Posted on 10/04/2009 7:10:11 AM PDT by Born Conservative
PITTSTON TWP. – A group of inventors from China has found a way to take water, the nation’s top-selling bottled drink, and infuse it with omega-3 fatty acids, the second-best-selling supplement. And Nature’s Way Pure Water Systems Inc., the Pittston-area bottler, will be the only source in the U.S. of the revolutionary product for years to come.
The product is going into limited-batch testing in December, followed by full production in January.
“Omega-3, next to multivitamins, that’s the No. 2 item that’s sold in health stores throughout the country … but it’s never been in water because (the industry) never had the technology to break it down,” the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer Sandy Insalaco said. “They (the inventors) have chemically engineered a way where they can break that down and it blends with the water and it is tasteless and odorless. … This is going be a vitamin water plus omega-3. That’s something that no one else can duplicate in the country.”
Insalaco himself knows the combination’s potential benefit: he takes six omega-3 tablets a day, a total of 650 milligrams. They’re large pills, hard to swallow, he says. But omega-3 is what’s known as an “essential fatty acid,” one that the body requires but doesn’t manufacture on its own.
If each bottle of water has perhaps 75 milligrams of the supplement in it, just keeping hydrated could provide all of the omega-3 needed each day.
The achievement is one of many at the company since Insalaco signed on about eight years ago.
. “They (the inventors) saw the total package here: quality assurance, logistics, everything. This is what we do. They just said they would rather partner with us because they thought that was the easiest way to get it to market,” Insalaco said. “I think we’ve changed the company with new technology. … It has paid off in our ability to attract some of the best clients in the country.”
The company is licensed to ship water throughout the country and currently ships to about 30 states and Canada. For a period several years ago when another bottler was having problems, Nature’s Way became the only U.S. supplier for Starbucks, shipping to all 50 states.
Insalaco plans to keep adding to the company’s success far into the future. “I prefer death to retirement,” he said. “I really, really enjoy this. It’s new, the technology is phenomenal.”
When his family sold its supermarket chain in 1993, Insalaco was 53 and, by his own words, “a little young to retire.” His relatives were involved in the family-owned Insalaco Development Group, but he decided to branch out into an industry about which he knew nothing. “I’m a fast learner. … The growth over the last 10 years (in U.S. bottled water sales) has been phenomenal,” he said. “I spent my life in the supermarket business and the real estate business. … It’s not that big a transition.”
About 90 percent of the company’s business is in bottling for store-brand customers. It trucks water from springs in West Hazleton and White Haven and also bottle city water that is distilled, deionized or treated through reverse osmosis.
Insalaco acknowledges the omega-3 partnership is “an opportunity of a lifetime, to say the least.” Any development in the industry so far “pales in comparison to what this will do in the marketplace,” he said. “Something with this type of tech in the water industry isn’t going to come by tomorrow. This is the most dramatic change that we’ve ever seen.”
Details of how the water will be marketed aren’t finalized yet, he said, but noted that the price will, obviously, be more than the average bottle of water. “It’s not going to be double the price of a vitamin water … (but) it’s going to be a higher priced item,” he said. “The cost of vitamins is expensive. … We’re going to establish the value in it because it has more value that a regular bottle of water. … If you drink a bottle or two of this every day, the bottom line is you’re going to get a substantial amount of Omega 3 in your system.”
Geographically, Insalaco hasn’t gotten far since he graduated from West Pittston High School in 1957, but he’s proud to have never lived elsewhere. “I never had any ambitions to leave the area,” he said. “I felt this was as good any area to conduct business as anywhere in the country. And that’s been proven over many times.”
He said the area never gets too active when times are vibrant and never too depressed when they’re meager. That even-keeled mentality and residents’ work ethic makes for a stable economy, he said. “I’ve been in 45 states. Never found one that I like more than this area. I love the change of the seasons,” he said.
Though he spends roughly 50 hours each week at the office, Insalaco also enjoys outdoors activities. He has a 75-acre summer home in the Beaumont area, and he rides snowmobiles and hunts for bear, wild boar and deer.
>> Beware of mercury and lead in the Chinese water.
Hey, good point! I may purchase and stockpile it — metals should be a good commodity investment going forward. :-)
Fish oil capsules can have mercury in them.
