Peptides Are Exploding. Payments Isn’t Ready
Peptides Are Exploding. Payments Isn’t Ready. The Research-Peptide Market Is Growing Faster Than the Infrastructure Built to Underwrit...
In this episode of Qredible Live, Brian Fitzpatrick sits down with Phil Vigeant, CEO of PlantFusion and a 40-year veteran of the natural products industry. Phil shares the story behind PlantFusion's founding, his non-negotiables for product quality, the truth about supplement regulation, and how consumers can cut through the noise in a confusing marketplace.
[00:11] Faith (Host): Hi and welcome to Season 3 of Qredible Live. We are here with Phil Vigeant and he is the CEO of PlantFusion. I feel like if I told you everything about him, it would take up the whole episode because he's accomplished a lot in his life in the supplement industry. And then of course we have Brian Fitzpatrick, CEO of Qredible.
[00:44] Brian Fitzpatrick: Well, Phil's a trailblazer as we've indicated and a pioneer. And I've always learned that the pioneers are the ones that end up with the arrows in their backs.
[00:52] Phil Vigeant: I have a few of those.
[00:55] Brian Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I bet you do. I understand that. You know, Phil, one of the things that really matters most to me is partnering with mission-driven CEOs and working with them because I always find them inspiring and it's sort of what I am. I'm always focused on the mission. It's really more than just building a brand, but trying to elevate the standards for an entire industry. You've spent decades in natural products from your early days to where you are now, really building PlantFusion into a premium plant-based allergen-free platform. Could you talk about your personal journey and the mission and what drives you and how you got to where you are today?
[01:43] Phil Vigeant: Yeah, I'd love to. Thanks Brian and thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. It's an honor to be on your show and congratulations on all your success with the show and the outreach you have and the following you have. That's a real accomplishment as well.
[02:00] Phil Vigeant: I could go back forever, but I was sharing with you and your team previously that first of all, I always say one of the best gifts I ever received from my parents was they owned a little health food store when I was a kid back in the 70s. This is back before there was no Whole Foods. There were no Sprout stores. You didn't walk into a conventional grocery store and find organic produce.
[02:16] Phil Vigeant: Back then those little boutique natural product stores were in most decent-sized towns, or they were coming online at that point. When I say online, I mean they were showing up in more and more towns because more and more people were starting to go through that movement of "wait, let's question what's going on inside our food supply." That's also around the time when people became aware of things like high blood pressure and how sodium was a contributor to that, or diabetes. Plenty of people had diabetes back then, so people were looking for low sugar foods and things like that.
[02:55] Phil Vigeant: That was some of the genesis along with the 60s, which was an inflection point for people considering what was going in their body and the chemicals and agents in society. But that was really the start of it for me, and I really say it was the best gift I could ever have because for them it started out like a lot of people as a hobby and as a way of life, and then just became a little business. Growing up inside that store was the best background or experience I could have ever had for appreciating not just organic food and healthy food but really what high quality food was like.
[03:41] Phil Vigeant: One of the things that was there was like we hear about processed food all the time, but there were so many things like just basic cheese—you got real cheese versus Velveeta, or I could go on with all the cheese whiz and all these things that were so common back at that time. That gift gave me an appreciation for just quality food in general over time.
[04:00] Phil Vigeant: I had siblings too. Combined with that, I was not a great athlete. I was an average athlete who wanted to be a great athlete, but I played sports as long as they let me play right through college. I competed and that was part of it—if you're an athlete, you want to know what you're putting in your body and you're trying to make yourself as fit as possible. All that led me to sort of the framework or groundwork for wanting to be in this industry.
[04:19] Phil Vigeant: After I got out of college, I was in the finance industry for a few years in New York. Great experience, great exposure, wouldn't trade it for the world. Learned an enormous amount. But realized after just a couple years there that an entrepreneurial path was going to be much more appropriate for me.
[04:39] Phil Vigeant: That led me to purchase a private label company called Reliance that today makes a lot of organic products and specialty nutritional products, private label products for major retail chains. I can't mention the names of them but just think of major natural products retail chains and even bigger chains where they use Reliance for organic plant proteins, organic probiotic products, organic multivitamins. Things that are very anchored in what we consider today to be the natural products industry.
