Dante Trudel Has Had Enough!

Enough is enough! My business partner and I are going to do something about an ongoing issue that effects all of you that has been happening for years and seems to be getting worse. Im going to put this in multiple places and in many forums because I feel it is that important. We've pushed this concept of purity and proof for a long time and it has been regular business practice for us even when other companies don't feel they need to abide. I am going to take this industry to task and most likely piss off a few people/companies in the process, but so be it.

This will be somewhat long but this is crucially important. There is a lot to it but I urge you to read it all the way through because it directly affects you the reader if you use dietary supplements, proteins and the like. It is important as it concerns your goals, and what you want to attain in this sport and in health and whether you actually accomplish it or not.

So why I'm I fed up and coming forward today? Two reasons.

1) I am not going to allow scam artists and shysters to put a black mark on the whole industry especially as it pertains to the mission/morals/values of what my business partner and I set out to do 12 years ago and have done up to this very day. I am paying top dollar for the best ingredients to my customers and paying top dollar for all the testing I am doing, yet it seems many of my peers in this industry obviously dont give a crap and are ripping people off without caring one bit about it! If you put economics and money before your goals, then negatives always seem to arise. My personal mission and my business partner Doug's personal mission bleeds directly into how we operate our business. Truth and honesty come before the dollar not 99% of the time, but 100% of the time. If you do the right thing in life--money, success and the attainment of goals will follow, we've followed this from day 1 and will always be our mission.

2) Secondly I will be no doubt be accused that I am marketing to drive more people to buy at True Nutrition. And why not? We are the ones playing by the rules!!! And paying a higher dollar to do it! Instead of paying for $14,000 dollar-one page ads in magazines and million dollar advertising campaigns, WE ARE PUTTING THE MONEY INTO THE PRODUCT!, not the other way around!! There is no hidden agenda here. The links below and what is going on pisses me off. If in the process of proving what we have been doing over the last decade or so, makes you a customer of ours, good. If not and you want to buy from someone else, I am ok with that too. I refuse to let these scam artists in the industry universally make our industry look bad. Im going to say the following without a shadow of a doubt. Please read it and read it again is what I ask of you. I can say it because its the truth. My opinion is my business partner and I (and our 50 + employees) have one of the most legit supplement companies in the industry. And we have proof, not just words! If you buy something from Truenutrition.com you are going to get EXACTLY WHAT YOU PAID FOR AND EVEN A LITTLE BIT MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE (read below).

So this is what has been happening lately. Look at that below! 4/5 of companies are failing to meet the minimum standard!

http://romanoroberts.com.mx/…/uplo…/2014/11/non-sensical.png

Now this is bullsh#$, this is wrong and we aren't standing for it. A whey isolate is supposed to (IF YOU PLAY BY THE RULES) to be ~90% protein, period. That is dry weight tested. If its wet weight tested there can be a variance of 2-8% but thats all depending on the moisture content of that test assay. So if you come out at 86% on a wet basis test, the moisture content has to be around 4% to get your 90% protein percentage. Thats a very important facet in these testing procedures that are being published. Regardless there is no doubt according to the tests being shown that there is some straight up scamming going on in the industry. What is usually done is if it is assayed wet is the lab will calculate dry percentage. If its assayed dry they will leave as is. I am hoping all this is taken into regard as it pertains to the testing showing up online because its important.

http://romanoroberts.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1.jpg

http://romanoroberts.com.mx/some-protein-powder-tests-off-…/

Again I am looking at these results and just shaking my head in disbelief. Especially at the two bottom ones. What is that sawdust? How do you sleep at night? This is someones hardcore workouts, diet, health and goals we are talking about here. YOU DO NOT BLATANTLY RIP PEOPLE OFF AND DEPOSIT THEIR HARD EARNED MONEY INTO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT!!!

http://romanoroberts.com.mx/4-dimension-nutrition-4d-nutri…/

http://romanoroberts.com.mx/giant-sports-class-action-laws…/

So what are you seeing here.....for those who don't want to go thru those links is the following

1) A great many supplement companies are flatout scamming their customers.
2) The amount of companies selling less than reputable protein powders and health supplements is astonishing....you are paying for flank steak and getting Spam.
3) And above all, massive respect for the very few who are playing like the rules like we are.

