What is Nutrilite?

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To answer the question “What is Nutrilite?” you need to understand the company’s origins. An important figure in Nutrilite history is Carl Rehnborg, who founded the vitamin and supplement company in 1934. Years spent working for American companies in China and recognizing how people’s health there was linked to what kind of foods they ate propelled Rehnborg to follow his quest to create supplements.

 

Rehnborg’s observation that a plant-based diet improved people's health led to his understanding of the importance of phytonutrients (plant-based nutrition). He took a holistic approach to good nutrition and developed a line of products with ingredients sourced from his first farm – a tiny plot in California’s San Fernando Valley.

 

To help distribute his Nutrilite™ line, Rehnborg was among the first to develop the sales approach known as multi-level marketing. The idea was the brainchild of a customer who’d offered to help train other representatives for a share of the profits.

 

And it was this approach that ultimately put Nutrilite™ under the Amway umbrella and made it the Ada, Michigan-based company’s best-selling product line. Before they founded Amway in 1959, Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos were Nutrilite™ distributors for nearly a decade. By 1972, Amway had acquired Nutrilite™.

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