[05:31] Phil Vigeant: I was very fortunate to work with a great group of people that shared some of the same vision and plan. We felt like private label didn't have to be a commodity generic product. We really focused at that time on patented and trademarked ingredients. We went really with where the science was in the industry on an individual ingredient to put into a supplement.
[05:50] Phil Vigeant: One of the things we really hung our hat on was using European extracts where things like ginkgo biloba and St. John's Wort were regulated as pharmaceuticals—that's how high the quality was of those ingredients. Also using a lot of patented trademark ingredients like FloraGLO, which is one of the best studied lutein products in the world for eye health. Just a couple of examples.
[06:11] Phil Vigeant: That led me to—as a protein supplement taker myself, I have a dairy allergy. It's not a severe one. Some people are anaphylactic to dairy. Unfortunately, it was not that severe, but I couldn't take whey protein or calcium caseinate or caseinates, which was the main source of a protein powder back in 2008, 2009. There was also soy protein, but that had lost its luster because of concerns about it being phytoestrogenic. It also is an allergen. It tends to give people a lot of gas and some people can have a severe reaction to it, not unlike dairy.
[06:52] Phil Vigeant: Rice protein was like the only protein source out there. Unfortunately with rice, it's both very bitter. The flavor spectrum of rice protein—it is a healthy source of protein, but I have to tell you, it doesn't taste very good for those who have tried it. And it's also very gritty. The texture is very gritty. It's not a shake experience someone enjoys. It's a shake experience that somebody gets through.
[07:07] Brian Fitzpatrick: Yeah. It's painful.
[07:20] Phil Vigeant: So in that process I really started looking all over the world literally for different sources of plant proteins that were non-animal, non-allergenic, that would be plant-based or vegan-based. I found pea protein, which at the time was really just a byproduct. It was an offshoot of what peas are mostly made for, which is for fiber and starch. A lot of pea starch is what's used in noodles, actually, so they're big in Asia.
[07:38] Brian Fitzpatrick: Like in peas?
[07:40] Phil Vigeant: Yes, in peas. As in the plant pea. As in the vegetable peas. What's interesting about peas for people like me who like to geek out on these types of things—it's about one-third starch, one-third fiber, and one-third protein. I'm going to really generalize, but nobody knew what to do with the protein.
[08:05] Phil Vigeant: We figured out that we could use that protein because it was actually a very good source of protein, non-allergenic. It checked all those boxes that we were suffering with. That was the launch and the platform for PlantFusion as a separate brand from Reliance.
[08:24] Phil Vigeant: I worked with a co-founder named Craig Cooper. He'd actually started the brand. I won't go into all that background, but we leveraged what we had as infrastructure at Reliance and were able to launch a brand in this space just as the movie Forks Over Knives—which is a very popular one about plant-based nutrition or vegan or vegetarian lifestyle—had come out right around that time. It was sort of the right place, right time. There was luck with what the growth and the interest in these alternative sources of protein came about. So that's how it all got started.
[09:15] Brian Fitzpatrick: That's a great journey, and I always love connecting the roots from when you were younger. I hear that a lot from mission-driven CEOs, so it's a great story. I am familiar with some of those big-name brands and they are big-name brands where you're selling some of your product, so very impressive. But in order to be successful there, you have to have some non-negotiables about things like product quality and regulatory compliance that truly separate what I would call serious supplement brands from a lot of the noise that's out there. There's a lot of noise out there and people don't know what to trust or who to trust. What are some of your non-negotiables that make your brand the top?
[09:39] Phil Vigeant: That's a great question. I will say it's a complex answer. I'll try to boil this down because when you look at the hundreds and thousands of ingredients in the supplement industry, the answer for one type of ingredient may not be the same answer for what defines quality for another one. These are plants. They're grown all over the world. They're grown under multiple types of conditions, and with any plant or product that comes from nature there's natural variation in them.
[10:07] Phil Vigeant: There's also what are you trying to do with it? You might want to take a whole herb that isn't standardized for a compound, or you might want a more therapeutic effect with an herb that's been isolated down to a single compound that will have more of a pharmacological or specific impact on your body similar to maybe the way a drug would impact you. It becomes almost a very isolated compound.