Let me explain this to everyone as quickly as I can here.

The majority of supplement companies out there don't make their own products. They are retail/marketing companies in offices with marketing/advertising people who never get near making a product or see a once of powder. These companies have contract manufacturers (like my company) make their products for them. These retail companies as much as they want to...CAN NOT PLAY DUMB anymore to what their contract manufacturer makes http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/…/FDA-warning-letter-hi… - they either must do finished product testing themselves or somehow verify that the products being made for them are completely legit.

So everyone is responsible here for their own products and manufacturing of their products. We at True Nutrition are part of the 1% of the industry that makes their own products with a fully FDA audited GMP manufacturing plant. Optimum Nutrition makes their own products, Universal makes their own products along with a handful else. Its extremely hard and most of all painstakingly expensive sometimes to be a contract manufacturer, the profit margins are much much less than retail, where every penny counts per unit.

So let me tell you how this works ok? Raw ingredients come into our warehouse and are placed into a quarantine section of our warehouse, it literally is in a separate locked 10ft high fenced in cage so no mistake is ever made for it to end up in our general population of raw materials before it passes our clearances. Let's use for example WPC (whey protein concentrate), its bought from the dairy itself or its packaging mediary, it shows up at our warehouse and the dairy gives us their Certificate of Analysis along with all current specs with this product (or whatever raw material it is), the product is then put into our quarantine and many samples are taken from this delivery. We use the "10th sample method". What that means that we sample every 10th kg, bag or pallet. So if we get 1000kg of the same creatine batch from our manufacturer, every 100kg we pull a sample. If we get 500 bags of WPC, every 10th bag we pull a sample. These samples pulled are then blended together for an aggregate of the total batch. This sample is then either tested internally and/or sent to multiple different 3rd party labs we have contracted out. Side note, why do we use so many different labs? Because we also cross reference occasionally to make sure specs are coming back on par/same from one lab to the next. So we're not only testing our materials, we're also making sure our labs are legit. We test for purity, potency and identity. What does that mean? Purity to make sure the material doesn't have a dangerous microbe or poison that could make you sick. Potency, to make sure if something says its 90% protein or 99% extracted, etc. its is actually to spec. And Identity, to make sure the fermented glutamine we brought in, is actually fermented glutamine. These tests can take up to 10 days to clear. And once they clear, then the material is cleared from quarantine and put into our general pop. Additionally this isn't just for raw powder material, this goes for packaging, lids, jugs, bags, everything!

Then what happens? This material is then allocated to product blending or raw material sale. It doesnt stop there! All supplements that are manufactured with these cleared/validated raw materials to a finished product or good, then have to be tested again! After we make a finished good, be it a capsule or something like Buzz Saw, etc. that finished product needs to then be tested for Purity, potency and identity once again, just to make sure there was no issues during production.

Why am I telling you all this, first and foremost to explain how painstakingly aggressive our process is, but the real truth is, not just us, but every supplement company out there has to follow these above rules BY LAW! Under strict CFR 111 manufacturing standard, all of these checks and balances have to be performed, so to see the above tests noted in the links provided, shows the rules aren't being followed! This has to change in the industry immediately! The only way it changes is if you the consumer is aware of these practices and only spend your hard earned money with companies that abide by these strict rules.

My partner and I absolutely love the fact that our customer base or any consumer that uses health foods, dietary supplements and/or meal replacements is taking things into their own hands. When this happens, the industry starts changing for the better... But a few pointers as we do see a few crucial possible mistakes and red flags that could be being made here are the following:

And maybe its us trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the companies in the links but 11 grams and .55 grams of protein?!?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

So a few things to note:

