subject, in a way. It was a wonderful time in our lives.

Can you share more about what your father was doing to launch his business early on?

My parents separated when I was 3 or 4 years old. It was hard on my mom at the time because of how busy my dad was. She took me back east to Connecticut with her and tried to get things going in her life. My dad visited and brought me back to California after a while.

We moved to Los Angeles and lived in a small apartment where he could continue working on his products. The business started to grow during that period, and he found a 3-acre farm in the San Fernando Valley where he could harvest alfalfa to use in the products.

He would process the alfalfa in a small factory in Los Angeles. He rented another place nearby where he could package the product. This is where distributors would come to pick up their product supply. The business kept growing, so he found a 10-acre farm near Buena Park to continue supplying ingredients for his products.

Who were some of the people helping your father market the product during that time?
Nutrilite founder, Carl Rehnborg.

He found that the best way to sell Nutrilite was through women who were using the product themselves.

It really came down to a woman named Alma Stewart who was one of his first customers. She kept asking to sell the product, but he didn’t think she would be able to sell it. But she was persistent, and after another sales setback he decided to give her a try.

He gave her a 25 percent discount on the product and told her she could mark it up from there. She was immediately successful. And she became one of his first salespeople selling the product because she believed in it and lived it, because it changed her life. People were intrigued with my dad, but they could see themselves in Alma when she was talking about Nutrilite and being a product of the product.

At the same time, he needed to be closer to the farm, so soon after we moved to Buena Park where we lived and worked. That’s where everything really got started. The business took off.

What were some of your first jobs with Nutrilite?
Dr. Sam as a young boy in Southern California.

Early on, I would work in my father’s laboratory sweeping the floor. Also, when I was about five or six, we’d go to the farm in the San Fernando Valley where my father harvested alfalfa.

My job was to pick walnuts and strawberries and sell them to people who came by. It was a great adventure for the family, especially during the war when gasoline was scarce and when we needed the extra money to make ends meet.

As the business started to grow, I would often go with my dad to make presentations about his products to potential customers.

During this time, he became known as the Vita-man and as his test subject, people would ask me questions and I would include in my answers that I ate my Nutrilite.

“Does your son use the products,” they would ask? He would say sure, and he would call me over to interact with me.

That would usually clinch the deal!

What were your early teenage years like?

The business started to grow when I was at that age, and as my father got more successful, and even before my teenage years, he sent me off to a military prep school to get a better education. As I grew up, I went to many different schools into my teenage years.

Going to so many different schools helped me learn how to take care of myself and connect with people. After I finished high school in Newport Beach, I went to Stanford for six years and then five years at UC Berkley for my Ph.D. I was always interested in the sciences. I studied chemistry, biochemistry and physical science, and then biophysics at Berkeley for my Ph.D.

How did your involvement with the company evolve as you got older?

In summers during school, I’d work on the farms or in the laboratories in a variety of different locations doing different jobs.

When I went off to college, I’d come back during holidays and work at the plant for about three months. I’d earn money to take back to school with me.

While I was at school, my dad would call me at least once a week to tell me what he was doing and to find out what I was doing. He was always really interested in my studies, especially when I got to graduate school.

What was it like when you officially joined the company after you received your Ph.D.?
Dr. Sam as a graduate student.

After I graduated, the business was at a crossroads. It was a tough time, and my dad was getting up there in years.

He said, “We need you back here at the company.”

So after a trip around the world visiting 40 different countries, I came back and started as Assistant to the President.

I jumped right into the thick of things and brought a lot of young people into the business to help me with the marketing, guys like Danny Rogers and John Brockman. At that time, Barney Bailey was incredibly helpful also.

What were some of the key challenges you faced early on?

Nutrilite had reached $50 million in sales but eventually dropped to $10 million because of the regulatory scrutiny we faced. The government temporarily shut us down, but we fought it in court and won. Then the government established regulations that ultimately worked in our favor because we finally knew what was permissible.

At the time, Dr. Stephen Tinkoff was running the company, he was a good leader, but his strength was not in sales and marketing. So, my responsibility was to help get us back to basics. We had to figure out how to sell the product effectively. We started by going door-to-door, but quickly realized that wasn’t the best approach.

We started traveling around the country, putting on meetings, and gradually built up our distributor groups. That was really the beginning of our success during that period.