[10:34] Phil Vigeant: All those things come into it to answer the question when you're looking at a thousand different ingredients over the course of my career. The answer becomes complex. But I think what we try to do is first of all, non-negotiable for our brand PlantFusion is one thing, and then sort of a general conceptual framework we use to look at ingredients.
[10:56] Phil Vigeant: For our brand, first of all it has to be 100% vegan. There's no flexibility around that. That doesn't mean—I want to be clear—that doesn't mean products that are not vegan are not good. Just that we're very clear on our consumer. We're trying to take away the pain of the consumer.
[11:13] Phil Vigeant: One of my friends in the industry, her daughter became a vegan. She said all she does is spend half her time in a supermarket everywhere reading the label because she's really trying to discern what's in there to figure out if something's vegan. You can't always just automatically assume that there isn't something else in there. It's a bit of a research project when they're really trying to feed a family or feed a family member or themselves. So our platform is vegan, 100% vegan. We won't deviate from that.
[11:38] Phil Vigeant: Another one is being allergen-free. We try to be 100% allergen-free on everything because it's not that allergens affect everybody, but if you see that mother who has a son or a daughter who has a dairy allergy or a gluten allergy or a nut allergy, they are what I call label scientists. They have to sit there and examine almost everything. You've seen them, we've all had dinner with them in a restaurant when they're severely allergic.
[12:08] Brian Fitzpatrick: It affects their whole lifestyle.
[12:10] Phil Vigeant: Right. So we're trying to make it easy and simple for that customer. Again, it doesn't mean that some of those items that have allergens—I love cashews. I'm not allergic to them, and I love almonds. But we have to make sure our consumer is really clear that they can take this product and not have to think about that.
[12:46] Phil Vigeant: As it relates to the ingredient world that we deal with—and it is very diverse—we start with some things that aren't as absolute as maybe some marketers would like to make them, but they're really clear. One of the first things we look at is what part of the world is it coming from. We've all heard of the disasters of things that come out of China and some parts of Asia and even India. That doesn't mean everything that comes out of there is bad, but we have to be very discerning about it.
[13:00] Phil Vigeant: One of the first things I did when I started the brand was all of our pea protein was sourced out of Belgium. I would be over in Belgium on a frequent basis working with the farm and the company that processes the peas and turns it into a pea protein powder that then we would ship over here to the US and then make our product with.
[13:22] Phil Vigeant: Europe in general has pretty high quality standards. So does Canada on a lot of these ingredients. That's a better place to buy it than other parts of the world where maybe it may have been less expensive but not as pure and not undergoing some of the same regulatory framework that the pea protein out of Europe does.
[13:39] Phil Vigeant: I have a funny story. I was in Europe and my daughter at the time—she was 13 years old—asked me where I was. I knew her question was filled with contempt and attitude because she was 13. She says, "What are you doing? Where are you?" And I said, "Well, I'm in Belgium." She says, "What are you doing?" And I said, "You're not going to believe this, but I'm actually on a pea farm right now."
[14:05] Phil Vigeant: There's this long pause. And then she says, "You are so weird." And her next line is, "Why can't you just have a normal job like Morgan's father?"
[14:16] Brian Fitzpatrick: (Laughter)
[14:18] Phil Vigeant: So all of this great stuff that people love to talk about that I've done, it's completely unvalued by my family. I just want you to know that.
[14:25] Brian Fitzpatrick: I don't think my family understands what I do.
[14:28] Phil Vigeant: Right. But anyway, that's just anecdotal to the process that we go through to try to find these best sources. I've worked with some great team members who've also been—I can't be everywhere—obviously we've had really top-notch product developers over the years that have traveled the world and been on those same types of trips to really understand it.
[14:45] Phil Vigeant: I have an associate I work with in the industry that does a lot of work with us. He was in India for the better part of three months. He is Indian but he was over there to see family and I'd say a third of that time was traveling through India and visiting certain suppliers, ingredient suppliers for organic vitamins and minerals, and being able to really touch it and feel it as opposed to just assume that the certificate of analysis is correct.
