Nguyen’s depth in both areas of business and technical acumen has been integral in his success marketing analytical testing and cGMP consulting services. His professional experience includes working for a variety of contract testing laboratories including ChromaDex Analytics (now Covance) and Certified Laboratories as well as for NSF International. Nguyen graduated from the University of California, Irvine where he received a bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences.

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Health E-Insights: What services does your lab offer and which industries do you specialize in?
 
Nguyen: Based in Salt Lake City, UT, Dyad Labs is an independent ISO/IEC 17025:2005 accredited contract testing laboratory providing specialized chemistry and microbiology testing solutions to the nutraceutical, food and beverage and personal care industries. Our new Utah facility contains 11 separate lab areas with over 30,000 square feet of dedicated laboratory space and office/warehouse space of an additional 150,000 square feet to allow for the addition of new testing services, equipment, and staff. Specializing in testing using advanced liquid and gas chromatography technologies, Dyad serves many of the leading national brands, sports nutrition, direct selling, and food companies worldwide.
 
Health E-Insights: Please explain the Dyad Parallel.
 
Nguyen: Dyad Parallel Testing was created because downtime is not an option. Delays on tests while the new lab gets their testing methods validated is not an option. The only real option is Parallel Testing. Parallel Testing is more than a complimentary test drive. It is the process of working with Dyad Labs through the whole evaluation of method validation, reporting requirements, and certificate of analysis production while still using your current lab. Then, when you have two qualified third-party suppliers, we are confident that our service and value will become apparent and we will have truly won your business in the most apples to apples comparison possible.
 
Health E-Insights: How will technology change the supplement and food industries?
 
Nguyen: As our ability to see inside products continues to increase, consumer expectation (the CSI Effect) has grown into what can only be called full label transparency. Today consumers may not always trust the manufacturer of nutritional products to tell them what is in the bottle, so brands and manufacturers are turning to third-party labs who can now analyze, primarily using liquid and gas chromatography techniques, finished goods, and raw ingredients down to the molecular level. This level of certainty will boost consumer confidence and result in a sorting of nutrition companies that play by the rules and those that are going out of business.   
 
Health E-Insights: Where do you envision the most significant growth in the company in the next few years?
 
Nguyen: Protein identification and quantitation is one of the many areas we are focused on. After examining all possible and widely used qualitative and quantitative protein methods, Dyad Labs recognized the need for an entirely new method of testing protein. Typical methods like Kjeldahl and Dumas, both based on measuring nitrogen released, have changed little since the 1890s and are easily spiked with nitrogen producing ingredients. After examining new technologies such as DNA testing and LC-MS/MS, we have developed a method with the ability to detect protein more accurately than ever before.
 
Health E-Insights: As an organization gets larger there can be a tendency for it to dampen the inspiration. How do you keep this from happening?
 
Nguyen: The Goldilocks Principle states that the optimal solution is often found not at the extremes, but the middle, where things are just right. It is true for the temperature of porridge and the search for planetary life, as it is for your quest to find the right laboratory partner. Your challenge is to find the best of both worlds. You need a lab that is large and technically advanced enough to handle your needs, but small enough so that your samples aren’t getting delayed, or being run incorrectly, or leaving you without access to actual lab managers. We are small enough and we are big enough to be just right.
 
Health E-Insights: Which is most important to your organization—mission, core values or vision?
 
Nguyen: I vote core values. In our industry, integrity and trust are paramount. Our customers trust us to run the right tests, using the right methods, to make sure that what is on the label, is in the bottle. This type of trust is earned by telling the truth to customers, even when that truth may be bad for business. Trust that comes from solving problems together, and not ignoring the warning signs when testing reveals some unforeseen results. Sure, there are labs out there that ask their clients what result they want on their certificate of analysis before the testing begins. Dyad Labs isn’t one of them.
 
Health E-Insights: Who has had the biggest influence on your life and career?
 
Nguyen: My special needs daughter. Although I have been around the industry for a while and many people might recognize me by name or sight, most probably do not know the story of my daughter. My daughter has an ultra-rare genetic syndrome called Bohring-Opitz Syndrome that currently affects approximately 80 children worldwide. My daughter doesn’t talk or walk, and we do not know how long she might live but she has taught me so much more in her young life than my entire life or career. The level of deep interactions I have with customers and colleagues is based on what I learn from her.
 
Health E-Insights: Is there a golden rule by which you live?
 
Nguyen: Hard work. I learned this from a very young age watching my parents who are immigrants that came from a war-torn country not speaking the language with no money in their pockets. They got themselves associates/vocational degrees attending night school while working as dishwashers. They worked their way up to blue-collar jobs raising me and my brother. Whoever says hard work never pays off? Can anyone really sit there and say, I gave 150% and didn’t get anything from it, or nobody noticed? Hard work has paid off for me numerous times.

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Sheldon Baker is CEO of the Baker Dillon Group LLC and has created numerous nutraceutical brand marketing communications and public relations campaigns for many well-known supplement and food industry companies. For Health E-Insights interview consideration or brand marketing consulting, contact him at SBaker@BakerDillon.com.