I saw this article and was really interested to see how this company had started.  My parents have stocked my house with Stevia my whole life because it’s such a better (healthier) option than traditional sugar.  I wanted to see how the inventor got it to be such a huge hit in the US.

Mr. James originally found the idea because this product was being used in Japan with medicine to make it sweeter for whoever was going to consume it.  He tried it out and loved the idea of a healthy option for Sugar.  He went to Paraguay to do more extensive research on the product and make sure it was all the Japanese claimed it to be.  After finding out that it was, he went back to Japan and opened up a processing factory for this product.  He wanted to introduce it in the US because they had yet to see a product like this.  The only thing in the market at the market at the time was ordinary sugar and a kind of artificial sweeter you needed a medical prescription for.

One major obstacle that James May faced was the FDA’s restrictions on the labeling of the product.  They allowed him to bring it into the market but he was not allowed to market it as a “sweeter”.  If he did this they would have considered the product to be “adulterated” and they would remove it from all stores.  This led him to name the brand “sweet leaf” in the hopes customers would understand the product from that.  By 2007 he was able to label it as an official sweetener and the company has sky rocketed since.

I really enjoyed reading this story because it showed a lot of the dedication he had for his idea.  He started this idea in the 80’s and it only came into fruition around 2007.  That’s over 20 years of dedication and research put into his product which is an incredible amount of time and risk to have.  To add, he also did an incredible amount of research on the product to make sure it was all that he was claiming it to be.  He wanted to have a quality (and healthier) sugar substitute and through his research he knew that’s exactly what he was giving his customers.

Article link: https://www.entrepreneurship-interviews.com/interview-with-mr-james-may-the-man-that-introduced-stevia-to-the-us-market/