[15:21] Phil Vigeant: Our sourcing standards vary based on the ingredient because we have to consider a lot of different variables. I like to think that we try to always buy organic when we can. Whenever we come out with a new product, I think you and Faith talked about this, we try to be first, better, or different all the time. In that process, that always requires research. That's not just calling up an ingredient supplier who can ship you a container load or a thousand kilos or a pallet of an ingredient because there's plenty of that out there.
[15:51] Phil Vigeant: We have to really weed through and navigate the spectrum of suppliers. I do think that to some degree, being in this space for a long time, like anybody who's in any industry, you learn these things kind of intangibly—how to go through that process.
[16:09] Brian Fitzpatrick: It's interesting because I learned when I was investing in hemp farms back in 2018, I learned a lot about the hemp plant and how it just sucks up whatever's in the soil. It's got this capability to actually remediate things in soil, which is okay unless you're going to turn it into a product and you've got lead in there.
[16:30] Brian Fitzpatrick: There's growing scrutiny significantly about plant-based proteins and heavy metals and contaminants and label accuracy. Even mainstream outlets now have really called out some brands recently. How do you approach that whole batch testing? You talked about COAs and transparency because consumers don't know how to read COAs. They look at it and don't know what they're looking at, but you have to have them up there. How do you provide that testing transparency so consumers and partners, whether they're B2B customers or consumers, know that your products are actually clean?
[17:35] Phil Vigeant: Again, there's a couple different ways. One thing is we still go back—I always go back to look at the genesis of the product or the ingredient because it doesn't matter how transparent you are in one way if you're not looking at the root cause of those issues at the source of the ingredient. If those contaminants are already in there, you can't take them out very easily.
[17:56] Phil Vigeant: It's like you deal with these issues really in the best way very proactively in the sourcing from day one. One other thing that we do before I get to the COA issue and the testing is in the example of plant protein, it's one of the main reasons we've stayed away from rice, which I didn't mention before.
[18:15] Phil Vigeant: Rice is grown in water. It's very hydroponic. And water has more heavy metals in it. It has minerals, good minerals too, but it also has—even in the most pristine water—you have a lot of heavy metals that you have to think about. That's one of the reasons we stay away from rice because it's much higher in heavy metals.
[18:39] Phil Vigeant: Protein is something we take at high doses. It's not like we take one gram of protein. When we take a protein supplement, we're taking 15, 20, 30 grams, maybe more than once a day. Those are some of the considerations. We stay away from rice. Although it's a good source of protein, if somebody's concerned with heavy metals, it's probably the last one you want to take if there's a predisposition or a concern about it.
[18:55] Phil Vigeant: It doesn't mean that if you take some rice protein—I don't want to create scare tactics. Scare tactics are not great for our industry. It's just a concern, something you have to consider or look at. It's no different than a man has to look at how much iron he's getting because that could be a dangerous mineral for them, although it could be great for women. Women usually have a problem with not having enough iron.
[19:27] Phil Vigeant: It is situational and you have to look at it from a practical standpoint. It's a great example of a mineral that is found in nature that so many women don't absorb very well or don't get enough of, and yet men have to really mitigate how much iron they get.
[19:55] Phil Vigeant: But once you get past that sourcing issue, first of all we do a ton of testing, and trying to deal with the transparency gets hard because as much as we have all these test results from third-party labs, we also have to be conscious of just putting that in front of a consumer because some consumers will start to call that lab. That lab is not prepared. These are business labs. They are so unprepared to deal directly with a consumer.
[20:18] Phil Vigeant: What we really try to do is transfer that information over into documentation where we can give them actual tangible results that they can look at, sink their teeth into, and see an actual result for it. It's done on two levels. One is we're looking at raw materials before they come in.
[20:40] Phil Vigeant: In the case of protein product, that's the majority of what people are digesting. Yes, there are flavors and natural sweeteners in there, but the majority of what people are taking is still a protein supplement. If I use my most common product—21 grams of protein, serving size about 30 grams—that tells you right there that about 25 grams of that 30-gram serving is from the protein powder itself, and it's only about 4 grams or so of flavors and sweeteners.
[21:08] Phil Vigeant: With that in mind, the main concern is what's that main ingredient. You look at the main source, which in that case is pea protein, and or amaranth and quinoa and some other secondary sources we might use. We just make sure that's tested really well because again, if that ingredient is off, doesn't matter what we do with it when we blend it—it's still going to be very high in heavy metals.
