Cultivating wellness from harvest to headquarters

Modern organizations are increasingly focused on transparency—with good reason, especially for those producing nutritional products. Consumers want to know where their nutritional products come from, how they are processed and why they work the way they do in their bodies before committing to a purchase.

To have a truly transparent supply chain, brands must tell the story of sourcing. And one supplier is making this an easy story to tell.

Kemin Industries is a family-owned, global ingredient supplier headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa. Its Human Nutrition and Health division develops naturally-sourced, functional ingredients for health and wellness brands around the world. The division’s portfolio of branded ingredients has applications for vision, brain, immune and men’s health, weight control and exercise performance.

Growing functional ingredients

From the United States to India, Kemin contracts with farmers to grow non-GMO lines of spearmint, tea, potatoes and marigolds. Kemin’s spearmint, grown for its antioxidant polyphenols, is the first spearmint crop to be Certified Sustainably Grown by SCS Global Services. Branded as Neumentix™, the phenolic ingredient has shown to support working memory, translating to benefits in both cognitive and physical performance.

Kemin takes pride in its leading efforts to minimize environmental impacts. Its exercise performance and recovery ingredient, XSurge™, is extracted from green and black tea grown on Rainforest Alliance Certified fields.

Before scaling up to large farms, Kemin ensures the most efficient non-GMO production of its spearmint and marigold crops by analyzing plant DNA, testing fields and using conventional plant breeding methods to produce hybrids.

“We know consumers want natural ingredients, which is why we invest in our conventional breeding programs,” says Dr. John Greaves, VP of specialty crops. “By mapping plant DNA, we can efficiently optimize our plants to produce the most efficacious natural ingredients.”

Kemin extracts its FloraGLO^® Lutein from dense, pigmented marigolds over twice the size of standard garden marigolds. Many of Kemin’s ingredients are water-extracted using a proprietary, gentle process that retains beneficial molecules and preserves the plant’s natural chemical makeup.  

Creating a culture of wellness

Kemin maintains a rigorous clinical program, partnering with esteemed academic and health institutions to ensure each ingredient provides its intended health benefit to end consumers. The company offers lab services to customers at its Molecular Advancement Center, providing testing and optimization for finished product formulations.

Kemin develops partnerships with its customers to provide technical and marketing support at its state-of-the-art headquarters campus. Opened in 2017, the campus features collaborative workspaces, a 24-hour fitness center, full-service restaurant, outdoor walking paths and on-site greenhouses.

Kemin stays actively involved in the community, centering charitable giving and outreach around nutritional education, affordable housing and disaster relief. As one of the first World Food Programme corporate partners, Kemin provides critical assistance for the organization’s food safety and quality management programs.

“At Kemin Health, we believe everyone deserves the opportunity to live a healthier life,” says Anita Norian, president of the Human Nutrition and Health division. “Our goal is to live out this vision in our everyday work with our customers and our community.”