Anyone notice N-Depot has gotten very expensive?

We can't get 1/4 of the price. That's my point. Our cost for raw materials is not as low as you think. We just don't have the gross margins you think we do. I really wish we did. It would make my mission a lot easier. Any of those Chinese suppliers giving you 1/4 price quotes are lying, or they are selling fake/impure stuff. Do you not think we order samples from literally every supplier we can? We order samples from these cheap suppliers. They never pan out. You would not believe the amount of retained samples we have, and the mountain of data we have, from hundreds and hundreds of suppliers over the years. We also use our buying power to force the good suppliers to drive down their costs if they can. We don't just buy things without a ton of data behind those decisions. If we can get a raw material that meets our high specs for cheaper, we do. We always try to make things as economical as possible. It's just that most of the time the quality raw materials cost more money than the bottom barrel shit that we will just reject anyway.

Testing is a whole other ballgame. We pretty much do 5 tests on every product: ID, assay, heavy metals, microbiological, residual solvents, and sometimes pesticides. ID is usually IR, HP-TLC, NMR, or mass spec. It depends on the specific product. Our IR cost us $90,000. Our HP-TLC line cost $100,000. We send out NMR and mass spec at the moment, but a few hundred bucks per test is about right. Assay we usually do in-house on our HPLC or UPLC. Our HPLC cost $70,000. Our UPLC costs $200,000. We still send off for some assays. Those are a few hundred most of the time, but sometimes they are more expensive when the reference standards are expensive. Just the withanolide standards alone for ashwagandha cost us $3,500, and we have to use some of the standard every single time we test. We bought a $40,000 microgram scale recently, so we can use less of the standards for making stock solutions. Before we had that, we would make a stock solution of the whole 10mg standard, and we could only use that for a couple months before we had to buy new standards. So the ashwagandha standards would cost us $3,500 every couple months. Pesticide and allergen testing is the most expensive of them all. Some tests are over $1,000 just for one sample. Our LOD and water activity machines cost around $10,000-$15,000 each. Titration machine was like $10K. Our fluorescent X-ray spectrometer was $85,000. We are about to buy a $275,000 triple quad GC-MS with headspace autosampler, too. Then we can do pesticide and residual solvent testing in-house, along with a ton of other cool shit. Our automated melting point machine was $10,000. Our polarimter was $15,000. UV-VIS was $25,000. Near IR was $50,000. Then you have the little things, like lab oven ($10K), electronic pipettes ($5,000), glassware ($10,000), and hundreds of other little things that a lab needs to run. I spent close to $400,000 on our lab expansions and modular clean rooms. Just the lab dishwasher that runs on deionized water alone cost over $15,000. Plus the deioninzing system we built to supply that and the lab. I've spent millions and millions of dollars on building and expanding my lab. I spent $15,000 just to build a freestanding clean room in our quarantine area for sampling, and hired a dedicated sampling team.

Then you have the people. We have over 70 employees now. I have 7 full time people in my lab, and those include PhD and masters chemists. Our QA/QC team has another 4 people on top of that. Do you know how much it costs for payroll for that many qualified people? It's not cheap, and the jobs market is tough to find good people right now. So you pay for people who are not complete idiots. Then you have the ongoing running costs. Our electric bills are absolutely insane right now. It's going to be 111*F today here in Phoenix. I have 55,000 square feet to cool. My lab stays in the low 70s 24 hours a day. Our product areas stay in the mid 70s 24 hours a day, every day. Then you have the consumables. Do you know how much solvents, buffers, TLC plates, columns, and other materials cost? We go through a ton every month. We also have to pay for companies to come take our waste solvents. We pay for a company to provide fresh lab coats for every production/lab/QC employee every single day, and take the used ones to clean. That's about $1,000 per month alone, just for fresh lab coats. Then we have gloves, hairnets, beard covers, foot coverings, and respirator filters for the lab workers dealing with volatile solvents that we replace regularly. I don't even know all the things my lab uses in a month. I get reports and talk to the heads of my departments, but the amount of things that goes into making our operation run these days is absolutely insane. This all costs a lot of money. Properly testing costs a LOT of money. Sure, improper shitty testing is cheap. You can get a ton of shitty labs to give you cheap quotes on things. The numbers are meaningless, and the chemistry is faulty, poor, or completely fabricated, though. Trust me, this has been my life for years now. We have worked with every lab you can possibly think of in the US. We have visited their facilities, audited their documentation, and re-ran their testing to verify their numbers. The amount of faulty or fake data out there right now is nuts.

To say we are doing things differently than pretty much any of our competition is a vast understatement. Nobody does all the things we do. I set out to change the industry, and to do that I need to take a lot of risks, spend a lot of money, and change the paradigm. I am doing what I promised years ago, even after all the shit I went through with Ceretropic. Please don't try and cheapen what I have done, and what I am still trying to do, by comparing us to the other vendors out there. We do not have the margins you think we do, and pretty much everything goes into increasing our capabilities and advancing the standards of the industry. Just think of how complex our Natrium stacks are. We are about to release our Sleep Support. That has taken us YEARS, because we needed 5 formulation changes to make it work correctly. Then there are 8 ingredients in it. We do 5 tests on each ingredient. So that's 40 analytical tests just for the raw materials for a single product. Then we analyze the finished capsules for proper fill amounts, ratios, and microbiological. So that's 4 more tests we do. That's 44 separate tests for a single product, and if a single one fails it holds up the whole stack. That's apart from FDA and customs issues holding up specific ingredients. We had to get 6 different magnolia bark extracts to get one that met our specs. We had to go through 10 different oleamides till we found one that met what we wanted, and we had to do a ton of non-standard testing to verify it. This is a single damn product. We have hundreds of products. Just think of all the shit that goes into ensuring the things we sell are at the standard we have set. You know how much money I could make by making a cheap stack with shitty ingredients and selling it for a huge markup like most the others out there do? If I am going to be accused of charging insane markups, I might as well just go and do it. That's not who I am, though. That's not why I am in this.