[21:27] Phil Vigeant: In the end we do the testing and we share the results with the customer sometimes on an as-needed basis. It's dangerous to just put things up on a website where you're dealing with a lab that's not prepared to deal with questions from consumers. We have to be careful there. But we try to be as transparent as we can.
[21:56] Phil Vigeant: I think that in the end the consumer needs to know. I find more often than not when you have these media pieces that go out there—there was one recently from Consumer Reports and candidly it was incredibly misleading. I know it would shock everybody that media outlets would do something misleading, but it really was sad what they did. It was sad for the industry and sad for the consumer because if you read the report, the theme of it was you really might want to cut down ingesting protein because of heavy metals.
[22:24] Phil Vigeant: That's a little bit like saying you might not want to work out that much or exercise that much because you could break your ankle. Yeah, that can happen, but you're kind of missing the larger point. Unfortunately, that piece was very misleading in that regard. It was clearly there to create sensationalism and fear, which sells.
[22:44] Phil Vigeant: That led to a million questions. But we were able to show people where we landed with that testing and what we had. I think there's one thing on heavy metals, Brian, that a lot of people should understand. Some of this fear around heavy metals in general, even in the food supply, comes from Proposition 65 out of California. For a whole variety of reasons that would get way into the weeds, California passed many years ago a clean water act. Who doesn't want clean water?
[23:04] Phil Vigeant: But what it really turned into was an act that enabled what we call bounty hunter law firms. They set standards for heavy metals that were so low that now if you're in California you'll see warning signs for all these things everywhere—in a car rental facility. Anybody who lives in California has seen them. They're oblivious to them now because they're so used to seeing the warning.
[23:27] Phil Vigeant: It sets a standard for lead that's 0.5 micrograms of lead per serving, which is actually much less than what you get in a cup of spinach. When we actually respond to this, we talk about what is naturally occurring in even really good sources of vegetables. It was again just sensationalism that really misled the consumer.
[23:49] Phil Vigeant: If you followed that threshold that they used, you wouldn't eat—you would eat very little vegetables because even organic vegetables from the healthiest soil in the world could still have heavy metals above that Prop 65 level. That's just the thing that everybody should try to understand. If an outlet is using the California standard, it's just fundamentally misleading.
[24:14] Brian Fitzpatrick: Yeah, and it's interesting because beyond consumers, what I'm seeing in the supplement space is that the due diligence that's required from distributors, even payment processors—like we work for payment processors—and what are they concerned about? They're concerned about chargebacks and claims that are being made. Somebody buys your supplement and you're making claims, and they want their money back because this thing didn't work.
[24:40] Brian Fitzpatrick: We have to validate all the claims. We have to look at your COAs. We have to make sure there's nothing bad in your products. That's what Qredible does for the supply chain, including banks.
[25:01] Brian Fitzpatrick: But now we're seeing the stakes getting a little bit higher. Even major marketplaces like Amazon are escalating their requirements around documentation, quality, and compliance for any of these supplements. From your vantage point at PlantFusion, what do you see? Do you see that increasing?
[25:25] Phil Vigeant: You're spot on. And in general, it's a very good thing. I think it's really important because let's face it, supplements can be sold almost anywhere. Just to be clear, a lot of people say it's an unregulated industry, which is fundamentally false, just so everybody understands that. The FDA by definition regulates anything we put in our body. So it is a regulated industry. It is not as regulated as pharmaceuticals, and that's appropriate because it's not as dangerous as pharmaceuticals.
[25:52] Brian Fitzpatrick: Do you think it's misregulated?
[25:55] Phil Vigeant: No, I actually think—it's interesting, it's been a big part of my career in the industry and I know this topic is going to come up—I think it's appropriately regulated. With that said, because there are so many ingredients in the industry, it's appropriate to look at certain ones in a different way.
[26:12] Phil Vigeant: That doesn't mean that every herb should just be sold any way you want. We all know that there are herbs and things out there in the wild that could kill us if we eat them. I think there's an appropriate amount of regulation. For people who aren't aware of it, just to set a foundation, back in 1993, DSHEA was passed. DSHEA is an acronym for the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act.
