Metagenics Inc. Chief Executive Brent Eck says he believes the future of healthcare is moving toward lifestyle medicine and that the company, which makes medical foods and nutraceuticals, can play a bigger role in shaping personalized nutrition.
“How many practitioners can actually do [lifestyle medicine]?” Eck said.
The approach is meant to prevent and treat lifestyle-related chronic diseases, such as diabetes, through diet management, exercise, sleep and stress relievers.
Eck said the Aliso Viejo-based company is tailoring products to practitioners, since doctors don’t have the time to serve as nutritionists to patients.
Back to Foundation
The company was founded in 1983. For more than 20 years it focused on exploring the concept of how the right nutrition could improve a patient’s health, but Eck said the company “lost its identity” when senior management changed. The company went from practitioner-focused to consumer-focused, and Eck said that “isn’t the way to go.”
“Our products—professional supplement-grade—are strictly prescribed through physicians. You should not be able to find our products online,” he said. “We shouldn’t be doctors to ourselves—if we are talking about a disease like Type 2 diabetes, both medical foods and dietary supplements should be only available through practitioners.”
He guided the company back to its core customers—practitioners—when he joined in 2015.
While some of the manufacturer’s products are available on Amazon, a legacy of its consumer-focused days, the company is in the process of tightening distribution. Patients can purchase products through their healthcare provider’s office or at metagenics.com with a practitioner code, according to the website.
Eck migrated west to Aliso Viejo from Illinois, where he was executive vice president of U.S. sales, marketing and business development at Fresenius Kabi, a German company that develops products used in infusion, transfusion and clinical nutrition.
Digital Makeover
Eck described himself as a scrappy chief executive and said a key focus when he joined the company was to get it “way more scrappy,” or more precisely, way more digital.
“A lot of what we built was on paper, and part of the digital transformation was to build a suite of tools for practitioners,” he said, noting examples like an e-commerce site, nutritional physical exam app, and other educational tools to help practitioners use nutrition in patient treatment.
The company plans to expand nutrigenomics research—the study of how nutrition interacts with genes to prevent or treat diseases—and collect more data. Eck said it plans to hire “at least a dozen people” in the IT department and in research and development at its headquarters—“making OC the central hub where we grow out R&D, IT infrastructure and distribution.”
It will also open a clinic at the headquarters next year. The center is to run like a functioning medical clinic so the team can understand what works or doesn’t work for practitioners; test viable programs; and collect patient data.
Metagenics will also hire clinic staff this year. It has an office in the Seattle, Wash., area.
In 2012 it moved from San Clemente to its current headquarters, where it has 187 employees.
Data
Eck acknowledged that while he’s a believer in the “quantified self” movement, also known as life logging, which uses technology to get data on a person’s daily life, he believes data can only be optimized in the hands of doctors focused on behavior modification.
“With physician practitioners at the center of changing healthcare [and us] building all these tools to help them engage [patients] as human beings about what [lifestyle] behaviors are creating havoc … we can work to design a lifestyle that works,” he said.
Metagenics generated over $330 million in revenue last year; North America grew about 12%, according to Eck. Strong international markets include Italy, Taiwan and South Africa.
It spends about $20 million a year on product and technology development.
“The biggest challenge is to bring doctors along that whole [lifestyle] medicine journey,” he said, “to convince doctors not to just recommend a few supplements,” but to put nutrition and lifestyle before functional medicine.
The Beginning
Metagenics was co-founded by Jeffrey and Mike Katke.
“They were a nice Midwestern family that were working on nutrition for a chiropractic supply company and decided to launch their own business based in the West Coast,” Eck said. The company is no longer family-owned after a subsidiary of Alticor Inc. bought “a substantial ownership interest in it” in 2009, according to a company press release.
“No name change at all. No impact to Metagenics—still left to run as a totally independent company,” Eck said.
The Business Journal reported that Metagenics had sales of $200 million in 2008.
Ada, Mich.-based Alticor owns direct-sale giant Amway, which sells health, beauty and home-care products.
Among Amway products is Nutrilite, a top-selling vitamin, mineral and dietary supplement brand.
Separately, Metagenics also announced in 2010 its acquisition of Catalina Lifesciences Inc. in Irvine for an undisclosed sum. Catalina makes Bariatric Advantage, supplements designed for bariatric surgery patients. The purchase is part of Metagenics’ offerings as a specialty line focused on helping patients before and after bariatric surgery meet distinct nutritional requirements.
