Lief Labs
28903 Avenue Paine
Valencia, CA 91355
Phone: (661) 775-2500
Website: www.lieflabs.com
Lief Labs is a leading innovator in product ideation and formulation for the dietary supplement market, driven by a passion for collaboration, a determination to offer only the best ingredients and an innovative and adaptable mindset. Lief also houses a state-of-the-art, full-service current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) manufacturing facility, which offers custom solutions for a multitude of supplement categories.
Adel Villalobos is the founder and chief executive officer of Lief Labs. A recipient of a BSc degree in biochemistry with emphasis in nutritional biochemistry, Villalobos has devoted his entire professional career to nutraceuticals. The perspective gained in his 18-year entrepreneurial journey continues to inspire him to support the aspirations of young leaders while making a difference in the community and world around him. Villalobos is a founding member of the Nutrition Industry Association, board member of the Supplement Safety and Compliance Initiative, and sponsor of Vitamin Angels and Heart of the Brain. Villalobos earned his BSc degree in biochemistry, molecular biology, nutrition biochemistry from California State University, Northridge, and is a graduate of the UCLA – Anderson School of Management Executive Program and Northwestern University – Kellogg School of Management.
NIE: Last year, Lief Labs debuted the podcast Beyond the Supps. Why did the company decide to start a podcast and what topics will it cover?
Villalobos: Our Beyond the Supps podcast was the brainchild of one of our highly ambitious and driven salespersons and the host of the program, Jacob Fishback, who had the idea and he ran with it. This reinforces the importance of having an environment and a culture where individuals are allowed to exercise some of their passions and ideas. It’s a great recipe for an organization and an example of giving autonomy to the visionaries within the organization and enabling them to successfully realize that vision.
The initial goal and concept of Beyond the Supps was to allow the end consumer to see what it’s like to be inside the mind of a contract manufacturer and the passion we have, so we hope that comes out through the program. Beyond the Supps helps to show the passion that exists at the manufacturing level, beyond the bottle and packaging, that’s not often seen like you do at the brand level. The program explores a range of key health and wellness related topics through discussions with industry expert guests. These guests include suppliers of raw materials, owners of GMP (good manufacturing practice)-certifying quality agencies, brand owners, scientists, athletes and even other contract manufacturers, so that the end consumer can see the passion of our entire industry.
NIE: Please explain the Lief Cares program. How does it work?
Villalobos: When we saw that the COVID-19 pandemic was causing a supply chain shortage of immune support focused supplements, Lief Labs began formulating its own in-house vitamin-C blend to provide immune health support supplements for our employees, as we continued to operate as an essential business during the pandemic.
We decided to take that a step further and wanted to recognize other frontline workers in our community, so we launched the Lief Cares donation program in May of 2020 and donated over 1,000 bottles of First Responders Immune Support supplements for distribution to first responders near our Valencia headquarters and in other regions of California. Then, in September, our team came together to create Essential Workers Immune Support supplements and donated 2,500 bottles for distribution to our local field workers in collaboration with Feeding Our Farmworkers.
Going forward, through the Lief Cares program, we will continue to identify essential groups in the community to spread awareness and support them with supplementation. Depending on the needs of each group, our team carefully selects and formulates supplements in-house with premium ingredients and brings awareness to the cause. And we’re now expanding Lief Cares to enable other partners in the industry to donate and participate through a special sponsorship program.
NIE: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Villalobos: I would say that I’m very, very passionate and wholeheartedly believe that if you want to be an entrepreneur there needs to be some kind of a giving-back quality and that you want to make a difference. For me, I wanted to make an impact in our industry and I wanted to focus on quality and transparency. Those were the two core values that I built Lief upon and I think they go hand in hand.
If you’re going to be transparent, then you’re going to expose your shortcomings, which means you’ve got to fix them and you have to be good if you’re going to be an open book. So, the organization was built on a foundation of quality and transparency and wanting to make a difference and then you begin to hire people with similar values who bring in different and even greater talents. And those people stick around because the value systems begin to align.