[26:30] Phil Vigeant: That was a proactive bill that the industry got together on. I was very involved in that myself. We got together and said, "Hey, we have to be proactive about setting some standards for the industry." It set up things like structure-function claims. Made it really clear we can't say that this bottle of supplements cures diabetes because that's a disease claim. We're not allowed to say that. That's flat out against the law. Companies that do those types of things are prosecuted by the FTC or the FDA. They can't catch everybody, but that's one aspect of it.
[27:04] Phil Vigeant: Another aspect of it was setting up a standard for things like structure-function claims, which very simply are, hey, this may not cure diabetes, but it might help support blood glucose levels, but you still should see a doctor. This isn't going to replace your diabetes medication if you have to regulate your insulin. There are different layers to it.
[27:20] Phil Vigeant: That was a great framework that I think many parties were very happy with. If I go forward, if you look at an ingredient like ephedra that was all the rage back at the turn of 2000, there were a number of deaths from people taking too much of ephedra because—a simple way I explain ephedra for those who don't remember—it was like high-octane caffeine, super high-octane.
[27:46] Phil Vigeant: For people that had pre-existing heart issues, it wasn't good for them to take a lot of it. People were taking it for weight loss and stimulation and energy, and it was really not a great ingredient that absolutely needed some regulation. It got taken off the market.
[28:02] Phil Vigeant: But what we did as an industry—and this is another initiative I was involved in—we said we need to set up adverse event reporting because one of the things they found with that ingredient as an example was that the companies that were selling it were not recording the complaints that were coming in on it, which is a dangerous thing.
[28:21] Phil Vigeant: We decided to be very proactive as an industry. The committee I was on, called the COMPLY committee, we worked to get a bill passed through Congress using some of our friends in Congress that was called the adverse event reporting piece. Now today if somebody calls up and says, "Hey, I had this issue with your plant protein," we are regulated by law to submit that to the FDA as an adverse event report. There's a certain framework around it which I won't bore you and your listeners with.
[28:50] Phil Vigeant: I think we're generally in favor of more reasonable regulation. You're going to find that most leaders in the industry and most people that have been in it for a long time and serve on these committees are generally in favor of higher standards, a higher degree of regulation within reason—as long as it's not too heavy and starts to cut off access for the consumer.
[29:06] Phil Vigeant: Many of us are also very freedom-oriented or choice-oriented in terms of what we do. We just want to make sure that we're not, in the spirit of regulation, mitigating access to things that could really help people. Because there are many supplements now that are commonly recommended by mainstream doctors that 20 years ago were being called snake oil. And yet there's still snake oil out there.
[29:32] Phil Vigeant: Like CoQ10 should be taken by everybody who takes a statin drug. Millions of people take statin drugs. Now many mainstream, not all, but many mainstream cardiologists when they recommend a statin will say, "Hey, you should also supplement your diet with CoQ10 because it's critical for what a statin might do to deplete CoQ10 levels." And CoQ10 levels are really important.
[29:51] Brian Fitzpatrick: And that's the confusion though, Phil—there's so many supplement brands out there. You've been there from the beginning setting the standards and building to the standards. You helped set some of those standards. You're fine in meeting these standards because you helped write them. You've been a pioneer and a trailblazer in this area. But people just don't know what to trust. They don't know what to look for and they don't know how to validate and verify who's real and who's fake.
[30:35] Phil Vigeant: I don't envy the consumer in this category. I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, but I feel like this consumer category is one of the most confusing for consumers. I was telling a story about my personal life—if I'm out socially and people ask what I do, I used to say years ago, "Oh, I sell supplements," and I would just get a litany of questions and sometimes extremely personal information people would exchange quickly.
[31:05] Phil Vigeant: A friend of mine that I was with many years ago would say, "I can't even believe what these people tell you about themselves. I don't even tell these things to my doctors." What is that indicative of? Not that I'm smart—it's actually indicative of how confused the average consumer is about the whole category.
[31:30] Phil Vigeant: I think everybody kind of has the same general feeling when they walk into a retail store or go online regarding supplements: "I know I should be taking something, or I know I should be taking this or more of that," but "I really don't know why. I don't know how much. And to your point, I don't know what's quality and what isn't."
