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Archive for December, 2011

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New Phone Thursday

Posted by adianutrition on December 29, 2011

I don’t have a picture today because the camera function on my droid is broken. That’s what she said. The new droid should be here later today, and hopefully Wen can get everything fixed by the time I leave for the day at 2pm. I asked Wen for a picture, but she refused.

I wasn’t sure if we (me) was going to be blogging this week, as I had hoped to take most of the week off, but there is so much going on that I got stuck in the office over the break. And, well, instead of actually working so I can get out of here, I’ve decided to blog.

We had a great Christmas break. Jenny sold the very first box of Unsweetened Green Tea, and April sold the very first box of Adia Sport, with Electrolytes. The Adia Sport has had rave reviews around the office, and we’ve discovered that the local Chinese population (Wen) LOVES the Unsweetened Green Tea. The new Mango Orange and the new Berry also had some nice comments.

So we have these great flavors, we have the product in a couple of Whole Foods stores, but we don’t have them up on the website yet, and there’s a very good reason for that. We don’t have professional pictures yet. Which is also Wen’s task for today. Our webmaster is moving to Taiwan at the end of the month, and we need to hire a new one. Wen has a friend who does it, along with taking professional photographs, so she’s off today to meet with him.

That’s our priority for the next couple of days. Website, whole foods and a big project we have coming in January.

I have two interesting stories that you have to read.

Here’s the first one:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/financialservices/utilities/8976692/Bacteria-unleashed-in-sewers-to-feast-on-Christmas-dinner-fat.html

Yorkshire Water is dumping trillions of bacteria into the sewer system to prevent blockages. People in England dump hot fat, oil and grease down the drain. The fats then solidify, blocking the pipes. This is an attempt to prevent the sewers from backing up into homes. Interesting, right?

Here’s the second article, from the New York Times, who have jumped on the bacteria bandwagon like a bacillus cell eating fat in a British sewer:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/bacteria-1-f-d-a-0/?ref=opinion

If you read the article carefully, it will make you very angry. The FDA has been ‘evaluating’ the practice of feeding antibiotics to farm animals since 1977. The’ve never done anything about it, except to ask the farmers to voluntarily police themselves. Which has never happened. Instead, what has happened is that 80% of the antibiotics produced in America end up being fed to farm animals, and now, based on a recent survey, 47% of meat contains bacteria. Half of that bacteria is resistant to at least three types of antibiotics.

So, when you go to the grocery store, there’s a 25% chance you’ll consume potentially fatal bacteria that doesn’t respond to commonly prescribed drugs.

Make sure you thoroughly cook your food.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Merry Christmas

Posted by adianutrition on December 22, 2011

This is Wen in her reindeer costume. It’s a good look for her, she has probiotic horns. As of now, Carl is still in the running for car magnet, but he hasn’t won yet. There’s still time to comment…..Bryan.

Yesterday afternoon we picked up samples of the Sport flavor and the Unsweetened Green Tea flavor. They’re both fantastic. The Green Tea has just a hint of lemon, and the lemon/lime takes like a certain sports drink that used to sponsor Michael Jordan.

Here’s a picture of the lemon/lime box:

Very well done. Today we get the 8 pallets shipped from the factory to our warehouse, and tomorrow we make the first delivery to a chain of stores that we will talk about next week! Big news coming!

I’ve got a couple of news stories to talk about. The first is from the New York Times, which is not a paper known for covering a lot of bacteria. Actually, I’m sure the actual paper has covered a lot of bacteria, but their journalists haven’t written about it. Here’s the story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/health/fearing-terrorism-us-asks-journals-to-censor-articles-on-virus.html?_r=2

I wrote a couple of blog posts about this a month ago. Finally, the US government is stepping up and “asking” Nature and Science magazine not to publish the details of HOW TO MAKE A FLU THAT WILL KILL EVERYONE!!!!!!

There’s some babble about censorship, which is just crazy talk. This is not censorship, this is common sense. And yes, there’s a difference. If these journals publish this information, some lonely 16 year old comic store clerk in Iowa is going to make it in his basement and end the world. We can’t let that happen. Or rather, hopefully, these two journals won’t allow this to happen.

But to give credit where credit is due (me), we were ahead of this story. We scooped the New York Times. Again.

