Tainted Chinese Food Ingredients First Discover...( Wide-spread ingredient quality con...),Health

Wide-spread ingredient quality concerns forced TSI Health Sciences to

change direction.

MISSOULA, Mont., Aug. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In 2005, TSI Health Sciences, a well-respected $50 million dietary supplement industry ingredients supplier based in Missoula, Montana, then known as Technical Sourcing International, was drawn into a wide-spread quality issue with the company's primary Chinese manufacturers. One of their top selling ingredients, chondroitin (sulfate), a popular osteoarthritis ingredient used today by millions of Americans to treat joint pain and stiffness, was deliberately adulterated with a chemical that TSI chemists could not even identify.

"Our Chinese suppliers were profiting by tricking our testing techniques," said Joe Zhou, president of TSI international operations responsible for corporate business development.

"Ingredient samples tested positive for chondroitin, but it wasn't chondroitin," said Larry Kolb, president of TSI US operations. "We caught several producers of our chondroitin ingredient red handed," notes Kolb.

Nine years earlier in Michigan, Zhou, a research chemist at Amway Corp., and Kolb, vice president for Charles Bowman & Company directing ingredient sales and marketing strategies for the company's personal care, OTC and dietary supplement industries customers, pooled their resources and invested $2,000 to start an ingredient business that, as Kolb recalls, "would bring the best ingredients to the US from China."

They worked on their business model for seven years envisioning the opportunity to perform a service that would assure the overall quality and safety of Chinese ingredients for US supplement manufacturers. "We gave customers the best of all worlds -- Chinese prices and US quality," says Kolb.

Kolb remembers the product testing incident like it was yesterday. They had critical and extremely difficult decisions on their hands. How do they co
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SOURCE TSI Health Sciences Copyright©2007 PR Newswire.

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