As these talented people begin to make a difference you realize, “wow,” as an organization we can really reach a true north. For Lief that is to have a fully verticalized community, whether it be Lief brands, Lief manufacturing, Lief raw materials or Lief quality systems, and also working with the right relationships and brands that have the same value systems that really care about quality and care about the entire industry. Ultimately, our vision is to set the standard of a conglomerate of organizations that love and are passionate about the industry to see if we can drive it from a $50 billion industry to get to a $100 billion industry. So now, it’s not just about me the individual entrepreneur, it’s about a group of individuals who share a value system that’s working and can contribute to that vision.
That means we have to be really good at what we do and have to be really efficient and we have to find the like-minded people in other organizations. For example, Nathan Cox who is my chief business officer at Lief, has talked a lot about wanting to get a group of like-minded manufacturers, including our competitors, to build a kind of consortium, so he’s thinking beyond Lief now. Because we want our competitors to also have foundations of quality and a focus on continuous improvement in order to grow our industry and to collectively make sure we are following regulatory guidance and that the end consumer is protected.
I think it all begins with our shared values and with the multiple visionaries in the company who are driven toward the same goal and believing in the foundation that this company was built upon.
NIE: The Los Angeles Business Journal recently ranked Lief Labs one of the 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies, while the San Fernando Valley Business Journal listed Lief Labs among the top 50 fastest growing private companies. What does recognition like this mean for the company?
Villalobos: As an organization that started from scratch with an entrepreneurial-rooted environment, there’s always the drive to accomplish objectives. As entrepreneurs we’re driven to accomplish, and that’s the drive that keeps our energy going in building a business. Receiving the industry awards and recognition can be a validation that we’re doing some things right. It also allows us to reinvigorate and to continue to double down and continue making the investments to drive in that direction, based on what we’re doing right as an entrepreneur.
The struggle to establish a viable long-term business and to still be around for 12 years can also be recognition, but it’s not just about being around for 12 years and being in existence. It’s also about whether we are moving the needle and making a difference, and if you’re successful in doing that, then it’s recognized.
My mindset as an entrepreneur, is also wanting to create jobs and to develop people. On a personal level, in my own development, I wasn’t someone at the top of my class in school and did not necessarily consider myself as somebody who had the abilities to reach this level of success. I had the ambition, but I always doubted myself. So, I think the industry recognition also helps build confidence, and confidence to me is important.
So, we started from zero and we hired people and we told people we wanted them to reach their professional best, and we created a learning environment that allows our people to exercise their ideas—of course all driven towards the same goal. And, if we’re getting the recognition and the awards, this means we must be developing people. We must be creating the right environment and we must be making a difference in people’s lives. And making that difference applies not only to the people that work here, but also applies to the industry that we’re in. We’re succeeding in the dietary supplement industry that’s driven toward the health of consumers and empowering consumers to make healthy choices and healthy decisions, and we’re supporting the brands we work with and helping them to understand the industry.
It’s a passion of mine to develop products that help consumers achieve their health goals, so achieving the industry recognition not only applies to us as an organization and getting through the early years and past the business barriers as an entrepreneurial startup, but it shows we also must be making a difference in people’s lives within our company and in the industry that we serve. It reinforces that, as an organization driven toward the end consumer, we can also deliver to society because we are producing quality talent that can eventually go on to work in other companies and continue to perpetuate what we started here at Lief.
NIE: What steps does Lief Labs take to ensure quality control?
Villalobos: Yes, quality is extremely important to our organization. To understand why it’s so important, I would rewind to the beginning and why I decided to start Lief as an organization built on a foundation of quality and transparency. Being in a consumables industry, quality must of course be important. But, even beyond that, if your ambition is being an entrepreneur like me, who was never solely driven by the financial success but more so by making a difference, quality has to be integral.