Here’s the backstory to the second article. My wife and kids spent most of yesterday baking cookies for Santa. They were delicious. I found this yesterday:

http://marshallwilsonblog.com/eating-raw-cookie-dough-can-make-you-sick/

So, don’t eat cookie dough.

One of our customers has done a study on how the different flavors of chews affect the timing of her bowel movements. My Christmas gift to you is not to write about it.

Have a great holiday!

 

Posted in bacteria, food safety, probiotic, probiotic and weight loss, probiotic chews, probiotic experiment, probiotic powder, probiotic research | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Lemon lime, flesh eating bacteria and the Catholic Church

Posted by adianutrition on December 21, 2011

 

Here’s a picture of Wen with a stick of Balanced Berry right in front of the machine that packs it into sticks. See the hair net? She’s still wearing it. She thinks that hairnet brings the sexy (I agree. I’m still wearing mine, and people are staring).

We watched the manufacturing process for a while, and there really isn’t that much to it. The foil wrapper is cut into six pieces, it’s sealed at the bottom and along the side. It’s filled with powder, then it’s sealed at the top.  All of that happens automatically. The sealed packets are then put onto a short conveyor belt that rises about three feet into the air, and deposits them into a tray.

Finally, the first humans get involved. They pick up the packets, weigh them, then put them into a box. When they fill the box, they seal it, then start again. In the case of the Berry, this happened 980 times. I watched this, then started having flashbacks.

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, and when I went back home during the Christmas break, I would work to make money to pay for my plane ticket back, books, etc. I would call an employment agency, and they would find me some job for the three week period. One holiday season, I got sent to an ink factory. It was the same kind of thing. The ink container was put onto a belt. It was filled, sealed and then someone put it into a box and put tape on it. My job was to put the empty ink container on the conveyor belt. For 8 hours. I felt like I had mastered the nuances of the job after about 45 minutes, and I was ready to lose my mind after 2 hours. After the first day, I was chatting with the guy whose job it was to put the containers into boxes. He said he liked the job, it was a little boring, but he had been there for 22 years.

Tragically, after three days, I was fired in front of the whole company. I had called in sick, mainly, because I was sick, and the manager had a staff meeting where he said part time workers weren’t allowed to call in sick, and to finish my day and don’t come back. I left immediately. I don’t think my spot was too hard to fill. It reminded me of the people doing this job. I know it’s drudgery, but it is so important to us and we really appreciate it.

The Berry is all done, the Lemon Lime is all done (Yahoo!!!) and our warehouse space is ready to go! They’re working on the fluffy green tea, and with any luck, by late this afternoon, we should have progress on that as well.

This production process has been very frustrating. Last Wednesday, I was sitting in my gym clothes ready to train with Gina when I checked my email and everything literally fell apart. I changed back, ran up, had a quick conversation with Gina, then spent the rest of the day on the phone. And it’s been going like that since Wednesday.

Sure enough, while I’m typing this, the packers call and there’s another problem with the green tea.

Ok, on to the news:

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/20/9588670-boys-survival-from-flesh-eating-bacteria-deemed-a-miracle-by-his-family-and-the-pope

This is the most insane news story I have ever linked to. And I’ve set the bar pretty high.

A 6-year-old kid is playing basketball at the Boys and Girls Club. He hits his mouth on the base of the basket, and gets flesh-eating bacteria which almost kills him.

His family starts praying to ask a 17th century Native American convert to Catholicism to intercede for him. The boy gets sicker and sicker. The parents are pulled in to say goodbye. The son gets better and is now well, but with some horrific scarring.

The Pope then sends over a doctor and a nun to verify this as a miracle, which they do, and the Pope has now made the native american a saint.

You have to read the article. It’s awesome.

In other news, the guy who invented the bird flu which can kill everyone is finally starting to get some mainstream press. I’d like to point out we were all over this months ago. Weeks ago.

This our 100th post. Thanks for reading, and have a great holiday.

 

Posted in bacteria, contagion, probiotic, probiotic powder, probiotics and behavior, probiotics and children, probiotics and health | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Orange is DONE! And our symbol has changed

Posted by adianutrition on December 20, 2011

This is a picture of the big machine that takes our revolutionary probiotic powder and puts it into little pouches. It’s in a clean room, so Wen was wearing a plastic covering over her head when she took this picture. So was I, except I rocked that thing.

