Carson City nutraceutical owner resurrects company with renewed vision

When Maria Watson walked back into the manufacturing facility that she and her husband had built, she felt so small and alone.

The 55,000 square-foot building was empty, and so was a part of Watson.

"I walked into this building in March 2016 by myself," she said. "Visualize what one little human being might feel like in overwhelmingness. I didn't even know where to begin."

Maria and her husband had sold Complementary Prescriptions, LLC, to a private equity firm in 2010, six years after completing the building in which their company, Vitamin Research Products, had expanded behind the strength of the medical nutraceutical brand and grown to a staff of 125 employees.

"It is from the revenue of those two brands that we were able to build this building in 2004," Maria said.

But Maria's husband eventually grew wary of the regulatory climate, she said, and insisted they needed to sell their business.

"I was sobbing," Watson said, "because he was done with this beautiful thing we had made together."

Watson did some consulting work for other companies, including Super Beets, afterward until the couple was notified that the firm they had sold to was abandoning the business.

"We get a phone call and these guys were done," she said. "It was over, they had burned through all the money, and they were going to sell the brands to other people."

What concerned Maria most was the staff being left behind.

"We owned this building, and they were going to walk out on all of the employees," she said. "Over my dead body are all of those incredible employees going to be left behind."

Maria, though, would return to the manufacturing business alone this time. Her husband did not want to go back.

"I told him that I wanted the keys to the building and I was going to start it back up again," she said.

Watson had her work cut out for her.

"I rehired a handful of employees, because I was only able to hire so many at the start," she said. "The first thing we did was put the building back together."

Today, the business is still a fraction of what it had been at the height of production. Its branding is having to grow back from the brink of near ruin, too.

"The journey has been slow and hard," Watson said. "We are still under-utilized, and we are not there yet."

But the company's fortunes are changing, she said, on the strength of medical marijuana and its chemical component, Cannabidiol.

"What has come into my life like gangbusters is hemp and CBD," she said. "Medical marijuana is the real deal, its benefits irrefutable."

If research on the medicinal value of CBD wasn't convincing enough for Watson, then witnessing its effects was.

An ex-employee stricken with Parkinson's Disease had visited her home one day.

"Sometimes the tremors would get really bad," she said. "I asked him to try CBD oil, and while he was standing there, the tremors changed."

The secret, Watson said, is that when CBD is consumed, the chemical component opens up CBD receptors in the human brain. When that happens, the nutraceutical benefits behind those receptors can then be delivered where they do the most good.

"The CBD receptors you have in your brain open up and are ready to deliver whatever is behind them," she said. "Now you've got this amazing bodily function that is hungry for this stuff, and it won't get you high."

Watson said she is now producing CBD nutraceutical products through the company, renamed American Nutritional Products, as an integral part of her plan to grow the business again.

"I am taking my 28 years in nutraceuticals, putting it with CBD and my research and development team that helped us build this building," she said. "Put them on point to combine the power of CBD and the power of nutraceutical ingredients."

Watson said she hopes to reopen the lobby of her manufacturing facility, located at 4610 Arrowhead Drive in Carson City, in August of this year to retail operations again.

"We used to do a lot of business out of that lobby, but I couldn't open it up until I understood who we were as a brand," she said. "I want to open up that lobby again."

Watson's passion, though, isn't the business itself. Rather, it's helping people with the nutraceuticals her company produces.

She discovered this passion in February 1991 while continuing to struggle emotionally with her son's death. Joshua, at age 3, had been killed by a drunk driver, and his loss nearly killed Watson.

"I did not cope well with the loss," she said. "When I'd think about Joshua, I couldn't breathe."

There was a blackness inside Watson caused by severe depression that she had difficulty describing to others, even her therapist.

Then, by happenstance, one day she almost literally bumped into a body builder sampling an amino acid powder at a tanning salon.

"I grabbed it and drank it, I didn't ask what it was," Watson recalled. "Then I started thinking about Joshua, and I was breathing. I was also aware of this non-blackness in my head that I was trying to describe to people."

The experience was more than an epiphany for Watson. It was an awakening.

She would go on to represent the amino acid product, breaking sales records as part of the network marketing company that carried it, convinced of its effectiveness treating chemical imbalances in the brain.

"I wanted to save the world," she said. "I truly believed that if I just gave you that amino acid, you would be happy and never be depressed, because it's about brain chemistry."

Watson said educating herself about the brain and its chemistry helped her understand how nutraceuticals benefit the body's most complex organ.

"It really does matter," she said. "When you are overly or wrongly medicated, you change the actual elements of your brain that communicate to each other."

Part of Watson's long-range plans with her company is to become a deeper part of the Carson City community, using an existing non-profit organization that had been established in her son's memory.

"I want to put vitamin D3 in the hands of low-income children," she said. "Their brains cannot develop without D3."

Watson said vitamin D3 is very inexpensive to produce and she can do it for about $1 per month per child. She just needs community partners to help her get the word out.

"The motivation here is that I so desperately want the help to figure this out, because I've got the facility that can make it," she said. "I want this community to know I'm here."

Watson said once the lobby is open for retail sales business again, she wants a percentage of that revenue to go into the non-profit that her mother first created after Joshua's death.

In his memory and that of her mother's, Watson is hopeful she will turn her dream of helping others into reality.

"I'm going to make a difference," she said. "That's who I want to be in this community."

Visit American Nutritional Products online or call (775) 720-0028 for more information.