Business View Magazine | May 2019

315 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MAY 2019 NATROL LLC needed to be marketed, sold, and legally labeled. “It laid the legal groundwork so that nutritional companies knew what they could and couldn’t do relative to the FDA (Food & Drug Administration), what claims they could make, what they could say to consumers, and how they could communicate the benefits of their products,” recounts Andrew Houlberg, Natrol’s CEO since 2007. “Natrol continued expanding,” Houlberg continues. “By 1997, we occupied a 90,000- sq.ft. manufacturing facility, where we are today. In 1998, Natrol went public, listed on NASDAQ as NTOL. Throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s, Mr. Balbert acquired multiple companies as part of the expansion plan including Essentially Pure Ingredients, Prolab Sports Nutrition, Pure-Gar, and Laci Le Beau.” Mr. Balbert was also a genius marketer. With every new product launch, he demanded healthy advertising budgets across mass media, beginning in health-conscious magazines, and then expanding to mainstream magazines such as TV Guide, McCall’s, Family Circle and Woman’s Day. In 1990, Natrol began advertising on CNN’s Larry King Live with Mr. Balbert hawking Natrol products on- air in an interview format with Larry King, himself. At the beginning of the new century, however, Natrol found itself facing marketplace changes that were beyond the company’s control. A decline in the overall dietary supplements sector was attributed to new studies questioning the validity of health claims of nutritional supplements, poor quality products from competitors with lower quality ingredients, an overall slump in the consumer marketplace, and market saturation. In spite of the marketplace challenges, the Natrol brand had become so well known for its quality that it helped the company weather the fickle nature of consumer trends. In 2006, roughly a decade after herbal sleep aid Melatonin first hit U.S. markets, Natrol’s Melatonin became the number one selling brand