california yes but you're with you're the vice president of commercial development but you are with a special division in my eyes the animal wellness yes what do you do in that division and specifically what do you do for the division well originally i formed our animal will this business unit i was trying to take a concept that we were doing in other industries and bringing it to the animal nutrition space obviously have a passion for animals and their health and longevity and over time i became really more of an innovation driver i wanted to reach out to industry to learn more about it be more involved have an opportunity to educate so part of my role today is kind of be the face of the group to say this is our passion is education as well as doing the right thing for our pets in terms of health and and education is key that that's the paramount thing because if you don't have the knowledge that then how can you have a good result and you and i met at super zoo super zoo is super giant industry trade show one of the largest in the country is for retailers focusing mostly on special to retailers that come to purchased new innovative products that are there so the people with the booths are actually holding their product line for them to come by and take a look at it's also a place to get educated on how to run a store also to get educated on what's going on in terms of raw materials and new products and you had the school of animal wellness there you had the school of animal well most tell us a little about bit about the school about i'm a wellness well i sit on the board for the world pet association who puts on super zoo as well as some other trade shows a land of pit  experience and also the america's family pet expo and as a only member involved on the ingredients side of things i proposed the concept of having a school animal wellness nutrition separate from the education forms are really just to help repeal or how do you run your store i figured that if we could have brought it into the center of the show and we could showcase that we want to bring in the scientists year can i be a speaker and the whole idea is that bring in people from industry with either your doctor or a very strong industry leader and talk about subjects with the facts and the science behind them to help give people an opportunity to hear that and to ask questions but i of course this was a speaker this year superhit two thousand and fourteen and i found it to be incredibly amazing because you had these people that came in for one to three days to las vegas to to look at products and the innovative products that are being featured and so forth and i talk to sales people so their time is very limited and supers who i have been visit super m a few years in the past when i was manufacturing my own supplements for dogs with healthy pet systems and i was amazed back then but i had grown and grown over those years and almost to the point of being overwhelming and then lecturing there they took their time to sit and hear someone provide education information to them and it was just amazing the rooms were for full of people taking notes asking questions and and then i proceeded to have months of evils after that and your classes were very will attend in the standing room only you said they were going to expand next year and  they they're looking for information they want results and it wasn't i want results because i want to sell product and make more money it was i want results so that i can help my my customers with their animals and that was the motivation and it was absolutely amazing what i love about this industry is that people really do care about their pets are part of the family's transition and parents out there so the idea is always striving for doing what's best for the animal and so it's really important to help consumers get a good education and try to take the emotion out of the decision as much as possible by providing them some of the facts and there's a lot of stuff on the internet in the blog and people are getting confused about what to do for their pets and so this is just an opportunity to say well let's just go back to the scientific community and talk a little bit about what we know and then that consumers ask questions and they're confused about something because really you want to help them make the best decision for them and their pet whether they need to talk to the vet or an animal nutritionist they want to change the food they're on they want to start taking a supplement and you know how to how do they go about making those decisions you want to have some kind of scientific basis for that as much as possible and you pulled and i don't like to call anybody an expert there are people that know have more information than other people for me to use the term expert means you're at the pentagon you're done and it's never the case you're learning all the time and things that you thought you knew because that was the science at that time had changed so people from all aspects of industries related to animals and to sit there and listen to these people talk and express their opinion sometimes their knowledge all the time was just incredible i'm looking for it i'm going to be lecturing there again next year i'm looking forward people are going to be there as well it was just a nice experience it was great i love hearing that and that's really what we're trying to provide it's not a sales pitch format it's really just talking about what's out there what's coming what's developing by having the professionals there they can discuss it because things are always changing and we're getting new information it's important to consider that we don't want to stray too far from what we know that is pretty sound when new things come along we want to vet it out between all the experts and i think that's great i i heard a number of experts talking and going off on a subject i didn't expect them to