The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  The father of the chia diet trend is Dr. Wayne Coates, a professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Arizona. A marathon runner with an interest in health foods, Coates’s research had focused on cultivating new crops from various sources over the years, including many from Latin America, such as quinoa, amaranth, and various strains of lettuce. In 1991 he was working in partnership with other academics in the northwestern provinces of Argentina, trying to introduce to poor farmers there more lucrative crops beyond the traditional staples of corn and beans. A few small farms in Guatemala and Mexico were still cultivating chia seeds, but someone on the team suggested they try them in Argentina, so in 1992 chia was planted as part of the program on thirty-five acres of land in the province of Catamarca.

  “The initial work we did was feeding it to chickens to make Omega-3-enriched, healthier eggs,” recalled Coates. “That’s how it started.” Omega-3 fatty acids were becoming a big driver of health trends at the time, and so Coates and his team focused their research on the effects of feeding chia to chickens, pigs, and dairy cows as well as laboratory rats. After a few years they began looking at chia as something humans should be consuming directly. Coates began working with others to identify additional health benefits, isolating chia’s antioxidant, fiber, and protein attributes in various studies he and his Argentine partner in the project, agronomist Ricardo Ayerza Jr., conducted. The Omega-3 acid levels in chia were particularly high, and the more Coates and Ayerza studied the seed, the more they realized what a potential gold mine they had unearthed. Chia seed stored easily, and unlike flax, it never went rancid once it was milled, which meant it wasn’t perishable. It had no discernible taste and could hold up to heat of various types, so it could conceivably work in everything from baked goods and meat dishes to heavily processed food products. In 2005 Coates and Ayerza published Chia: Rediscovering a Forgotten Crop of the Aztecs, a book that summarized their research and passion about chia and strongly evangelized for its consumption. It coincided with Coates’s efforts to sell chia seeds in the North American market. He received approval for its sale by the Food and Drug Administration, who certified it was safe to eat, and Coates sold the seeds online and to health food stores around North America.

  Around the same time a Toronto health food entrepreneur and self-confessed jack-of-all-trades named Larry Brown was launching his own chia seed business. Brown had been selling various whole grain breads to Canadian health food stores since the mid-1980s and had occasionally heard about chia seeds. “I remember reading a book in a health food store called All About Chia in 1972,” recalled Brown, sitting at a Starbucks near his house one day. “But you could barely find it. It was sometimes in health food stores in little plastic bags with twist ties on it and a handwritten paper label.” Brown’s sister Trudy searched online for someone who could procure chia seeds, and they came across a family of farmers in Argentina who were using it as chicken feed (and likely got their start from Dr. Coates’s project). Brown showed some of Coates’s preliminary research to a friend who owned a health food store. “This will change the world,” Brown recalled the friend saying. “But you need to do research.”

  Brown took a small bag of chia seeds to Dr. Vladimir Vuksan, a highly respected professor of nutrition at the University of Toronto, and literally knocked on his office door, asking whether the professor would study the seed. “You don’t just walk in off the street,” Vuksan shot back. “I don’t even know you.” But Brown, a persistent salesman, convinced Vuksan to keep the seeds and take a look if he was interested—no obligations or questions asked. Five days later Vuksan called Brown back and told him it was the most nutritious food he’d ever seen. He began conducting his own studies, which showed that salba seeds (he and Brown didn’t use the name chia because of associations with the Chia Pet) were beneficial in reducing blood glucose, blood pressure, body inflammation, and fibrinolysis, especially in patients with type 2 diabetes. Vuksan and Brown dug into the different strains of chia seeds out there, including white chia, red chia, and black chia, as well as the various attributes of seeds grown in different regions. Eventually they identified the two strains they felt were the most consistently nutritious, and in 2002 they filed provisional patents for Salba Hispanica L. (basically chia seeds) as a medical treatment. Brown set up the Salba company and released the first branded strain of chia seeds to the market in the early 2000s. As sales slowly grew in the health food community, Brown reached out to a Denver-based company, operated by a man named Rally Ralston, that made tortilla chips and other products with whole grains. Ralston and his brother had been looking into chia seeds since 1999 and soon began working with Brown to develop chia-fortified chips, salsas, pretzels, and snack foods under the Salba brand.

  Other companies started popping up, particularly in Toronto, which became a sort of chia mecca in the trend’s early years. Press followed as well. In 2005 the Saturday Evening Post—which, almost two hundred years old, now targets a geriatric audience—wrote about chia seeds as a returning “supergrain,” quoting Dr. Vuksan and his research extensively. Margaret Conover, a Long Island botanist and science educator turned chia blogger, was shocked when her eighty-year-old mother baked salba muffins for her family reunion after reading the article. “ ‘Yeah, they’re these miracle seeds I read about in Saturday Evening Post.’ ” Conover recalled her mother saying. “ ‘They do blah blah blah … and I paid thirty-two dollars a pound.’ My mother doesn’t pay thirty-two dollars a pound for anything!” Conover said. “I was just flabbergasted. She was the first person I’d ever heard of outside the chia world who bought it, and she bought it through mail order.” A year later Dr. Andrew Weil wrote about chia seeds on his website, which is one of the most read wellness and nutrition publications in the world.

