How long have you been involved in the nutrition field?
A- I’ve been in the nutritional field for about 35 years. I worked for 14
years for Pillsbury which became General Mills then I left that job
and worked another 20 years for a pharmaceutical food Company
called Novartis, a large food corporation.

What did you do for these companies?
A- Well I was in a lowly position with Pillsbury where I was working as
a technician and I was a non-professional. I had a 2 years degree
and then I worked my way up the ladder there and then I became a
food scientist and finally ended up getting a 4-year degree from the
University of Minnesota.

Then when I went to work for Novartis, I ended up working with a
scientist title and I continued to work my way up and I did a lot of
work formulating products, looking at the nutrition of different
products and really following the development of food all the way
up from the research state to full scale manufacturing. Basically a
product development food scientist does everything; they work with
the marketing people of the Company. They help conceive the ideas
for food products like analog products, like a cereal or whatever it
may happen to be. It could also be a fabricated product like a take
off of a baked item. You come up with the idea working with the
marketing people. You would then put together a prototype of the
product idea so that the marketing group would have something
they could look at and actually sit around the conference table and
talk about.

Then as a team you would decide which of these products you’d like
to develop then one of those products would be picked and taken to
the next stage and the product development scientist would begin
to refine that product. It might be improvement in flavor or taste or
texture. The product would be refined and presented again to the
marketing group. There would be another round table discussion
about that particular product and the marketing group would point
to food scientist in the direction he needs to go.

So I would go back to the bench so to speak in the lab and then
make further refinements and then you end up at the first stage of
product development, which would be product approval. Then once
the product is approved by research and marketing then you begin
to pull manufacturing into the picture. Is it possible to manufacture
the product you have been working on, then at that point you have
three groups involved, you have the research and marketing and
manufacturing people then you would all work on development.

At what point do you have to present that to the FDA?
A- Generally it is the responsibility of the product development people
to be aware of the Food and Drug Administrations requirements. So
when I used to work in the lab I had a library of different
regulations called the Federal Code of Regulations. I would be
aware of all the guidelines and I would either take that back to
marketing or present that to whomever I needed to inform.
We would talk about that regulation and whether it would be a
problem in the development of this new product we are working on
and if we agreed it was a problem then we would have to submit
something to the FDA and if it wasn’t a problem we would just
proceed on.

What was the average time limit until the first step until the
product hit the shelf?
A- It’s hard to tell but with the company like one of those mentioned,
we would manufacture products. There were several different
groups and one was a food product service and those would be the
products you are most familiar with. They would be the products
you would see of the shelf in the grocery stores. Then another
group would research what was called the clinical group products
and that particular group would work on developing products that
would be intended for use in clinics and for people that required
special feedings.

The development time and the rules and regulations applied to the
different kinds of products, whether they are food service items or
clinic products. There were regulations that govern the formulation
of and development of and the marketing of all of those different
products. They were all different.

For example, Novartis had a line of weight loss products that were
very popular. It was the Optifast Line. Within that product line I’m
just going to guess there were at least 75 different products. There
were different categories of products, liquid, supplements and there
would be formulas of products intended to be administered through
hospital tube feedings. There were solid foods as opposed to liquid.
It kept getting divided even in the categories because the nutrition
and they had very strict federal guidelines intended for hospital
feeding situations. The products would be tested extensively then
we could be talking years of clinical trials.

Some of the commercials that have been on TV recently have been
very enlightening, I’m not sure if it’s Glaxco, but you’ve seen them
talking about how long it takes to develop a drug. I think that’s just
very enlightening for the public because most people have no idea
what is entailed. Would you agree with this and let our readers in on
some additional information?
A- It does get pretty interesting because the normal consumer groups
will make some blanket statement about how the consumer is
getting ripped off by the drug companies and the pharmaceutical
companies because they are charging 100 times more for their pills
than what it cost to manufacture. That is a fact even with the
dietary products that we would manufacture. They were sold many
times for what is cost to manufacture the product in terms of the
composition and the package and the marketing. You put all that
together and that is just a fraction of the cost if you include the
development of the product. When you figure that the clinical trials
that these products go through can cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Some cases I would have to guess would border on a
million dollars done by some of the larger pharmaceutical
companies.

I am not saying that there isn’t a lot of profit is taken by some of
the pharmaceutical companies but there is another side to the
picture and that would be the testing that goes into some of these
products is something people don’t consider.

That was some very interesting information about the processes
that a single product goes through before reaching our grocery or
******** shelves. Let’s move on to an overview of basic nutrition.

__________________
Christopher Berry
Diabetic Discussion