[31:50] Phil Vigeant: It's one of the categories that has the most conflicting bits of information because it's everything from what I'll call very pop-type media environments like going back in the day Dr. Oz and Oprah and those other things where somebody would come on and just say something that was just taken for granted as an absolute—to doctors who for many years, they're getting better now, but still today most mainstream medical doctors, family practitioners, have no idea what to recommend. They don't know.
[32:20] Phil Vigeant: Nutrition is not really taught that we've all heard—it's not taught much—which is sad because it's the foundation of health.
[32:34] Brian Fitzpatrick: You would think that in general a family practitioner would be required to have a tremendous amount of knowledge in general nutrition. You would think that would be required, maybe not a surgeon, but certainly a general practitioner and people that deal with general health. But it's not the way it is.
[32:51] Phil Vigeant: It's a super confusing category. I don't envy the consumers not in it. People, my friends that are in the industry, we joke around—that experience wasn't unique to me with people just sharing information. This is the experience that everybody in the industry has when they are out socially and meeting people.
[33:13] Phil Vigeant: I think part of what you see is people who come into the industry from outside of the industry, within a few years they're fans. They're not just fans because they sell it. They fall in love with the industry and the products because of what they experience. It doesn't mean that everything we produce is perfect for everybody and it doesn't mean we're going to cure cancer. But I think in general the experience people have once they're exposed to healthy eating, healthy diets, and nutritional supplementation is generally a very positive one.
[33:32] Brian Fitzpatrick: Well, my doctor started out that way, but I think he got too many lunches and dinners from big pharma reps. He shifted a little bit. In fact, even yesterday during Trump's press conference about the cannabis industry rescheduling and CBD, even the doctors—there was one doctor who spoke and he said, "We weren't taught about this stuff in medical school. This was not there." So it's amazing.
[34:04] Brian Fitzpatrick: Phil, I could talk to you forever but we're already past time. This has gone so fast because first of all you're fascinating. You've got a great background, a great company, and you're always fun to talk to. We really appreciate you being on Qredible Live and talking about all things supplements and natural supplements and plant-based supplements. We appreciate you being here. Thanks for joining us today on Qredible Live.
[34:24] Phil Vigeant: Well, thank you.
[34:26] Brian Fitzpatrick: How can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about you and your brand?
[34:30] Phil Vigeant: Email me. First of all, you can go on plantfusion.com—that's the website for the brand. My email is my name, Philip with two L's, period, then Vigeant at plantfusion.com. But they can also just hit info at plantfusion.com and it'll get to me. Anybody can communicate with me that way and we'll do our best to get back to them as quick as we can.
[34:45] Phil Vigeant: Anytime we can be a resource, the team and I are very passionate about health and nutrition, and it's really what drives us. There's no finish line. It's like anything else in life. We're learning things every week and month and year. We work with a great group of people and we do our damnedest to make sure that the people who take our products are getting the best products available in the marketplace, and that we're constantly trying to improve what we're delivering and help people with their health.
[35:24] Phil Vigeant: Because I think everybody knows who's had health problems—it's something we all take for granted until you actually have the problem or a loved one has the problem, and it changes our lives. If we can just make everybody 5% healthier, that's a big step in the right direction.
[35:41] Brian Fitzpatrick: And people will spend a lot of money to get healthy after they're not.
[35:45] Phil Vigeant: Yeah, exactly. We've all been there. But it's a great show. Thank you very much for having me on. It's an honor to be on, and congratulations again for all your success and the success of the show.
[35:58] Faith (Host): I have to say too, as a consumer, this Season 3 has really been a trend of founders coming on and sharing their stories. I think just hearing your passion for purity educates these consumers because someone would be more apt to buy your product over a 4.8-star rating on Amazon no-name company, which has no regulation really, and they just have a bunch of bots giving ratings. We really appreciate when we have founders come on and just share their story—clear communication. This is good for you. This will help you. We really appreciate that. It's been great chatting with you. I definitely want to have you back on.
[36:26] Phil Vigeant: Oh, yes.
[36:28] Faith (Host): Yeah. I think 2026 is going to be really exciting in the health and wellness industry.
[36:33] Phil Vigeant: Yeah, it's growing momentum. I think whether people like the Trump administration or not, there's some stones that are being turned over. Although it may be uncomfortable and maybe not every policy is the right one with RFK and everything, I think there are really great questions being asked that we should be answering as a country for the health of our citizens.