  As word spread, around 2007 and 2008, more chia suppliers began entering the market, and more chia products (drinks, bars, supplements) began appearing on health food shelves. Because chia wasn’t a widely traded commodity, the price and quality fluctuated unpredictably. It was the Wild West: a constant influx of new players, each staking their claim to some previously unnoticed corner of the market, with no one really able to guarantee anything. Brown and Ralston got into a disagreement over the direction of Salba’s business and split ways, though not before heading to court with each other and the Argentinean suppliers of the seeds over who could use the trademarked name of Salba (essentially, Ralston won the rights). Wayne Coates worked with a Florida company called Lifemax to develop the Mila-branded mix of chia seeds, which Lifemax then distributed through a sort of Amway-style direct marketing model, in which users sold bags of seeds to their friends and recouped a share of the profits. Mila is priced several times higher than other chia products, and many in the chia community (yes, there is a chia community) have complained that it is nothing but a pyramid scheme. On her chiativity.org blog Conover reported that Lifemax was rumored to have published a study written by an “expert” serving time in federal prison and that Coates claimed that the Lifemax people owed him money, and this is why he left the company.

  Then, in 2009, author Christopher McDougall released the book Born to Run about the reclusive Tarahumara Indian tribe in Mexico’s Copper Canyons who are reputed to be the world’s greatest long-distance runners. They run in thin sandals, avoiding the injuries that plague most joggers, and they eat chia. Though McDougall only mentioned chia seeds a few times in the book, he did so with the zeal of a missionary, spreading a powerful gospel to fresh converts. “If you had to pick just one desert-island food, you couldn’t do much better than chia,” McDougall wrote, “at least if you were interested in building muscle, lowering cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease; after a few months on the chia diet, you could probably swim home.” Born to Run quickly became a global sensation, selling millions of copies and igniting a fever in the jogging community. I remember being on a book tour in Buffalo, New York, and my chaperone was an enthusiastic jogger who couldn’t stop talk
ing about the book. He had tossed out his running shoes and had begun running in minimally supportive “barefoot” sandals (an entire industry that sprung up in the book’s wake), and as I sat eating chicken wings at the Anchor Bar, he stirred a spoonful of chia seeds he kept in a plastic baggie into a glass of water and told me how I really should have written a book about running instead. Runners’ message boards and websites filled up with enthusiastic discussions on chia seeds, and their use began growing in other athletic communities, which are early adopters of many health trends.

  After Born to Run the market burst open with chia entrepreneurs. Janie Hoffman, an upbeat avocado and pineapple farmer from Southern California, heard about chia seeds from her personal trainer, who was using them instead of flax seeds because of their longer shelf life. She bottled chia fresca drinks (basically chia lemonade) and brought them to her yoga students, who couldn’t get enough of them. In 2010 Hoffman launched the Mamma Chia line of beverages, promoting them with the above quote from Born to Run posted prominently on her website. Mamma Chia’s first customer was all the Whole Foods stores in the southern Pacific region of the United States, where they sold so well that within a month they were distributed nationally throughout the chain—a major coup for any company, let alone a startup. Mamma Chia drinks are now available in thousands of stores around North America, including mainstream grocery retailers like Wegmans, Kroeger, and Safeway. A year after Mamma Chia’s launch, Dan Gluck and Nick Morris, two young hedge fund financiers in New York with a passion for intense workouts, got into the business with Health Warrior, which marketed whole chia seeds and chia energy bars, initially to other type-A athletes who worked in finance. They sponsored 5 a.m. power workouts in Central Park, where they served chia drinks, granola with chia, and their Health Warrior bars. Wall Street traders got hooked on it and brought Health Warrior products to their offices, where they began leaning on chia as an energy boost during frantic days on the market—popping a handful of seeds or a Health Warrior bar to stay alert during marathon sessions of shorting derivatives like their predecessors had once done with coffee, Red Bull, and cocaine. Even the folks behind Chia Pet got into the act, launching a line of ch-ch-ch-chia Omega-3 seeds with their particular brand of low-budget, catchy TV commercials.