Somehow the fact the water is from Pennsylvania doesn’t make me feel much better about lead and mercury levels!
A lot of fish products can, including canned tuna.
>> Fish oil capsules can have mercury in them.
That’s why I get my Omega 3’s from goldfish and guppies. They’re low on the seafood chain. And they taste great on Saltines.
That says it all. China will soon overtake the United States as the dominant country in the world and here's why. China encourages inventors while we focus on lawyers and community organizers.
"I like mine with a twist."
I know, I only mentioned the capsules because my chemical engineer husband just recently told me about that. I still take them, I still eat tuna, I am growing an extra arm.
Remind me not to leave you alone with my son’s aquarium! LOL
I have read the vitamins break down in water so by the time you drink it you are only drinking water....
Yes, you can now join the millions of happy and prosperous Chinese citizens taking advantage of the growing numbers of American and Western multinational corporations “outsourcing” their production to the hard-working and industrious people of China. This outsourcing has now spread to their food supplies and ingestible items. Since these firms pay us for gross weight – and this new weight will be pretty gross – and the stupid American government only spot-checks imported items in these categories (they just got lucky on the anti-freeze thing), it has opened an entirely new opportunity which our beloved Chairman is offering to any Chinese citizen willing to do a little of what the foolish Americans call “grunt work.”
Installing one of these state-of-the-art food additive production facilities behind YOUR hovel is as simple as clipping the coupon below and sending it to the address shown. Your production plant will be shipped to you in 4 to 6 weeks. Supplies are limited so don’t fart around. ACT NOW!!
These silly Americans have an expression we have “borrowed” and modified to describe this new and exciting venture: “Don’t give me any s**t.”
Our motto will be “We won’t GIVE you any s**t. But we’ll SELL it to you fools at a really great price.”
Better yet, we convince them to COME HERE to pick it up and save us the shipping costs.
AND LOOK FOR A NEW DROP-DEAD MONEY-MAKER COMING SOON. SOYLENT YELLOW PROMISES TO BE BIG!!
AND YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED TO KNOW THAT THE “CHERY” PERSONAL VEHICLE TO BE IMPORTED BY CHRYSLER IS SIMPLY A HORIZONTALLY MODIFIED VARIATION OF THE VERTICAL UNIT SHOWN ABOVE. WE SIMPLY SLAP AN ENGINE AND SOME WHEELS ON THAT PUPPY AND OFF SHE GOES! AMERICA’S VAST ILLEGAL POPULATION OUGHT TO SNAP THEM UP LIKE TACOS.
Omega 3 is a fatty acid, not a vitamin.
LOL
Lol!
Like anything else, it’s home much you take in. Anything is “poison”, depending on the dose.
I remember as a kid playing with a big ball of mercury that my friend had. Today, the mercury in one of the old thermometers is enough for a hazmat response.
Also, when I first started as a RN, we used the old thermometers (about 20 years ago). It wasn’t unusual for them to drop off the table and break. We used a dust buster to clean up the spill.
I’m not saying that this stuff isn’t dangerous, but the environmentalists have created an atmosphere of fear, and it’s gotten to the point of ridiculous.
I just cancelled breakfast... for the next year
That is so TRUE! One night we were out for dinner in Houston with a bunch of Chemical engineers. I mentioned the ammonia truck that overturned in Houston several decades ago and it killed several people when their lungs filled with ammonia fumes. A chemical engineer at our table said too much of ANYTHING in your lungs is deadly, even water! Well said. I still crack up when I rememeber that.
I go to Costco and get liquid CoQ10. mmmmm mmmmmm mmmmmm.
Was that the one in '77 at 610 and the southwest fwy, nearly gassed the staff out the Houston Chronicle? I remember it took 3 hours to get home from school that day.
Anhydrous Ammonia is not like water, it likes water. At the refinery they warned me it would instantly desiccate anything that contacted it. Eyeball shriveled into raisin, that sort of thing.
“A group of inventors from China has found a way to take water, the nation’s top-selling bottled drink, and infuse it with omega-3 fatty acids.”
In an interview one of the inventors, Cu Fo Fun, stated that the breakthrough came when they added melamine and anti-freeze to scum free pond water
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