The importance of quality is particularly significant in the dietary supplement industry. It’s a relatively young industry that was often very much chastised prior to 1994, as the regulatory environment did not really exist before then for the dietary supplement industry. It wasn’t until The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, DSHEA, of 1994 that the dietary supplement industry became a sector officially recognized as a category by the FDA with newly established U.S. rules, laws and guidelines.
I entered the industry in 1996, just two years after DSHEA passed, and I really fell in love with it. I have a technical education and background as a chemist and in my early jobs in the industry quality was very important to me, and I worked for an organization that also took it very seriously. At the same time, as the new FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) regulations were newly taking effect, the industry required a learning period to understand how to apply these new rules and needed time to learn to walk before trying to run and a proper foundation needed to be established in order to implement. So, in those days, to continue to hear about quality issues in the industry, and that quality wasn’t a priority really bothered me.
When I started Lief in 2008, I would say it was a coming-of-age period for the industry because between 2007-2010 the regulations on how the industry would be governed regulatory wise and quality wise were published and they became law. I knew I wanted to set a good example, so to me, establishing a quality infrastructure from day one ensured the bricks were laid and then I built the organization from there. I also believe quality is a dynamic, constant continuous improvement process and mindset. So, we’ve always had a quality-driven philosophy and the next step was to determine how to continue to deliver and ensure that quality, particularly as we grew as an organization of five employees to the over 230 we have today.
To ensure quality, we found that it has to be defined, in terms of the physical characteristics and what the product looks like. And, it has to be repeatable with an established range within quality standards. We had to establish these standards with very stringent and very narrow quality parameters where required, and then having much broader guidelines in areas where not required, so that we would have the flexibility that allows the organization to function and to be able to manage quality and ensure regulatory compliance. We also need to adhere to compliance and the regulations, laws and the documentation, so we make sure that the company understands these as an organization.
Through my team at Lief, it was important to also identify leaders in these environments, make sure they understand their role and their accountability, and then establish the documentation and continually improve on the documentation. This empowers our people to be able to adapt and adjust, and to understand and meet the ultimate vision of quality that’s been set by the philosophy and the leadership of the company. Then, based on the core philosophy, we needed to establish a set of very simply SOPs (standard operating procedures) that employees are trained on and making sure that these are policies that could be governed by the leadership in the organization within a flexible and adaptable structure.
Understanding risk and how we define regulatory compliance is also very important. We make sure that the leadership team and everybody downstream understands risk assessment and that priority No. 1 is safety of the consumer, so the allowance for risk there is narrow. We cannot risk the health of the consumer with potential microbiological contaminants or allergens, for example. So, we have stringent specs and systems in place to ensure that every single product that leaves our facility does not have any risks to the consumer and we have systems in place in the organization to continually mitigate those risks.
These include systems like our SOPs, a HACCP (hazard analysis critical control point) program with various critical control points, and cGMPs (current good manufacturing practices). These govern all processes within our quality management system to ensure adherence to rules set by the regulatory bodies, including the FDA cGMP guidelines and in compliance with 21CFR Part 111.
We also have one major quality management system that manages all of the organization and then it has its branches, accountabilities and written documentation. Additionally, we audit ourselves on a regular basis and then have third party audits like NSF twice a year. Following the audits, NSF gives us a report card and then we fix and cure their findings, which continually drives us to maintain our quality management system in place and allows us to continually improve. Paying attention to consumer complaints is also very important in maintaining quality and we make sure that those complaints are fully vetted and we have a root cause analysis system in place to address them. Once we identify the source of the problem, we also have a Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) system to ensure the problem is corrected and doesn’t occur again in the future.
From a quality assurance perspective overall, I believe the real value here is the philosophical approach. And it can’t just be philosophy. It’s combining the philosophical approach of the organization together with the appropriate systems and processes and putting it into practice. That’s why the platform and foundation of quality and transparency on which Lief was built is very important, along with our regulatory practices, to ensure the highest levels of quality and compliance.