talk about maybe five or six years ago the new trends that are happening definitely are intriguing to the to the industry and have you found one of those trends is going to a more natural state with products and approaches well i think people are looking for a fresher food let's just say that i think about the trends with the humans i mean we everything process everything fast food and now we're trying to going oh we want some things fresh we don't want to eat like that we want to have i want to prepare myself i want to have a role when it so i think that's what we're seeing with the pets is a traditional killable even though it was all the dog was supposed to get and supposed to be balanced nutrition the now people want to play a role in the perpetration of the food if they do they  can you know they are animal nutritionists so they need to make sure that with they do still provide the basics of nutrition and then if they want to modify or you know provide a higher quality they're willing to spend the money for fresh fresh food delivery all those trends are very interesting and i think they're here to stay but everybody can afford this so what range of the spectrum are you as a consumer from the person that can afford a lot of the expensive food to the person that's willing to have fresh my food delivered at home to their dog every day so but dogs obviously grew up eating fresh  meat and other contents of the animals as they evolved so they were used to having cooked food that they have adapted and so we have to be careful making changes too quickly in this or systems are very susceptible to stress absolutely and they have very small livers and right and we think the liver is a liver but it's really not that and you have to watch how much and how you introduce things and so well how many people would you say attended to pursue i think we have almost fifteen thousand it so the highest number so far it's been growing quite a bit we're actually in the top t of trade shows in the country in terms of growth it's nice those people are animal lovers and everybody's having a good time and it's just it's people are smiling and talking and going from both the booths and lecture so horn and specifically animal wellness division your raw material supplier for anyone that would want to make supplements or put formulas together for products for animals yes so we're  know i'll tell you a story when i decided i was going to manufacture vitamins for dogs and cats and i started formulating i had no clue where these things came from i know i had no were i was used to walking into a health food store and seeing this this bottle with labeling on there and there was a little capsule in there or gelcap or powder or whatever it was and you just bring it home and oblivious to any of the process and then i had and i had an immediate eyeopening experience when i sat down and said what's with the company and said can you and they're like yeah we have to source this over here we have the source this over here this comes wet this comes  then and so but i want to talk a little bit about that and where we were how do we how do we get that capsule how do we get that to all and the process that's involved and going there i mean you really don't think about it but it's on a tree somewhere it's on a plant somewhere and it has to be extracted from that and really i think that's not in the average mindset so i'd like you to explain that we're going to go to commercial break here to second sato i don't want to her school of animal wellness to pursue lisa we were talking before break about the raw materials and where they come from i laugh internally that all the time when i when i recall my exposure to  supplements and so forth where do we really get all of these nutrients that we that we want to take until former capsule form well ingredients come from a variety of places obviously some are from plants and plants sources also they can come from extractions oils they can come from so this is which a lot of vitamins are produced by synthesis which is which would be a chemical reaction to make that compound so it just really depends what it is but just when you go to source around material can come from different parts of the world it's different places store different places and has a shelf life and distribution around the country is always a challenge and where it is closest to the so a lot of these products come from china a lot of your basic vitamins are made in china and that's just the peer plants in china and they're run by their corporation and the people are trained and have follow all the hassle rules and all the guidance and then any products that come from china on the human side are supposed to go through a certification process once it arrives in the u s so the u s for the food industry and the supplementary has done a very good job with monitoring that have there been issues from time to time have been issues on the pet side and this is creates a mistrust of ingredients coming from china because the rules maybe were more lax and there was less transparency about the testing and checking of wrong gradients and most of that change will be changed because of the food safety modernization act and all plants will have to operate the same way tell us about that it's quite involved it's going into effect next year so there are already taking steps to set up all the bodies and regulatory agencies in order to handle it the basically you have to monitor you have to have complete transparency of where where did the raw material come from this whole history you have to have all these things in place you cannot provide full access to your plan your records and all your safety and all your micro so it's very  a lot of paperwork and a lot of certification will be part of it so it does create a lot of extra cost for all of us but the whole idea is to get everybody on the same playing field and really under cover  people