Why is your Magtein so expensive?

The SHOULD all come from the same source. I say should because I know for a fact there are some people out there getting regular magnesium L-threonate from China, and mixing it into the batches they get from AIDP to keep the costs down. The way these distributors handle monitoring these patented products is based on an honor system. Every quarter they request sales numbers for what you sold. They then match those numbers up with how much raw material you bought, and make sure they add up. Sounds logical, right? I guess to middle managers that have never been in the real world it does. However, in the real world people try to cut corners and screw you every chance they get. So what do those people do? Well they buy 100kg from AIDP, then 900kg from China. They then mix those two raw material batches together, and call it all Magtein. Then when it comes time for quarterly reporting, they lower their sales numbers to match how much raw material they got from AIDP, not the actual total sales numbers. It's happening right now. I have alerted people at these companies to it many times. However, they are not interested in investigating, and don't want to rock the boat. If sales are up, no sales manager is going to want to go on a fishing expedition and call their customers liars. So they look the other way.

Now how can this happen, and why would it be worth it? Well I can get some of these patented things made for us in China for a LOT less. I am talking 4X less, sometimes more. When these patented things are not exactly special, i.e. not unique forms you can't really get in generic form, the markups are crazy. To further complicate it, these patented products are never sold to us by the patent holder themselves. They have exclusive distribution agreements and licensing agreements. AIDP is just the exclusive distributor of it in the US. The patent holder licenses it to AIDP. I've spoken to AIDP about it before, and they tried to get the patent hold to lower their costs. However, the patent holder wanted to maintain the margins to fund more research. So AIDP had to follow the pricing the patent holder was requiring. The thing with these exclusive distribution agreements are they are usually country-specific. Take Synapsa for example. The actual bacopa that goes into making Synapsa is called CDRI-08. That stands for the Central Drug Research Institute of India. So the Indian government actually funded the development of it, then licenses it out to distributors around the world with different names. PLT Health is the exclusive distributor of it in the US as Synapsa. However, in other countries it is called Keenmind. So it can get complex with some of these patented ingredients.

We actually do hold patented ingredients to our higher standards, though. This is mainly for heavy metals. We require the patent holders to meet our specs, and they do special batches just for us sometimes if the normal ones are higher than our heavy metals specs. We also don't just take their word for things. We test and verify every batch ourselves, too. The heavy metals thing should not be an issue for Magtein, though. Those levels are always low. It more comes into play with patented plant extracts, like bacopa, ashwgandha, etc. We also hold them to our other standards as well. Until we can prove the claims these patent holders are making in our own lab, or in an ISO lab that we trust, we do not put our name behind it.