We had quite the drama yesterday. We got a crazy phone call first thing in the morning from the packing people who claimed that our powder was too fluffy to pack. Which is just crazy talk. So we had to run out there to see it, meet the production people and see what was what.

It turns out that when the powder is stirred, it gets fluffy, but the key is to wait a while for the powder to settle. Wen figured that out, which is why she’s in charge. She’s still wearing her pretty head covering.

But as of this morning, all the Orange Mango was done, and the packing people were working on the Berry. They expect to finish the Berry this afternoon followed by the Sport and tomorrow they finish the Green Tea. So we are back on track production wise.

In other news, our stock symbol has changed to “ADIA”. So if you punch that into your quote screen, you can see where we’re trading (2.5 cents per share). Hopefully, this is the little acorn that becomes the mighty oak. Or put another way, hopefully we grow VIRALLY!! (Bacterially?).

Ape was over at Sports Club LA yesterday, which is really a trendy health club in Irvine. She’s been spending a lot of time at these yuppie health clubs, and she’s doing a great job. Except she hasn’t got us free memberships, so that’s her goal for this week. Because if someone ever needed a free membership at a gym, it’s me.

We had our last holiday party last night. It was great, and it’s great that it’s over. Now I need to recover, and I need to sleep for about 16 hours to feel normal again. I have so much ridiculous work to do that I can’t see straight.

Here’s today’s article:

http://io9.com/5869343/

It’s a discussion about how the first complex cell might be an accidental byproduct of a bacterial invasion. It’s interesting. Kind of.

Have a great Tuesday everyone!

Posted in bacteria, Equinox, probiotic, probiotic chews, probiotic powder, Probiotic tasting, probiotics and alcohol, water | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Sports Club LA – And Green Tea

Posted by adianutrition on December 19, 2011

We are having a special Adia holiday contest. From now until Friday, whoever posts the most comments will receive, free of charge, an Adia car magnet. Be the envy of your neighborhood. Impress your friends. Make your parents proud. Mix your metaphors.

So here comes the big week. Production. Today we head over to the co-packer to pick up the first run of Adia Unsweetened Green Tea. We are very excited, and we hope to post pictures tomorrow.

This was the last big weekend before Christmas, and for our family, with all the kids activities and friends, the last 8 days have been insane. We’ve had events every night, and for some reason, friends I haven’t seen all year choose these two weeks to get together. Which makes no sense to me. We have the ENTIRE year to hang out, but you want to squeeze in dinner the week before Christmas. Baffling.

But it’s winding down. Tonight is the last activity of until the 23rd. In other words, tonight is the last activity until Friday. Then we have three quick events, and voila! Christmas. Followed by college football.

On a tangent, we note the passing of legendary golfer, film star and North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Il shot a 38 the first time he played golf, including 11 holes in one. He also claimed not to produce urine or feces like a regular human, and he had staff members inspect every grain of rice to ensure they were all equal. I guess since the rice was never leaving his body, he wanted consistency. He was the one person on the planet who would have not benefitted from probiotics.

On to todays other news. Here’s the link:

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/new-ozone-and-hydrogen-superweapons-kills-bacteria-without-remorse-14-12-2011/

It’s a way to sterilize operating rooms by pumping them full of ozone. It kills all bacteria through some scientific method that has lots of capital letters and numbers. It’s very cool.

So make sure you do that.

Have a great Monday!

Posted in bacteria, probiotic, probiotic chews, probiotic powder, probiotics and alcohol, probiotics and health | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

New banners and new production issues

Posted by adianutrition on December 16, 2011

Here’s a picture of the new banner we got from Randy Carr. It’s amazing. But this is not a great picture, because you can’t tell how tall it is. Let me try it with Wen in the picture.

Is that better? Wen’s about 5’2″, so that banner has to be 9 feet tall. It’s going to kill when we put it out in public. Why is she holding her hand on her head?

We had more production problems on Thursday, but I think we got them all solved Thursday night.

Our packer (the people who put the powder into the stick packs) started our run on Wednesday night. But the powder was too fluffy to run normally. So they had to stop the run, open all the packs and put it onto a different machine.

People have said a lot of things about me, but no one has ever accused me of being to fluffy. But I guess it depends on what you mean by fluffy.

This was on top of the nightmare we had getting the actual powder over to the packing plant. One of the great things about our process is the system of double checks we have at both the powder maker and the packer.

