MARCH 2018 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 25
PRESS BUSINESS
LONG ISLAND EYE
With plenty of new jobs on the line,
Nature’s Bounty gets second chance
By WARREN STRUGATCH
About six years ago, Nature’s
Bounty, the vitamin and food-supplement
maker that employs
over 2,000 in the Town of Islip,
announced plans to open a $32
million, 60,000-square-foot manufacturing
facility in Amityville’s
New Horizons Industrial Park,
located in the Town of Babylon. To
run it, Nature’s Bounty would soon
hire more than 200 local workers to
manufacture energy bars for global
sales.
A vitamin and food-supplement
manufacturer with manufacturing
operations in California, China and
elsewhere, Nature’s Bounty was,
and is, Islip’s largest employer that
is not a hospital. It is also one of the
largest private employers in Suffolk
County.
To sweeten the pot for company
officials, the Babylon Industrial
Development Agency slashed the
company’s Amityville tax bill by 60
percent for 15 years. In 2013, when
the facility opened, Empire State
Development, New York State’s economic
development arm, offered a
$750,000 grant of its own.
Within just two years, the good
vibes soured. In March 2015, Nature’s
Bounty closed the plant, axing
more than 200 jobs. The plant’s
work was outsourced to Nellson
Nutraceutical, a California company
whose “very special manufacturing
capabilities” could “produce
more bars and faster,” according to
a spokeswoman.
Matthew McDonough, Babylon
IDA’s chief executive, tried to talk
the company into staying. No dice.
“California,” he says, “was a done
deal.”
The state withheld grant payment
while McDonough clawed back
nearly
$294,000 in owed
abatements.
“Ironically, we ended up leasing one
of the buildings to Bloomfield Bakers,
from California,” he tells me.
By the following year, the company
was considering its options. In Fall
2016, Nature’s Bounty told Empire
State Development that its 11 Long
Island manufacturing facilities
required extensive upgrades to
keep the company from relocating.
Howard Zemsky, Empire State
Development’s chief, “assessed the
threat of moving the company’s
manufacturing and distribution
out of state to be real,” according
to William Mannix, executive director
of Islip’s Industrial Development
Agency. Albany then offered
a grant of up to $25 million and $10
million in job training and other
workforce development programs.
In return, the company committed
to creating 157 new jobs, retaining
2,042 existing jobs while investing
over $142 million on upgrading its
Long Island plants.
Locally, Islip’s IDA board offered
$8.4 million worth of tax abatements
to the company over the next
decade. The agency also expects to
extend an undetermined amount
of sales tax benefits as well, based
on final capital cost reporting. The
retention deal is expected to close
within several weeks.
Job creation is a key component of
any government retention strategy.
According to a report in Newsday
at the time, Nature’s Bounty’s CEO
“pledged” to add the jobs within a
year’s time. A spokeswoman says
that the equipment needed to run
the facilities would be transferred
within three months’
time.
Since then, the company’s
executive suite has had
a shakeup. Last July, Nature’s
Bounty’s long-time private equity
owner, the Carlyle Group, sold a
majority-stake sale of the company
to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts for a
reported $3 billion. After the deal
the new owners divested most of
the company’s European operations,
slimming its global work
force by about 75 percent.
CEO Steve left Ronkonkoma and
moved into the corner office
of the Kellogg Company, the
global cereal maker. Replacing
him was Paul Sturman, former
worldwide head of Pfizer
Consumer Healthcare. The
company’s best-known brands
remain, including the flagship
Nature’s Bounty, plus Sundown
Naturals, Osteo Bi-Flex,
Solgar, Balance Bar and Puritan’s
Pride.
Despite the upheaval, apparently
neither state nor local IDA officials
have opened conversations with
Sturman to gauge the new CEO’s
level of commitment to his predecessor’s
pledge. Messages asking
about job creation left with Sturman
were not returned. Jodi Katz,
a spokeswoman, says hiring information
“would be made available
at such time as we submit a filing”
with Empire State Development.
That won’t be before the end of the
year, at the earliest – a long time for
people waiting on jobs.
John Lombardo, who runs Suffolk
County Community College’s Advanced
Manufacturing program,
tells me: “I know firsthand they are
actively participating in every job
fair at Stony Brook, Suffolk Community
College and the regional
labor departments. I’ve every
reason to believe they’ve probably
already exceeded their original
hiring goals.”
Hopefully this time the new hires
will be permanent.
Warren Strugatch is a partner with
Inflection Point Associates (Inflection-
PointAssoc.com), a consulting firm in
Stony Brook. Contact
him at Warren@
InflectionPointAssoc.
com
Nature’s
Bounty
CEO Paul
Sturman.
Nature’s
Bounty is
planning new
manufacturing
jobs on Long
Island.