What stands out for you about working with Nutrilite employees?

From the beginning my dad was always telling me that the most important asset you have are the people that are going to help you make and sell these products. He loved talking to employees and helping them understand why he was making these products, and why they ought to use them.

That’s why we always provided supplements for the employees to use, that’s always been part of it. It had to do with how the product was sold, the biggest thing was to have people use the product to be able to sell it – that meant the employees, too.

He also instituted profit sharing, which he believed to be tremendously important. We were one of the first companies to do so. He believed that for a business to be great, people had to be a part of it.

What does the Nutrilite and Amway family mean to you?

I feel like even though we all come from different backgrounds we are all the same in many ways and we all have the same potential. It isn’t about one single individual who has all the answers, everybody’s got to be a part of it. Everyone in this family is in it together. It’s about the camaraderie and respect for each other.

ABOs all over the world should feel the same way.

Can you tell us about the first time you met Jay and Rich?
Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos.

I was at a leadership meeting in Los Angeles with my father and he was most interested in having me meet Jay and Rich. He pointed them out to me and said they were really going to go places. He was excited because he knew they were the future of the business.

They wanted to know everything that I knew about Nutrilite. They both asked a lot of questions. Every time I ran into them after that, they wanted to talk to me to get my perspective on how Nutrilite was doing.

They had started their Ja-Ri business at that point, but they always maintained a line between Nutrilite distributors and Amway distributors before we merged. Joining with Amway was a big step and my trust in Jay and Rich helped make the process possible.

What do you consider to be the most rewarding aspect of your career?

The most rewarding aspect is really helping people understand what they are eating and why our products could be added to their diet to help them have better nutrition and a healthier life.

Can you tell us about the “product of the product” philosophy?

That came from my dad. He always said the best way to sell the product was to use the product.

It was about getting more people to embrace the product as part of their lifestyle, not just making a one-time sale.

Dr. Sam wearing his “I eat Nutrilite” pin.
How has Nutrilite evolved since your father’s time?

The big evolution was certainly expanding internationally. My father always wanted to get back to China and other parts of the world. That’s where I got involved too, figuring out how to start companies overseas. Joining with Amway allowed that global expansion to happen.

How have you achieved work life balance in your career?

I’ve always felt that work, love and play are all part of it. You’ve got to get them all in there, you don’t just focus on one or the other. It’s about finding something that you really love doing and getting after it. You want everybody to have the opportunity to have a full life, whatever role they’re playing. It’s especially true today. We need to keep connected.   

Which Nutrilite product are you most proud of and why?

Obviously, it’s the Double X™ supplement. It’s Amway’s number one product and it’s the most complete product with all its components as close to nature as it can be while being effective. And it’s continually being improved. When my father came up with it, he was basically saying to people that embracing his products meant embracing a healthy lifestyle.

Looking to the future, what excites you about Amway and the Nutrilite™ brand’s potential?

I’m excited about what we can do at places like our farms to help people better understand this magnificent planet and the world we live in. How can we make it a better place, and what can we do to help people embrace that and understand it?

Dr. Sam on the Amway campus in 2023.

We can’t just wait for a problem to occur and then try to solve it. We need to plan and prevent problems from occurring in the first place. We’ve got to embrace this approach – our Health and Wellbeing – to protect our futures. We need to take care of everything – the people, the plants, the living creatures, the oceans, the land.

That’s what I’m passionate about now.

Blast from the Past, Health + Wellbeing, News & Views (Amway & Nutrilite), Optimal Health, Reflections

Experiencing our Commitment to the Future

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Last month, I was able to experience Amway’s commitment to health and wellbeing firsthand. I spent time in Zurich, Switzerland with Founders Council members, and I also visited Napa Valley in California and spoke to a group of Japanese ABOs about how our future is taking shape.

Amway Founders Council members in Zurich, Switzerland. Can you find Francesca and me? Photo Credit – Dusty Brown, 2024

The event in Zurich reflected the strong partnership between Amway and Founders Council Members who shared examples and best practices of how they are transforming and building their businesses differently with health and wellbeing as the focus.

At the event in Napa, I spoke with Amway Japan ABO leaders who were equally excited about the direction we are headed for future growth as a health and wellbeing company.  While this path forward seems like a new approach, this has always been the foundation of what my father believed in many years ago.