The powder maker runs a bunch of tests on the bacteria to make sure the counts are right, followed by other tests to verify percentages, ingredients, etc. Then they certify the product and ship it to the packer.

The packer then runs the same types of tests to ensure the product that is shipped to them is the same product that’s described on the shipping bill.

The challenge we had on Thursday was that the manufacturer forgot to send the shipping bill. So the packer got several random kegs of powder with no shipping bill or list of ingredients.

Then we went through the circus of trying to get that together in time to save a 1pm cutoff to make the packing schedule for the next day.

Which we did. Which was followed by me falling asleep at my desk from exhaustion. This whole process is just so different. Normally I can solve all my issues by asking Wen. And if I don’t get the answer I want, I keep asking until she figures out how to do it.

So on Monday, we’ll have our first set of Green Tea boxes. I’ll post pictures when I get them.

One last story on this. We are spending some time with Carl, who we really like and want to figure out how to work with. When I described the first debacle, he sent me a text offering his help.

Then when I didn’t return his text immediately, he sent a text that the easiest solution would be to have more than one vendor. So, when he comes to visit us early next year, I’m going to pour a beer on his head. Carl, you’re warned.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2074693/Half-orange-juice-served-cafes-contain-bacteria-salmonella-scientists-say.html?ITO=1490

Today’s news story comes from the Daily Mail again, who seems to write a lot of stories about food poisoning. They’re the source for fecal contamination of cell phones.

Now they’ve tested Orange Juice in cafes and found half of it’s contaminated.

Instead of avoiding Orange Juice, you may be better off just staying out of London.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Posted in bacteria, probiotic, probiotic chews, probiotic powder, probiotic research, probiotics and health | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Holiday Party at Tommy Bahamas

Posted by adianutrition on December 15, 2011

Wen is taking over the blog today!

I have a personal blog which I try to manage everyday. The blog is mostly about food I ate and places I went. So, since I am in charge of this blog today, I’m going to write about food…nay….beer!

We went to Tommy Bahamas Island Grille for Adia Holiday Party yesterday. After going through a rough working day, you have no idea how much I appreciated this Happy Hour Party.

We sat down at the bar first, and first thing we ordered was Allagash. Shelly has been talking about how great Allagash tastes. I’ve been wanting to try but couldn’t. Shelly finished the last two bottles of Allagash we had in the office.

I saw this frozen glass with iced cold beer in front me. I then had my first smile of the day.

Yes, the picture below is my empty glass. If you hang out with me often enough, you’d notice I have this bad habit of not finishing any sort of drinks. But this Allagash…..look at my glass. Do I need to say more?

I heard that Allagash is hard to find, so I’m going to give Tommy Bahama 5 stars on Yelp for having Allagash on tap!

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Holiday party and new adventures in manufacturing

Posted by adianutrition on December 14, 2011

The reason for this picture will make sense soon.

We have been leading up to this week for the last 4 months. We’ve been taste testing, working with the lab and developing four amazing flavors that we are ready to unleash right before Christmas. This is our gift to the world.

So everything comes down to this week. There are three manufacturers involved. The box maker, who simply prints the boxes, which we’ve shown. Those boxes were made, and delivered a month ago. They’re in good shape.

Then there’s the foil wrapper. That guy went college with my wife. We had some delays with them before, but they tend to get stuff together quickly once everyone agrees on colors, etc. We had a little bump in the road with them last week, but they got the foil over to the place it needed to go on Monday night.

The last and most important part of this is the actual probiotic powder itself. It’s made in a lab, packed into kegs, and shipped to a factory who then verifies the ingredients against the foil wrapper, puts the powder in the wrapper and then seals it into stick pack.

The stick pack people are running 24/7 and are the hardest people to work with. Because if everything isn’t there 48 hours in advance, they give away the manufacturing spot to someone else, and you can’t another spot for two months. So if it’s not at the stick pack place by Monday, there’s a good chance we won’t be able to get these flavors out until March.

We reserved a spot with them in September on the earliest available date, which was in December. So it was critical to get the powder there on time.

And over and over again, the powder people said it would happen.

It didn’t happen.

It was supposed to happen on Friday, but something happened on Friday, then it didn’t happen on Friday, there was a lot of nonsense back and forth, but the bottom line is the powder company didn’t get the powder over to where it needed to be.

