Better Products for a Better Future, with Stephen Phipps, Chief Innovation Officer
We’re asked all the time about how we formulate Thorne products. What inspires us?
For me, inspiration for product innovation comes from making sure these things stay around for my kids, my future grandkids, and my greater community. I get to see a lot of testimonials from people saying how these products greatly impact their lives for the better. If we don’t take the time to produce better, consume better, harvest better, and reduce our footprint more, it’ll be hard to preserve the benefits we’ve gotten from these resources for future generations.
An example of this is our revolutionary dissolvable disc supplement line. The idea came from a small group of us wanting to look at how we can create another new, quality product while honoring our commitment to the environment. make something different that touches on environmentally driven questions. How can we remove plastic from the functional beverage industry? Can we improve beverage shipping by removing water from the equation? Imagine something like a carton of alternative milk that could be shipped like a sheet of paper to be reconstituted in the home and still be delicious.
All these ideas culminated in Thorne’s dissolvable supplement discs — a first-of-its-kind functional beverage, delivering a nearly zero carbon footprint. With plastic-free packaging and cartons certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, our dissolvable discs produce 53-percent less greenhouse gases per 8-ounce serving, compared to the plastic bottles used in traditional beverage manufacturing.
Our current lineup of dissolvable supplement discs include Prebiotic +, to promote bloat-free gut health*; Sleep +, a soothing blend of chamomile extract, L-Theanine, and melatonin*; and Kids Multi +, a sugar-free multi-vitamin for your little onesa growing mind and body.* We’ve got more coming down the pike for our dissolvable discs, so stay tuned.
From researcher to innovator
I became hooked on science and research as an undergraduate researcher working for an integrated pest management lab. It wasn’t glamorous — I had to collect caterpillar vomit — but it was there in 2006 that I was published for the first time, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
I earned my PhD in pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Florida in 2009, with a focus on botanical products in areas of mental health such as anxiety and depression. My research interest at the time was specifically around a nonclassical entheogen and its use in cases of refractory depression. During this time, I also published studies in the journal Planta Medica (you can read them here and here), and highlighted testing options for botanical supplements in publications with the United States Pharmacopeia.
Before joining Thorne, I was in private practice in Seattle as a naturopathic physician, focusing on a mix of primary care, mental health complaints, and weight management issues. I had a two-year residency at Bastyr University, where I taught pharmacology and performed clinical research. I also had integrative rotations at local hospitals and community clinics, including a homeless youth clinic. During this time, I contributed the opening chapter to the book Studies in Natural Products Chemistry with a friend and lab mate of mine, on structure-function relationships of entheogens across multiple species.
I was first introduced to Thorne after moving from Florida to Seattle. The first winter was brutal. I had never been somewhere with so little sun for months at a time. It was really impacting me, so I wanted to get some vitamin D. A friend told me to check out Thorne, that they are amazing and have this “No List” — unacceptable ingredients for Thorne’s nutritional supplements — that makes them better than anything else you can buy. So, I checked them out, and I actually felt it. I had taken vitamins before, but Thorne was a game changer forto me.
I’ve been with Thorne since 2015, and I stay up to speed on the latest clinical research by using several resources. I search biomedical literature on PubMmed, an online database of journal articles. I focus especially onaround natural products, things like Rhodiola and other botanical adaptogens, glutathione, nicotinamide riboside, and CoQ10, to name a few. I have a few clinical trial groups I follow, like Clinical Research Informer, and ClinicalTrials.gov. I also use social platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn for a more on-the-ground approach to how we think and talk about health.
Staying on top of the latest research helps when some products eventually decline and then face discontinuation. Like life, a product lives for a set amount of time, and then it either needs to be reformulated or it is discontinued. I work with a group of people who analyze that takes in a lot of information to determine the product’s fate.if the product can be reformulated or needs to be discontinued.
From the research and development side of things, we look at the literature between when we first formulated it and now. We look at things like publication density to get a sense of what may have caused a decline in the product use, changes in what is being studied with that ingredient, or what ingredients may be similar to what we are reviewing and if they are better candidates. All of these things can help determine how to best approach the problem with the underperforming product.
Focus on food and family
My background is in botany, with a love of ethnobotany, which comes down to how humans use plants. Medicine was just one part of it; of course, there’s food and nutrition, spiritual uses, and so on. This has been going on for as long as we’ve been were around. My extracurricular activities entail anything culinary. I love to cook. It’s my little Zen moment where my brain can stop, I can listen to music, make some good food, and serve family and friends. Living in the Charleston area in South Carolina also lets me enjoy amazing food, too. There’s a lot of history around the food here, which comes through in the ingredients and the way it’s prepared. preparation of the food.
I’m a dad and a husband outside of work. I love my family and enjoy any time I can spend with them. My partner is also a naturopathic doctor so we like to look at things we can make at home, like topical treatments and tinctures. We have started making mocktails with Daily Greens Plus, which has been amazing! Our greens powder is really fun and versatile, and I love how I feel when I take it.
The Medical team at Thorne really wanted to bring a greens powder to the market that you could really feel, and to celebrate what botanical ingredients could do to support you and your daily needs outside of macronutrients or vitamins that are used to fortify other products. It’s also a very transparent product –, you know how much you are getting of each ingredient, which is so important for products like this.
As I said before, any time I hear about how we impact people’s lives, it’s the best feeling. My favorite story is from a few years back. My brother-in-law called, and it was one of those days at work that has you questioning your abilities. I hesitated to pick up, but I did. My brother-in-law was excited because he was talking to someone, and Thorne came up. The man told my brother-in-law how much the products have impacted his life, and how much better he feels, and he’s able to meet his health goals. It was the best thing to have heard, especially on a bad day.
My favorite Thorne products include SynaQuell. I coach youth soccer on the weekend, and I played in clubs growing up. Knowing the research on head impacts, and having experienced my own concussions on the pitch, I make sure to have SynaQuell in the pantry for my son and me during soccer season. Currently, Thorne is supporting a clinical study by the Mayo Clinic to investigate SynaQuell’s effects on brain function in youth ice hockey players, which we are very excited about.
I also love the printed dissolvable disc products; they are near and dear to my heart. In the mornings, I tend to rush out the door in a hurry, taking kids to school before making it to an early meeting, so grabbing a Prebiotic + pouch to take on the go makes things easy. Then at night, I can make either a hot or cold drink with Sleep +. I love the ability to have support for turning off the hamster wheel with theanine and chamomile. I sit in front of a screen a lot during the day and need to be firing on all cylinders, mentally. AI take a combo of Brain Factors and Memoractiv covers both eye fatigue and mental support and is integral to my morning routine.*
There’s one supplement in my top -five that I helped develop but don’t take: Collagen Plus. So why do I love it? Well, it has our nicotinamide riboside hydrogen malate as well as some great plant extracts and a clean collagen source. It was fun to source and to make, and there is a lot of science behind why we chose the ingredients that make up Collagen Plus. All of these factors translated to results people could see, and we really challenged what a collagen supplement could, and should, be doing.
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This article is part of an ongoing series from Thorne HealthTech’s Medium blog, where we showcase the individuals behind Thorne’s approach to developing and delivering health and wellness solutions.
