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Mother Knows Best

Everyone should love his mother-in-law as much as Jim Beck does.

Beck, chief executive of Brea-based Nature’s Best, affectionately calls her the company’s “chief emotional officer”,with good reason.

Shirley Lindberg Hallstein, the company matriarch, is in her 70s and still serves as chair of the distributor of vitamins, supplements and health food with yearly sales of $300 million.

She has carried on the dream of her late husband Robert Lindberg for more than 30 years, keeping a united front at the family business.






“She really just drives family values down through the children and into the company,” Beck said. “She has carried on her late husband’s philosophy of a family that stays together is stronger.”

Nature’s Best was honored with the large business award at the annual Family Owned Business luncheon put on by the Business Journal and California State University, Fullerton’s Family Business Council. It was held Nov. 16 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.

Nature’s Best has a history that will give anyone the warm-fuzzies.

The Lindbergs’ story dates back to another matriarch’s innovation in the 1940s.

Gladys Lindberg,Shirley’s mother-in-law,was tired of her kids coming home sick from school. She read up on nutrition and vitamins, searching for alternative remedies.

“She was looking for a better way to take care of her children,” Beck said.

Inadvertently she created the first vitamin packs,portable packets of a variety of daily vitamins. She put them into small cellophane parcels inside her kids’ lunchboxes.

“That was the beginning of the Lindberg vitamin pack,” Beck said.

The Lindberg pack later was sold out of the family’s home. The family produced the packets by hand for years.

When Gladys’ son Robert went to college for engineering, he drew up plans for the first automated vitamin packaging machine.

The products soon went mass market.


Started With Store

In 1949, the Lindbergs opened the first Lindberg Nutrition Service store in Los Angeles.

In the next 20 years, the chain grew to 11 shops and became known as one of the health food industry’s first superstores.

That led the Lindbergs to help start a distribution business, Nature’s Best, in 1969 along with a group of other health food retailers.

In a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in El Segundo, the young company distributed products via its own trucks to health food stores from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Eventually, the Lindbergs bought out the company’s 50 other owners.

They remain the sole owners of the privately held company today.

Randy Lindberg, Robert’s son, served as the company’s president and chief executive for 33 years.

Jim Beck, Randy’s brother-in-law, served for 25 years as its chief information officer before becoming president in 2005.

Company ownership is going to stay in the family, Beck said.

“The plan is to make sure that the ownership is passed down,” Beck said. “As far as the executive management of the company, there isn’t a specific plan today other than for myself to continue as president.”

The Lindberg siblings set to own the business are Randy, Lorie (Beck’s wife), Lisa and Rohn.

Other family members are active in the business.

Lisa Lindberg Van Nortwick is married to a buyer at the company, Gerry Van Nortwick. Lisa doesn’t work for the company,she’s a ceramic artist.

Jason Beck, son of Jim and Lorie, runs the data center.

Shirley’s sister, Beverly Hogan, is the receptionist.

Beck, 52, said the story of his career is like a turtle on a fencepost.

“You know he didn’t get up there by himself,” he quipped.

He said he owes his success to the company’s trio of non-family executives.

“These are the guys that got me on top of the fencepost,” he said.

Tom Echolds, the senior vice president of sales, has been with the company for 26 years.

Tim Groff, the chief financial officer, has served for 17 years.

Russell Parker, vice president of purchasing and operations, has worked at Nature’s Best for seven years.

And Brian McCarthy, vice president of distribution, has been there for three years.

“The reason we have such a strong leadership team is that those individuals share the same family values that Shirley does,” Beck said.

It’s Shirley’s guidance that keeps the family from squabbling.

“Certainly there are disagreements,” Beck said. “But in the end Shirley’s ability to maintain her values keeps everyone in line.”

That, and a team of outside professionals.

Present at company meetings are an estate attorney, a tax attorney and financial chief Groff.

“Having the meetings moderated by an attorney has really been the difference for us,” Beck said. “In a family owned business you have varying levels of understanding of legal issues. And if you leave it up to the family members to work through those you can have conflict.”

As the company grew, previous generations passed down its expertise, according to Beck.

“We are a pretty together group,” he said. “The business is sufficiently competitive enough that it really doesn’t leave a lot of room for any one family individual to take it too far off-track.”

Thirty years ago, when Shirley and her husband ran the business, buyers of natural health remedies and foods had to look far and wide.

It’s now a $70 billion yearly industry, according to figures from the Natural Products Association, a trade group.

The products Nature’s Best carries range from organic foods, nutritional supplements and herbs to personal care items and frozen foods.

The company delivers to more places than ever including health and natural food stores, supermarkets, restaurants, colleges, schools and drug stores.

It carries more than 19,000 products to retailers in the Western U.S. including Hawaii and Alaska, as well as to Hong Kong and the Philippines.

Nature’s Best learned how to change with the times.

It stuck out every passing fad,from the bodybuilding craze of the 1980s to the organic revolution of the 1990s.

“Some of the misconceptions of old are now going away,” Beck said.

The natural health industry is “becoming much more visible and much more mainstream. Even companies as big as Wal-Mart are starting to talk about organic products,” he said.

The company has deals with about 1,200 suppliers and brings in as many as a hundred products a week, Beck said.

“Our industry is all about new product innovation and our business is about that, too,” he said. “It’s our job to get that in front of the consumer.”

Nature’s Best’s biggest customers include Costa Mesa-based Mother’s Market, Thousand Oaks-based Lassen’s Natural Food & Vitamins, San Luis Obispo-based New Frontiers Natural Foods, Phoenix-based Sprout’s Farmers Markets and Down to Earth Natural Foods in Hawaii.


Buyout Offers

With 20% yearly sales growth, Nature’s Best gets buyout offers “all the time,” Beck said.

The company remains committed to the “little guy”,small, independent health food stores not unlike the Lindbergs’ early shops.

“There’s a cultural connection between our company and the independent retailer,” Beck said. “The real interest we have is in innovation,and these are the guys who do it.”

Once a year in October, Nature’s Best hosts its own mini-trade show.

The company invites about 300 of its suppliers to its Brea warehouse to learn about new products and chat face-to-face.

“Our customers are family-owned businesses as well,” Beck said. “It’s nice to be able to invite them to our house.”

Nature’s Best has thrived in Orange County for more than 20 years. But a big chunk of its operation is moving up the road.

The company has outgrown its Brea space and couldn’t find enough industrial space in OC’s tight market.

Nature’s Best now operates out of 350,000 square feet of space in four buildings in Brea and a warehouse in Honolulu.

The company has plans to move its warehouse to neighboring Chino, a shift that allows its 400 employees to stay put, Beck said.

“It was a combination of finding a place that worked financially and that wasn’t too far from our employee base,” Beck said. “We were concerned about staying close to Brea.”

Some of Nature’s Best workers commute from as far away as Los Angeles and Victorville.

Beck and his family live in Rolling Hills Estates on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The company is set to move into a 410,000-square-foot warehouse in Chino by the end of next year, Beck said. He’s secured a 15-year lease.

The distribution center is set to move, but the headquarters,and its workers,will stay here.

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