The way the sampling is pulled and sent to a lab is just as crucial and if not more important than the test itself. We've tested 1000s of materials over the years and have learned a few things about sampling. The reason we use the "10th sample method" is because we've on many occasions only pulled a small sample from one spot of a pallet of whey protein isolate, where we only grabbed 10g of material, and the tests came back that it was only ~70% protein. This of course created a huge issue with us going back to the manufacturer/vendor only to realize we pulled the sample incorrectly. The sample size was too small and we didn't access the sample in enough locations to that total batch. When we took that same pallet and tested the powder in 10 different locations and used larger sampling sizes, the tests then came back ~92% protein. So please do see that if an unexperienced person is just taking some protein powder out of a jug and dropping it in a baggie and tell the lab to test the protein content, you could get back unreliable results, which could then also create a situation where you post openly unreliable results saying a product failed when in reality it quite possibly didn't fail, but the sampling method failed. Or even worse, the product actually is not as good as the tests say it is.

Which brings up the next possible issue. Test method. There are hundreds if not thousands of different test methods in obtaining purity, potency and identity, some are more accurate than others, some that create false negatives, and some that are more expensive than others. For example testing protein wet or dry has a drastic price difference, but at the same time test results also can have a drastic difference. The surveyor of the test results is just as important as the sampling and the lab technician who did the tests. Ordering up the right tests, regardless of costs and then reading those results and deducting what the results truly mean are extremely important.

But the bottom line is-when I see this http://broscience.co/gnc-dangerous-supplements-accused/
and this LESS THAN HALF THE PROTEIN IN IT THEY CLAIM!!! http://romanoroberts.com.mx/inner-armour-protein-spiking-c…/
and http://romanoroberts.com.mx/musclepharm-sued-for-amino-spi…/

There is a problem!

Years ago, with our first website actually we did something no one ever did and we actually removed it on our second website (this is our 4th website now), but we are planning on bringing it back as it seems so very important to do again. We used to continually update our test results of each raw material we sold with a PDF link on each product. We knew how important they were, hence why we provided them, but at the time back in 2003-2005 or so it didn't seem like anyone cared to look.

In light of everything that's happened in the last few months and the public becoming more well informed, we're going to openly show some of our recent test results to a few popular products we have.
COA/protein percentage. This is already way too long enough already so Ill try to load what people are most interested in. And we are going to load all this testing on our new site since we seem to be one of the few companies that follow any rules around here.

So transparency is lacking in the industry. We have always been transparent. The two ways we differ than any other companies in the industry are the following.

a) If you order 15 pounds of protein from us....you actually get 15 pounds of protein!!! We are the only company in the industry that truly goes and gets your 15 pounds of protein first and then adds the flavoring on top of those 15 pounds of protein that you TRULY BOUGHT. Seems like a simple concept doesnt it? Every other company out there if you buy 15 pounds of protein in chocolate for example, you are getting 14 pounds or so of protein and roughly 1 pound of flavor/sweetener. So take that into the equation every time you price shop. That two pound bucket, that five pound bucket, or heck those 30 pounds of protein you just bought for what you thought was an awesome price per pound actually was 28 pounds of protein and 2 pounds of flavor and sweetener. Truenutrition-you order 5 pounds of cold filtrated isolate=you get 5 pounds of cold filtrated isolate and then the flavor on top of that 5 pounds.

b) We spend way into 5 figures a month on testing. We even test in various cases when we dont need to test. Its a very simple process and it is what it is. What you actually think you order and what you actually get is one in the same. You put in your order and what goes into your bucket and/or bag is the RAW MATERIAL right from the manufacturer that has been run threw lab testing as per FDA rules! You would think that would be universal. We thought everyone was doing it to, obviously not! And YOU are the one losing your hard earned money and your muscle gains or fat loss because of greed and severely cutting corners.

In the next upcoming months we're going to revamp our website again and we're going to make this a huge component for our customer base that wants to see them. Myself and my business partner Doug are very much like you, we're supplement users first and care what goes into our body and we use other products outside of what we make so we don't want to be swindled either.

Sorry to take up 15 minutes of your valuable time with my rant, I'm simply tired of seeing companies having zero respect for the very customers that put them on the map in the first place. I came from this industry, Im a product of this industry and I owe this industry with my best effort put forth....and we are going to continue doing the right thing with my customers best interests in mind.   -

Dante Trudel