So I yelled at Wen, then Wen yelled at the powder people. Then I yelled at the powder people and Wen yelled at me. Then Jay yelled at me, and I yelled at Wen. Basically, everyone yelled at Wen.

And then Wen and I offered to load up our cars and drive the powder over there ourselves. But, no, the powder people were going to take care of it.

So, finally, at 2:30pm, yesterday, half the powder get there. We breathe a big sigh of relief, because we made the deadline.

Until we come in this morning and find that powder people shipped the powder without a packing list or certificate of ingredient. So the nothing can happen until those get there. In fact, the packer can’t officially receive the product.

Another crisis erupts this morning.

We call the person over at the powder company. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know why the remainder of the powder wasn’t shipped last night, she doesn’t know if the remainder of the powder has a packing slip or certificate of ingredients. Basically, she doesn’t know anything.

And after two more hours of this, we are finally starting to get it sorted out. Hopefully by tomorrow night, we can get the first couple boxes off the line and show you. But you will never know what we went through to get it.

And if we can’t get this together in the 30 minutes, Wen and I are going to get in those cars and move it ourselves.

Posted in probiotic powder | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Holiday Party Week

Posted by adianutrition on December 13, 2011

Laura brought some cookies into the office yesterday for Wen, April and me. I have no willpower and immediately devoured half of them at 10am followed by a Teryaki bowl from Koba Tofu Grill.

Why am I telling you this? Because every single cookie left in this picture was just inhaled by Wen who literally took both hands and JAMMED everything into her face. Strange, really.

Today we are trying to make sure all of our raw powder and foil wrappers get to the manufacturing plant so we can start our production run tomorrow. This whole manufacturing process is a new challenge for me. I’m used to working with companies that don’t actually MAKE anything, so the idea of sitting around waiting for someone to call me back from a factory floor is baffling.

Wen is in charge of coordinating this, and we end up having conversations like this:

Wen: Ok, they’re going to deliver one flavor today.
Me: What happened to the two flavors that were ready to ship on Friday?
Wen: The delivery department didn’t get the message.
Me: What message?
Wen: The message to deliver.
Me: So where are my 1,000 pounds of probiotic powder?
Wen: At the factory.
Me: What?
Wen: I don’t really know.
Me: Could you take these scissors and just stick them through my head please.
Wen: I hate my job.

On the bright side, I found a place that serves Allagash beer on tap. Tommy Bahama’s off of Avocado. I wonder if they’re open for breakfast.

Posted in probiotic powder | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Big week for Adia

Posted by adianutrition on December 12, 2011

A number of you have asked to see what I look like when I work out. So this weekend, I took a couple of videos. Here’s the first one. Normally I do this with one hand, holding the camera with the other, but I did this in the early morning and everything was slippery. Enjoy

Here’s another one of me doing pullups with my knees bent. I do this to work my shoulders and core: Regular pullups are for amateurs.

Yes, I am a 30 year old blonde woman with a wife and three kids. You didn’t ask, and I’m not telling.

Pretty amazing, isn’t it? These videos are actually from Gina, my trainer and our fitness model. When I called her this morning to ask if could post her video, I also asked her why I wasn’t training like this. Her response? Because the only way you could do a pullup is if I surgically removed everything below your chest.

That’s not what she said, she was very kind. “Well…..umm……we’ll work up to it.”, which is much nicer than saying, “Sure, let’s go to the gym in fantasy land and we’ll get right on it”. I make her sound gruff, she is truly one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.

Anyway, this is the biggest week in Adia history. Today we have the raw powder (hopefully) being shipped over to be put into stick packs and boxes. We have the film being run at the film vendor and if things go well, by Thursday we should have our four new flavors for sale.

We’ve been working up to this for a while, and the last production run had some problems. So I’m a bit nervous about how things go this week. I plan to spend a lot of time driving around from place to place and annoying Wen. A normal week, in other words.

We also have five big meetings with a national retailer. I can’t give out the name yet, but we received approval to get our products into their stores, and this is the week we go to the store managers to get it on the shelves. This is also a huge step, and we’re excited and nervous about that.

We should have a whole different perspective on everything by Friday. Hang in there with us!

Posted in probiotic, probiotic and weight loss, probiotic research, probiotics and health, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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