Business View Magazine | December 2018

100 101 think we’ve done so, pretty well.” Today, XYMOGEN supplies approximately 12,000 practitioners, offering over 400 products made from 1,200 different ingredients. Its biggest markets are the United States and Canada, but it also has clients in South Korea, South Africa, Indo- nesia, China, and Iran. Its 430 employees work out of its 240,000-square-foot, Orlando headquarters, and a distribution outlet in Mississauga, Ontario. Its raw materials, as well as its knowledge base, come from all over the world. According to Blackburn, the company’s manu- facturing facility is the newest in the industry, and it’s about to get much bigger. “Our purpose-built manufacturing facility is 136,000 square feet and we are outgrowing that,” he relates. “So, it was very fortuitous that there’s a moving com- pany next door that went out of business, right when we were looking for space. That opened up 120,000 more square feet for us and now we’re close to 260,000 square feet. And that’s enabled us to move forward with many new initiatives.” “One is called Private Label Now,” Blackburn continues. “Private labels are very common in all industries, but I don’t know that any other compa- ny in any industry has anything quite like it. Our customers are practitioners and our minimum or- der is 12 bottles; so they might call up and order 12 of one, 24 of another. In this regulatory envi- ronment, you have to go through several steps to XYMOGEN get the labels approved and reviewed and then printed and then put on the bottles; typically, it can take from one to two weeks.” “So, we came up with this program, where we review the historical usage of each of our custom- ers - we have about 500 private label customers - and we pre-label, based on their history, three months worth of product and store it here. There are so many benefits to that: number 1–we’re able to do it on our high speed labeler, instead of putting them on by hand.We’re running these at a hundred bottles a minute. The big advantage for the customer is when they call, the order goes out the day they order, so they get it right away. Number 2 - some of them end up not ordering on time and this way, they don’t have to worry about back orders, because we always have inventory for them. Number 3 - we’re able to do fulfillment, so now, they can have their patients go onto our e-store and they can order their products and we can ship the private label direct to their patients. So, it’s rather an extraordinary service that we’re able to provide and it’s grown our private label 35 percent over our general business. That took a lot of room, because we have about 400 differ- ent products in our product line, and that’s about 8,000 different, individual SKUs if you add up all the customers’ private label products. So we had to come up with 8,000 bins to store all these products and that’s where the additional space next door, really helped out.” Another area for growth is XYMOGEN’s contract manufacturing (CMO) division which provides product for other companies. “That now rep-