  All of this threw the chia market, which had barely existed a few years before, into a frenzy, as increasing numbers of distributors, importers, and producers began buying up a finite amount of chia seeds. Sandra Gillot, the CEO of Benexia, a Chilean-based company that is one of the largest chia seed suppliers on the market, said that the demand went from “zero to a market that could take ten thousand tons of seeds, and the supply is only six thousand tons in a year.” Several droughts and weather events affected chia crops in South America during these prime years, and chia’s price, correspondingly, shot through the roof in 2012. With chia seeds selling for more money per pound than filet mignon and, in some cases, rising up to 30 percent in a few months, new suppliers rushed into the fray to try to capitalize on the chia boom. People began planting chia wherever it could grow, from countries like Peru and Bolivia to experiments in America and the Philippines. One of the largest growers to emerge was the Chia Co., which only began cultivating chia in Australia in 2003 when the company’s founder, a fourth-generation Western Australian grain farmer named John Foss, discovered chia while studying global health food trends.

  Dole came late to the chia market, but as often happens along the progression of food trends, their entry was a game changer. Prior to the slow launch of the Dole Nutrition Plus label, in late 2012 the players in chia products were relatively new entrepreneurs, like Mamma Chia, or natural foods specialty brands, like cereal maker Nature’s Path and Hain Celestial, which mainly sell at health food stores and higher-end retailers, like Whole Foods. The Dole Food Company, in contrast, is a $7 billion, publicly traded juggernaut with operations in ninety countries and more than three hundred products sold globally in pretty much every supermarket and corner store. When a company like Dole dips their toe into chia, even tentatively, it’s a clear indication that the trend has entered the mainstream. As recently as 2007 Larry Brown and his partners at Salba were banging on the doors of companies like Chiquita Banana and General Mills to put chia into their products, without any luck. Now, if Dole succeeded with it, everyone else would surely jump aboard.

  A few weeks before visiting Dole’s headquarters in California, I had flown to Kannapolis, North Carolina, a former mill town outside Charlotte that was best known as the home of the Earnhardt NASCAR racing dynasty. Since 2008 it has also been the location of the North Carolina Research Campus, an array of massive regency buildings where universities, big food corporations like General Mills and Monsanto, and healthcare organizations conduct research into health and nutrition. It was largely paid for by David H. Murdock, the ninety-one-year-old CEO and chairman of Dole, who plans to live well into his hundreds and has committed millions of dollars to finding a fountain of youth in the vegetables and fruits he sells. His eponymous research institute is the core of the campus, and there is significant space devoted to Dole’s nutrition research laboratory, where the company conducts most of its studies on the nutritional content of the products it sells, from fruits and vegetables to more processed foods. Everything, it should be said, is decorated in Murdock’s style, which is a mixture of oversized colonial architecture, golden elephant statues, and gigantic sun-drenched murals of fruit and vegetable spreads, including a rotunda with an eagle soaring through it—almost like a cross between a WPA food poster and a gaudy Macau casino.

  Marty Ordman met me there, along with Nicholas Gillitt, a British scientist who heads up Dole’s nutritional research laboratory, and Brad Bartlett, the company’s vice president of packaged foods. A native of Virginia Beach, Bartlett had the broad shoulders, confident demeanor, and pencil-thin mustache of a major league baseball manager, which was common among food industry big shots, and he’d invited me to visit the facility to illustrate a key point in the chia trend’s evolution. “It’s one thing to show a nutrient in a fruit or vegetable,” he said as we sat down at a conference table piled with Dole Nutrition Plus chia products, “but it’s another to show how it changes health.” Chia had grown to this point thanks to an aura around its purported benefits, but with Dole Nutrition Plus, the company was committed to backing up every single claim it made with its own scientific studies. “You get this mystique behind something without evidence, but then with research, it becomes true.”

  Gillitt began going through the results of his research so far, which had demonstrated that Omega-3 ALA levels (believed to control inflammation) had only gone up in subjects when the chia seeds were milled into a powder. Whole chia seeds were statistically no different in their effect from whole poppy seeds, which meant that milled chia was more nutritious for consumers. Another study showed that ALA levels in the blood peaked two and a half hours after eating milled chia and left the body six hours after consumption. Gillitt theorized and was trying to prove that this was converted to energy during the time it was in the body, lending evidence to the folklore that chia provides a natural sustained energy boost—something Bartlett said the company could easily market in products like squeeze packs, juices, and energy bars targeted to marathon runners, long-distance cyclists, and other athletes. These studies were the core of chia’s future with Dole, and Gillitt wanted to have a new study constantly ongoing in the wings, waiting to be released in order to stoke fresh demand for the company’s chia products and the trend.

  Chia represented what the food industry calls a functional food, a growing segment of ingredients with purported health benefits, a food that can drive sales when integrated into other food products. Several years ago I visited a complex at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg that dedicated itself to discovering and working with functional foods. At the time they were conducting large-scale trials on behalf of the Unilever margarine brand Becel, which was releasing a margarine with added p
lant sterols, a naturally occurring substance in vegetables that researchers believed could lower cholesterol. Test subjects came to the university each day to eat breakfast, which always included foods made with the sterol-fortified margarine (unless they were in the control group, who just got regular margarine). The study, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, measured the cholesterol levels of the subjects over various periods of time to see what effect the margarine would have.