Francesca and me relaxing in Napa Valley, California. Photo courtesy of Amway Japan, 2024.

I came away from my travels and interactions struck by the overwhelming acceptance of this path forward for our business. I spoke with many different people who were so impressed because they can easily see a tangible, positive impact from our renewed focus on health and wellbeing. Not only for themselves, but for all the people connected to their communities throughout the world.

It was very validating for me because it recognizes the fundamentals of a wonderful concept that took root so long ago about the best way to live a healthy life.

Seeing it for ourselves

It has been 90 years since Nutrilite was founded, but more than 100 years since my father, Carl Rehnborg, first went to China and observed that plant-based diets and regular physical activity made people healthier. It created a seed of an idea for him that led to the founding of Nutrilite in 1934. 

I can see for myself that Amway understands that Nutrilite is so much more than a plant-based supplement brand – it is a way of life that has stood the test of time.

Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel traveled with Nutrilite distributors to Buena Park, California, to see Carl and Edith Rehnborg. Photograph circa 1950s.

Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel saw it for themselves when they worked as Nutrilite distributors in the 1950s before founding Amway. Years ago, distributors would travel with Rich and Jay by bus to California to see Carl Rehnborg and the Nutrilite farms firsthand because they knew that the farms, the soil, and the meticulous devotion to quality was the true foundation of their business, something you will see in this incredible film from 1954 – From the Ground Up. 

Building a foundation

Today, those trips to the farm so many years ago – and the belief in a better way – have taken root. As a result, Amway’s foundational products work to help promote healthy nutrition and good daily habits. That’s where it starts.

And we need this more than ever now, because we are still faced with many challenges.

In the United States, where the standard American diet is the norm, people are consuming higher amounts of ultra processed foods and animal products. According to a recent Health Matters presentation from Stanford University, Americans continue to have wide nutritional gaps in their diets. 

The percentage of Americans who consume the recommended minimum amounts of fruits and vegetables is still much too low. According to the CDC, 12.3 percent meet fruit recommendations and 10 percent meet vegetable recommendations. The numbers are even lower for adolescents.[i]

Considering how fast paced and distracting our lives have become, it’s not surprising these numbers remain so low for many of us.

A way forward

It’s why the work we are doing is so important. We are creating vibrant communities that have the potential to empower millions of people to improve their health span – or the number of years they are healthy, happy, and feeling their best.

Don’t forget that it takes a village to do this – going it alone is not sustainable. We rely on our friends, family and counterparts to keep us motivated on our journeys to optimal health.

Together, we can empower people to live better, healthier lives, helping them achieve their wellbeing goals.

I’m so excited to see what the future will bring!

[1] Lee SH, Moore LV, Park S, Harris DM, Blanck HM. Adults Meeting Fruit and Vegetable Intake Recommendations — United States, 2019. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022;71:1–9. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7101a1.

Blast from the Past, Reflections

Revisiting the Origin Story of the Nutrilite Brand

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Carl F. Rehnborg in Shanghai wearing a light colored suit and holding his pith helmet in the 1920s.

I’m excited to tell you that in just a couple months, The Nutrilite Story 3rd Edition will be released and available for purchase. Writing the book — all three editions — has been a labor of love for me.

Revisiting the origin story of the Nutrilite™ brand and sharing my father’s experiences motivates me to stay the course sharing my message of health and wellbeing.

When my father, Carl F. Rehnborg, founded Nutrilite in 1934, his vision was to create a company that would provide people with the highest quality nutritional supplements. He believed that everyone deserved access to good nutrition, that everyone should benefit from a plant-based diet.

He also understood that stewardship for the planet is directly tied to our self-interest and our individual well-being.

A Place of Golden Opportunities

In the spirit of my father, I want to share an excerpt from chapter two of the book, “A Place of Golden Opportunities,” to get you excited about the upcoming release.

It’s magical for me to imagine my father traveling east to the other side of the world in 1915 to begin building a business in China. It’s not as if he could just jump on a plane and arrive, after all.

Passport pages
A page from my father’s United States passport.

His initial trip marked the beginning of a life-long journey of discovery and perseverance that created the Nutrilite brand that we know so well today.