[36:56] Phil Vigeant: In that process, we will learn more and be better off for it. It may not be perfect, but I think it's due. It may not be appropriate in every case, but these are good questions we need to ask and answer ourselves and let people make their choices. I think that's the big thing. Whether people like what's happening or not, there's a theme around this, which is give people more choices as opposed to being prescribed or telling them what they have to do.
[37:24] Phil Vigeant: I think that really came out of the COVID vaccination issue where we saw the divisiveness of that. I don't think most people were pro-vaccine 100% or anti-vaccine 100%. I think most people were like me and many others that would say, "No, let's just make sure you have all the information and then you get to make a choice personally."
[37:43] Brian Fitzpatrick: Yeah. And they were scared too. There's not a lot of time to make a decision or do a lot of research when you're fearing for your life.
[37:52] Phil Vigeant: Yeah.
[37:55] Brian Fitzpatrick: Totally interesting. I think this is why we're going to see an over $400 billion market in this supplement space before long. That's really why I shifted into the tech side of this—first of all, I'm a big believer in supplements. I've replaced a lot of my pharmaceuticals with natural supplements and changing eating habits.
[38:25] Brian Fitzpatrick: It's been a learning process for me because everybody's body is different. But you're counting on the quality of the supplements you're taking because you don't want to spend money with some type of placebo thing you're throwing in your body that's just nothing but a carrier oil.
[38:43] Phil Vigeant: Yeah. And those products are out there. Like Faith mentioned what's online—it's a scary world out there. We look at some of what's online and we just shake our head. The FDA and FTC, I don't care what administration it is, they have limited resources. They can't go after everybody.
[38:59] Phil Vigeant: But I think the people I work with in the industry—I always say it's the loud minority that gets all the bad press in any industry or field. I think that's true for our industry where there's this loud minority that is sensationalized, they overstate claims, they make promises that aren't realistic for a consumer to accept.
[39:27] Phil Vigeant: I think the people like—not just me, but there are other people like me in the industry. At the industry trade shows I meet with people that are very genuine and authentic about what we're trying to deliver. We really are trying to create solutions and answers for consumers the way they're looking at them.
[39:44] Phil Vigeant: Bottom line is don't listen to the loud minority. There are a number of other brands besides us that are trying to do the right thing and get the right products in people's hands. I think that's more of the majority of the industry than the minority of the industry.
[40:00] Brian Fitzpatrick: Speaking of the loud minority and the Trump administration and things that have to take place—amazing announcement yesterday on the rescheduling of cannabis from a Schedule 1, so it's no longer sitting next to heroin, but now next to Tylenol with codeine in Schedule 3. And the fact that Trump has basically directed Congress to fix the hemp problem that got created and return to something more common sense.
[40:25] Brian Fitzpatrick: We're going to have a special episode on Monday at 3 p.m. We're going to be talking about that and what the implications are so that we can—instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which is what happened last month on hemp and CBD and things like CBN and CBG that actually are good for you—the object is to get rid of the gas station weed and get to the positive stuff. The stuff that it was meant to be.
[40:49] Brian Fitzpatrick: There's a great example of what was never meant to be happened because of opportunity and opportunistic players. But we're going to talk about all those implications on a live special episode on Monday at 3 p.m.
[41:00] Brian Fitzpatrick: And then after the Christmas break, Faith, who do we have coming up next?
[41:05] Faith (Host): Yeah. So we're going to have a little break and then January 16th, we have Code Health founders Wendy Cohen Osborne and Dr. Lisa Piper. That'll be really exciting to chat with them. And again, we have a bonus episode Monday, December 22nd, 3 p.m. Eastern Standard. We're going to ask Brian all the questions that everyone has. Should be a good episode.
[41:30] Brian Fitzpatrick: There you go. And Phil, just like Dijon—Vigeant—that's how you pronounce his name. You have been an absolutely amazing guest. Thank you for joining us. We'd love to have you back here on Qredible Live. Have a great Christmas. Have a wonderful holiday and blessings to all of our viewers.
[41:56] Phil Vigeant: Thank you guys. Great to be here. Take care.
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