that are doing it correctly hopefully that'll make for safer products oh definitely that's i think everybody looking forward to that is just as a huge undertaking that ultimately we all agree that there needs to be certain things in place in order to ensure safety when you source the raw materials they come in different forms from my recollection and i remember there was dry there was wet there are products of the became dry and huge a bit about that in the process sometimes a product how it's made initially isn't how it used to be used later and so many in the supplement size so many things need to become a dry product in order to be either compressed into a tablet or put into a two piece our shell or dry will mix with other powders so you might have to dry the product on a type of oil or a carbohydrate in order to make it dry but then there's products that are still in the liquid form maybe that's the only way they're available in so then you have to figure out in your process had incorporate a liquid into your product i was amazed when i went to the manufacturer for my products it was like a hospital setting like a surgical room everybody was garbed like that nothing as far as skin pretty much showing any wear shoes covered g one area they were actually producing in and we weren't even allowed to go in there because we could contaminate the product and you said i think these are supplements but they're conducted pretty much the same way that pharmaceutical drugs are are compressible and literally it's an o t c e f t certified plant so you have certain practices that you have to have it has to be clean and you can't have any contamination you have to control your airflow you can't have hair get into the product you can have jewelry that pieces that could fall in so there's a lot of it's good manufacturing practices but it is required and then another aspect that i didn't even consider was the security even to even get in the front door when you have an appointment was when i was in operation and then one day i had an appointment and a big  big purchase are coming and we run to the place of the lockdown basically we were because they were exposing the formula and it was such a big secret and we had to reschedule my appointment because of the situation so it's a tightly controlled is very much while this industry operates there's only so many people that make tablets make two piece hard shell make liquids powders gels and so the client wants to have their own unique formula and they don't want someone to match it to make it copy it so there's a lot of things in place confidentiality put in place something like that happen you brought with you abseil book which reminds me like i'm i have some test tomorrow i've got to go study but this is basically the guidelines for the pen as tree supplement food mostly for food and treats to supplement category has been this no man's land but this book is for is put out by the american association of the control officials it was designed many years ago and used to go commerce across state lines and they wanted to make sure that you weren't bringing in some bad feed from another state to get rid of it in another state and so before we had the food modern safety act you know this is pre all that and over time it's the way that we actually govern how animals are fed whether it's a production animal or your pet so it's all animals and they've set up the whole little bible of guidelines of what should be in a feed nutritionally what's approved what's not approved what you can say about it they do approve new products it takes a very long time  each state has its own regulatory official that decides if you're complying with the guidelines and that causes a little gray area which is a real challenge so this is a federal government agency well they report to the into a store and found a product was mislabeled based on what they interpret it in this book they can tell they pull that product and they contact the manufacturer they send the machine stop ship letter basically says you cannot sell in our state any longer you violating our guidelines well if they're not a government agency how can they do that well because they're actually a volunteer body that's enforcing this at this handbook but they do have jurisdiction in their state so they can say look you can't sell in our state doesn't mean you can't sell in the usa so it's the state has their own control over how you feed animals and some of them are pretty a lot more strict about how they interpret the book and there's a gray area for some it does provide challenges of certainly if you want to get your product in all fifty states and one state does not agree with your labeling and this can happen with treats functional treats and food but supplements is a whole another area which generally they sort of take a side step on and let another group handle that so functional  again being something that has some additional the triggers are you alright yes there is it is it actually providing your basic nutrition that would be considered under africa if you're making some special dietary statement about the product it's not listed in the handbook they consider that a drug because you're trying to treat disease so there's a separate body in our industry that helps break that and they're and and try to find people maybe that are following the rules that they've set up just so after come in and pull all this away from them and we all comply if everybody follows these guidelines then it's better for  history and you want to kind of take out the people that are missing labeling misbranding making health claims that you can't make treating disease so they're at the very conservative in your approach and this is the existing landscape today that's true for the for the human side of supplements is as well so this was initially started because we were feeding the animals that we were eating and then a sort of