When your destiny is to blaze new trails, it can make you feel like a square peg in a round hole. But then when you find the right fit, magic can happen. So it was for my 28-year-old father during the fall of 1915 when he packed all his goods into a steamer trunk, stepped onto a train in Grand Central Terminal, and embarked on a journey that would take him halfway around the world. He would begin a new career in China as an accountant for Standard Oil Company of New York, which everyone called Socony for short. Beyond the obvious adventure of it all, the Socony job had offered him the means to fulfill a deeper pull, something that had been tugging him powerfully since his days at Pratt Institute, or possibly before, toward that mysterious, inscrutable faraway land.

Before my father could leave, he had to pass a rigorous training program in New York, a program that would prepare him for his new life. During this time, he learned all about the oil business—about oil, solvents, fractionation, and vacuum distillations. He studied Chinese culture, history, and philosophy. He also learned about life as a foreigner in China—how visitors could live in foreign concessions that had the look and feel of their home country. The course was fascinating, but the competition was brutal and the pressure was intense. The class was whittled down from 100 to 20 students in three months. My father not only survived the cut, he thrived in the competitive environment, graduating with honors. His final 200-page project was so good that Socony accepted it as a model for assignments to other men, even putting some of his recommendations into effect. At graduation, the names of the students and their stations were read out. My father’s home for the next two years would be Tientsin (today known as Tianjin), the “City of the Heavenly Ford,” a large port city not far from Peking.

It must have been humbling for my father to stand under the canopy of golden stars in the expansive ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, his pith helmet and pongee suit carefully tucked away in his trunk and try to imagine the adventure that lay ahead. Would it be like anything he and Hester imagined as they had pored over the news, events, and culture of China during their days at Pratt? His long journey began with a train ride from New York through the Midwest to catch a steamship from Vancouver, British Columbia, bound for China after stops in equally exotic Honolulu and Yokohama.

At first, it seemed as if the train would never leave the endless city that surrounded New York, but it soon caught its rhythm and sped through the low mountains on its way to the Midwest. Looking out on the landscape as the train churned on, my father could see the rolling hills of Ohio where John D. Rockefeller had started Standard Oil. He changed trains in Detroit, the city where Henry Ford’s amazing assembly line was cranking out Model Ts so fast that almost anyone could own one. It was hard to imagine that just a few years ago gasoline had been a waste product of the oil refining process, while kerosene for lamps and paraffin for candles were the primary products. In China that was still the case, but when all 400 million Chinese could afford motor cars—well, the future was almost unimaginable. It was a new century and a new world in which technology fueled by oil would make everyone’s life better, and my father was now to play a part in this business, a business of almost limitless potential…

Keep reading my blog for more information about the upcoming release of the new book.

I can’t wait to share it with you!

Cheers!

Blast from the Past, Optimal Health, Reflections

The 90th Anniversary of Nutrilite

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Believe it or not, next year marks the 90th anniversary of Nutrilite. Many amazing things are in the works to celebrate this important milestone.

For starters, something I’m truly excited about is the upcoming release of The Nutrilite Story, 3rd Edition. The updated version of the book will not only to tell the ongoing story of the Nutrilite brand, but its release will also coincide with the 90th anniversary.

The book tells the story of my father, Carl Rehnborg, and how his insatiable curiosity and dogged determination created Nutrilite. It also shares how my personal journey from childhood up to the present has helped Amway and Nutrilite become what it is today. You’ll be able to get a copy of the book early next year.

That’s not all we have been busy with lately. To help people better understand the Nutrilite story and how my personal life has been so intertwined with health and wellness, I spent several days in a production studio capturing my impressions about the past, present and future.

Here’s a teaser video we put together to give you a taste of the content you will soon be able to see.

There’s even more. During the last two weeks in October, I will be touring Asia – stopping in China, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan – to begin celebrating the 90th anniversary of the brand and all the amazing things happening with Amway and Nutrilite.

So make sure you stay tuned to my blog for updates about my trip.

I’ll talk to you soon!

Cheers!

Blast from the Past, Reflections, Today's World

Harvesting Protein from the Sea

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My father, Nutrilite founder Carl Rehnborg, was ahead of his time, he was able to foresee outcomes before they happened. And he was always looking for ways to improve the health of the planet and our prospects as individuals – even in unconventional ways.

