The story of how Mark and Darlene Powell started their family business from their family home is one their daughter Rikki Harrison tells with cheerfulness and pride.
The business, Nutra Organics, has become a household name in the wellness space, thanks to its ever-growing range of family-friendly, locally-made supplements and powders.
But 25 years ago, in 1998, it was a one-product side venture that serendipitously began when Mark started developing a mixture at the family kitchen table that would eventually become Nutra’s best-selling product, Super Greens + Reds.
“It was almost an accident,” Harrison laughs as she tells SmartCompany.
“We started making this product, we’re all taking it and feeling amazing, and people started asking for it.
“That’s how a lot of our product development happens; we make products that we need or we think there’s a real genuine need for and then it becomes commercially available.
“If we’re not solving problems, then what’s the point?”
Harrison, who serves as Nutra’s chief operating officer and a board director, says her family has always been healthy – “like packing mung-beans-in-my-lunchbox-at-school-kind of healthy” – and both of her parents were trained in homeopathy and massage. Their interest in alternative medicines even led Mark to importing blue-green algae from the US to sell to health food stores, until that was no longer permitted.
This passion has been the driving force behind Nutra Organics as the business has grown from a long-time side hustle to a company that now employs more than 50 people and supplies to almost 2,200 stockists across the country, from Priceline pharmacies to independent pharmacies, grocers and specialty stores.
One Nutra Organics product is sold every 30 seconds and the company will “definitely” exceed $30 million in revenue this financial year, says Harrison.
“Our mission, everything we do, is to deeply nourish 10 million people. That’s what we want to do with our lives … and we are on a mission to do that,” she says.
Nutra Organics has always been a family affair, and even though founders Mark and Darlene are officially retired, they remain on the company’s board and represent the company as ambassadors.
And like many family businesses, there was a time when everyone in the family was involved, including Harrison’s sister Brit, her husband, sister-in-law, and niece-in-law. The business was run, essentially as a side hustle, first from the garage of the family home, and then from a rental property when the family home was sold to invest more in the business.
That changed in 2013, when Mark was visiting a mechanic to get his car fixed in Currumbin on the Gold Coast and saw an opportunity right in front of him … in the form of an empty factory for lease.
“He said: ‘I rented it and we’re moving there’,” Harrison recalls.
The family only had one pallet worth of stock to move into the new space, but Harrison says it proved to be a “really big move” that set the business up with the ability to scale when the time came.
But, Harrison doesn’t gloss over the challenges either.
“When we got to the factory, we spread things out to make it look like we had more things … I had a couple of children and I brought the kids in with me … doing all the things. And we all did that with our kids when they were born,” she says.
“But we nearly went broke for the first five years every month; we were banging the drum saying, ‘this is awesome, this is awesome; but then, you’re also like, ‘who really needs to get paid?”
“There’s nothing like family to put blood sweat and tears in”, says Harrison, recalling how she and others in the family were working in the business well beyond the hours they were paid for, while also holding down full-time jobs.
“You give 1000%,” she adds.
And when Nutra did move into a position to make its first outside hire, they “literally just became part of the family”, she says.
By 2015, the wellness sector was starting to blossom and products like bone broth were becoming more mainstream.
For a family, and business, that had already been making bone broth and other supplements for years, it was a case of “right place, right time”, says Harrison.
“I think it was good new product development, coupled with having the heritage, where we were doing it before it was cool,” she says.
In 2015, Nutra brought out its bone broth powder, and in 2017, its range of collagen-based products were released. The demand for its locally made products was growing, and growing fast.
“Almost harder than working out who you were going to pay each month was doubling, and then tripling, in size really quickly,” says Harrison.
“That was almost harder because we’d buy 300 kilos of bone broth that we’ve had cooked and we do this and that, and then we bring it in. We get it packed, and [say] ‘Yep, awesome’. And then we sell it in like two weeks, and then we would be like, ‘hold up, we don’t have any money to buy more’.”
Nutra Organics has been entirely self-funded by the family and Harrison firmly believes consistency and transparency are what has allowed the business to not only survive for a quarter of a century but to thrive in the current wellness boom.
“It’s about doing the same thing again and again,” she says.
The other, if not the most important, element is the people working in the business, says Harrison.
“[It’s] having passionate believers who are like, ‘we are making a difference, this is going to affect people’s health’, and having everyone work together in the same direction,” she adds.
“And then I almost think you can’t really go that wrong; your growth is natural and then as you scale, it’s just more zeroes. You do the same thing, but you just create more of it.”
This consistency also extends to product quality, explains Harrison, and keeping the Nutra supply chain local means the company has “ultimate control over everything we do” and can “stand behind our product”.
All Nutra Organics food products are made within Australia and most of them are done so within 100kms of the company’s headquarters in Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales.
“In the very beginning, Mum and Dad always had this ethos – and it was unspoken to begin with – but if they wouldn’t feed it to their grandchildren, then there was no way it was ever going to make it onto the market,” says Harrison.
“So I think for us, it became vitally important to have 100% strategic supply for every gram, and every single ingredient is sourced by us, and originally by me, actually.”
The wellness market is booming in Australia, and the CSIRO predicts demand for the vitamins and supplements sector in particular will reach $5.2 billion by 2030, up from $3.5 billion in 2018, based on current annual growth rates.
And with that kind of market opportunity comes a growing number of competitors.
For the most part, Harrison says there’s a place in the industry for all brands that are genuine about improving people’s health. Competition is healthy and it keeps the Nutra team on its toes, she says.
But the business has seen plenty of others “come and go”, some of which have “taken the world by storm” only to disappear when their business models didn’t stack up.
“If you are genuine about it, you’ll be around in five years, 10 years,” she says.
Consumers now have access to much more information about their health, says Harrison, and they can see through bogus claims.
“If you don’t gain your customers’ trust, you just won’t be around for very long,” she says.
Nutra employs in-house naturopaths and nutritionists and is acutely aware that if it says anything about its products, it “better be able to back it up, know it is for real”, says Harrison.
It’s one of the reasons why the brand chooses to only work with influencers who either already use and love Nutra products or who are excited to add them to their daily life.
“Alignment is super important,” Harrison says when asked about this element of the brand’s marketing mix.
Nutra typically develops ongoing relationships with influencers, says Harrison, and has been working with some for six or seven years now.
“If our consistent transparency for the business isn’t replicated in people that we work with, then we’re not going to be authentic long-term,” she says.
“And that would be terrible to build 25 years of heritage and then ruin it by working with someone who doesn’t actually believe in the product.”
News Editor
Prior to joining SmartCompany, Eloise was news editor at Books+Publishing, the trade press for the Australian book industry. Eloise has degrees in media and communications, marketing and business management, and political science. You can follow her on Twitter at @ellykeating.
