Natural Products Marketer Podcast

The episode delivers a handful of genuinely useful, non-obvious operational insights - particularly the identity-vs-authenticity testing distinction and the blind procurement-stage testing strategy - but buries them under significant repetition, mutual affirmation, and padding across a 56-minute runtime.

“What a lot of people don't realize is an identity test will just tell you that the product or the ingredient you're expecting to find in the product is there. It won't necessarily tell you if anything else is in there.”

“if you are testing it yourself without telling them, you can find things that right away and make a decision right away”

The counterintuitive argument that small retailers have an informational advantage by self-funding blind testing (suppliers can't send cherry-picked samples) is a genuinely fresh, first-principles take; most other content recycles familiar 'trust is fragile' and 'buyer beware' themes.

“if you're not gonna ask them to pay for the testing and you test it yourself, you have an advantage over the retailers who are asking the supplier to do the testing”

“you need to be asking about authenticity testing, not just identity testing”

De Leonardis brings real senior practitioner credentials - VP of Private Label at SOVE's (Canada's second-largest supermarket chain) and a pharmacy chain background - but the conversation doubles as a soft pitch for his own company, Purity IQ, which slightly colours the framing throughout.

“I was VP of Private Label for many years”

“I was with at one point, you know, the largest super grocery chain pharmacy chain in Canada”

A few concrete data points land well (the elderberry-COVID supply mismatch, zero collagen finding, SOVE's named, a 26-store retailer cited), but the most alarming claim - collagen brands - goes unnamed, the elderberry figure is self-hedged, and there are no dollar amounts, percentages, or timelines attached to any claim.

“apparently more elderberry sold during COVID than there was raw material available in the world”

“we have found in some of the very big, well-known brands, zero collagen. Oh no, it's all gelogen.”

The host asks one good catalytic question (red flags) and keeps the conversation moving, but she largely echoes and validates the guest's points, introduces an off-topic book detour that goes nowhere, and never challenges a single claim, even when hedged assertions like the elderberry statistic invite obvious follow-up.

“Yeah, and you know, we talk about white label a lot because it is such a great way to maintain some margin”

“Do you know the book How Not to Die?”