If you’ve read The Nutrilite Story, you might know the story of the Acania a ship he purchased to harvest plankton from the sea off the coast of Alaska. If you want to know more about Nutrilite history, understanding the story of the Acania is a good place to start because it embodies my father’s forward thinking-nature, the type of thinking that translates into the foundation of the Nutrilite brand.

The Acania designed by John H. Wells and built by Consolidated Shipbuilding Company in 1930. Seen here as Research vessel in Juneau, Alaska (1987)- Southeast Alaska. By Gillfoto – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75

An Eventful World Tour

In the early 1950s my father was entering the retirement phase of his life, having turned 65 in 1952. But he wasn’t slowing down by any means.

A year later, his insatiable curiosity led him to embark on a world tour with his wife Edith that took them to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. During his travels, he was analyzing the character and culture of ancient places that were brand new to him. And in doing so he couldn’t help but view things through his own particular lens – nutrition. 

He visited Europe when it was still recovering from the devastation of World War II. He theorized that proper supplementation could help bridge nutritional gaps in people still recovering from the traumas of war. And throughout his travels across three different continents he saw stark reminders of poverty and malnutrition.

He returned home inspired to find ways to make the world a better place and to do what he could to help eliminate poverty and starvation. He saw that people were not only suffering from a lack of vitamins, but also from an inadequate intake of protein.

Observations while Sailing to and from China

Decades earlier he had sailed to and from China across the North Pacific, where he saw plankton blooms glowing in the dark seas at night. Memories of those passages across the ocean gave him an idea for a solution. In the fall of 1954, he decided to find a way to harvest plankton straight from the sea and use it to make a protein supplement.

Why plankton? More bang for the buck, he figured, or more protein by the pound, to be more accurate. Sure, one pound of plankton might be roughly equivalent to a pound of fish, but a lot of food value was lost between the plankton and the big fish that humans ate.

He purchased a 126 foot luxury yacht called the Acania and he refitted it for harvesting plankton. By the summer of 1956, the Acania set sail, bound for the waters off Alaska. I was able to join the crew during my summer break from Stanford University, where I had just completed my sophomore year studying chemical engineering.

How it Worked

From the Acania’s deck, we would send these big coned-shaped nets down 100 feet in water to scoop up the protein-rich plankton. We would follow the plankton on sonar. We could see the fluorescent plankton rise at night with the dwindling sun when we could get close enough to harvest it. We would bring it onboard via big pumps that sucked it out of the water and into the bowels of the boat, where it was spray-dried with relatively little treatment. Every night, we would catch 100 pounds. It produced a very high-quality material that was 85 percent protein.

The trip was a success, proving that plankton could indeed be harvested, and a healthful protein supplement easily made from it.

Unfortunately, the operation wasn’t economically viable. Harvesting plankton was simply too costly at the time to produce a supplement whose primary market would be the world’s most poverty-stricken areas.

The Acania Today

The current owners of the Acania reached out to me earlier this year to compile historical details about the vessel. The ship was built in 1929 and it’s had a storied history with multiple owners. Nutrilite owned it from 1955 to 1960 after which the boat was sold to the Stanford Research Institute.

The ship is being restored after it sank at the dock in Everett, Washington in August of 2017.

I hope to be able to visit the current owners sometime in the near future to share personal stories about my time on the Acania and to relive some of the wonderful memories I experienced as a young man helping to build the future of the Nutrilite brand.

Recent photos of the Acania undergoing restoration after being salvaged from the harbor bottom.

A Friend of the Sea

Friend of the Sea Logo

Today, Nutrilite ingredients harvested from the ocean are Friend of the Sea® certified. That includes the entire supply chain — the fisheries, the fish oil producer, and our products. Specifically, it relates to our new Omega and Advanced Omega products that have begun rolling out this year. It’s another step toward sustainability and care for the planet we call home.

Friend of the Sea® sustainable fisheries and Omega-3 certification ensures certified products minimally impact the environment. Following Friend of the Sea® requirements ensures healthy fish, supports endangered species, and encourages an abundant supply for the future.

My Father’s Legacy

My father was focused on sustainability, social responsibility, and other innovative methods to help alleviate global challenges like poverty, malnutrition, and climate change. He was doing this even before the modern environmental movement was born.

It’s the type of thinking we need more of today as we slowly realize that the future is now. And we can’t pass our problems to the next generation anymore.

Cheers!

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