In the last year, Len Zapalowski, BSc, MSc, CEO, with Mazza Innovation Ltd. in Summerland, BC, Canada, has overseen a scale-up of Mazza’s technology from the laboratory to commercial production. He is leading a group of physicists, chemical engineers, finance and communications experts to propel the marketing, sales and production of Mazza’s high-value extracts. Mr. Zapalowski has extensive experience in leading management teams in high growth companies with environmental stories having both a regulatory and consumer impact. He has more than 25 years of senior management experience with some of Vancouver’s most successful companies and his broad global business experience includes general management, R&D, sales, marketing and business development in North America, Asia and Europe. Mr. Zapalowski graduated with a BSc and MSc from Imperial College in London.
  
Health E-Insights: Where will the most significant growth occur in the company in the next few years?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: The most significant growth at Mazza Innovation will be from supplying high quality polyphenol extracts into the dietary supplement, functional food, functional beverage and cosmeceuticals markets. This will be done by marketing either directly to ingredient formulators or in partnership with established nutraceutical ingredient manufacturers.
 
Health E-Insights: How will this technology change the supplement industry?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: Mazza’s technology is a clean phytochemical extraction process. This is important because currently most extracts are recovered using solvents such as methanol, ethanol, acetone or ethyl acetate. Solvent plants are complex facilities set up to handle explosive and toxic chemicals, and have significant worker health hazards. The result is significant operational overhead including the disposal costs of contaminated biomass residue. The Mazza process, however, recovers polyphenols using only water. Mazza extracts are recovered with minimal health and environmental costs and with a much lower financial cost than conventional approaches.
 
Health E-Insights: Why would a company buy your product?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: Mazza’s extracts are differentiated because they have been produced using a clean extraction process. The cost of production is lower than a solvent-based plant. In the future, there will be more restrictions to building solvent-based plants, which means that companies will be looking for cleaner extraction methods. In addition, companies are looking for a point of differentiation in their marketing strategies: a clean extraction technology will draw consumer interest to a subject that is becoming increasingly important—the transparency of our food supply. 
 
Health E-Insights: How do you evaluate the success of your company?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: Our goal is to become the established market and thought leader in clean polyphenol production and extracts.
 
Health E-Insights: What words come to mind when you think of your brand?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: Clean, green and pure. High value extracts. Fast and efficient extraction process.
 
Health E-Insights: What part of the business keeps you up at night?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: I am hopeful that the industry will quickly recognize the value of clean extracts from both a health and environmental perspective.
 
Health E-Insights: What are the top two metrics to which your company pays the closest attention?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: Customer satisfaction and sales velocity. We want to ensure that clean, high-value extracts will become the standard demand of the consumer.
 
Health E-Insights: Is there one key message to the industry that you would want out there?
 
Mr. Zapalowski: That Mazza clean extraction technology is something the industry has been seeking for decades. Many novel extraction technologies have been put forward, but none have achieved broad commercial uptake and success. Mazza’s technology is the next big thing in extracting polyphenols from botanical feed stocks for both the greatest consumer health and environmental benefit.
 
Sheldon Baker is well-known for creating nutraceutical brand marketing and public relations campaigns. For Health E-Insights interview consideration, contact him at Sheldon@NutraInk.com. And follow him on Twitter @NutraInk. By the way, Sheldon is looking for a few good PR consulting jobs.