This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Correction: The Utah company XanGo has received a single admonishment from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Also, the company is investigating the potential of China's market for its product. Both points were exaggerated in a front page text box Sunday.
Once a year, usually in November, Salt Lake City turns orange-side-out as thousands of XanGo distributors, clad in the company's signature color, descend on downtown for their annual convention. But look closer and you'll see a more subtle and significant transformation taking shape.
Inside the Salt Palace Convention Center's big ballroom, three 30-ish friends, inventors of the mangosteen juice concentrate, are forcing a generational shift in the supplement industry, mobilizing the XanGo faithful with slide shows and stand-up routines.
They are shrewd, self-deprecating and wealthy. And one by one they stir the crowd of missionary-like marketers who, without provocation, holler "giddyap" and "go time," and quietly calculate their chances of winning an orange Vespa.
Joe "Ironman" Morton, 36, gets the audience going with childhood stories of his weird, health-obsessed home life, when other people considered Vitamin C a curiosity and colon cleanses, especially for 9-year-olds, were not cool.
His older brother, Gordon, speaks reverently about innovators such as Google and Cirque du Soleil. And when he explains what it means to be a maverick, he quotes Nelly - the rapper, not Don Nelson, the former Dallas coach.
Finally, there's Aaron Garrity, the co-founder whose résumé includes an MBA and a musical touring ensemble that featured a young Lenny Kravitz. On stage at conventions, Garrity covers XanGo's booming sales figures and Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive."
If this were a movie, convention credits would have to include Billy Graham, Bob Barker and Kelly Clarkson. Oh wait, it is. Pumped-up distributors can buy the DVD, along with bottle-shaped pamphlets, PR kits, shot glasses and any number of professionally produced promotional materials.
Together they tell a story of a phenomenally successful network marketing company that, despite selling a single beverage, expects to hit the $1 billion mark in annual sales by 2009 - seven years after its creation.
"I don't want to be the next Nature's Sunshine," says Gordon Morton, referring to one of Utah's most successful supplement companies. "I want to be the next Starbucks."
As XanGo pursues that goal - and prepares for its upcoming convention - the Mortons have more on their minds than upstarts and downlines.
Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration admonished the company and its distributors for using brochures that make curative claims, a no-no for supplement companies regardless of whether research supports the premise. These particular pamphlets, produced by a third-party publisher, insist mangosteen juice treats everything from arthritis to viruses such as HIV. Since receiving the FDA's warning, XanGo has cautioned distributors against reciting these claims.
XanGo's commercial shield also is beginning to crack. A re-examination of the company's patent, done at the request of a competitor, suggests the drink may not be patentable. While XanGo fights the ruling, a number of me-too products are creeping into the marketplace: Mango-Xan, made by Pure Fruit Technologies, a division of Tahitian Noni; Thai-Go from Nature's Sunshine; and Mangosteen Plus by New Vision.
If the Morton brothers are rattled by any of this, they hide it well. Of course, they have spent a lifetime dealing with doubt and discomfort, and that has prepared them well.
Family quirks: The Morton boys knew better than to admit they were sick. To do so meant swallowing concoctions of cayenne or chlorophyll. "When you're green inside, you're clean inside," their mother would say.
Gabriella Morton was raised in Italy, where pharmacists were as likely to prescribe an herb as a pill, and she carried that knowledge with her to Canada. That's where she met and married Gordon Sr., a Protestant auto parts manager who later converted the family to Mormonism, a faith that has spawned a long line of herbal healers starting with Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith's reported revelations from God about the medicinal properties of roots, herbs and mild foods were well documented and echoed by subsequent church leaders.
But it was health food pioneer Paul C. Bragg who baptized the Mortons into militant herbalism after their couple's first born, Gordon, had a bad reaction to a prescription medicine.
Suddenly, sugar was out and sprouts were in. The family made its own yogurt and bread. Trading lunches at school was impossible. "We used to dream of having a PBJ on Wonder Bread," says Joe Morton.
It wasn't long before their dad was selling supplements for Nature's Sunshine and holding "opportunity meetings" in their house. Vacations centered around top-achiever trips.
Their mom opened Gabriella's Health Food Shop, where the kids learned about all manner of herbs, including which ones to recommend for erectile dysfunction.
"Stuff that would scar just about any other 12-year-old," Gordon jokes.
Growing up on "the compound" - the term friends gave the Mortons' 20-acre homestead outside Shelby, Ontario - was an early source of embarrassment for the brothers. But now it's a crucial part of the XanGo story, giving the young executives street cred with industry veterans.
"If it wasn't for our weirdness, we wouldn't have a company," says Joe.
Exotic discovery: In the late 1990s, Joe Morton was dining in a café in Kuala Lumpur when fate arrived in the form of a small purple fruit.
Mangosteen trees are native to Southeast Asia, require a tropical, humid climate, and take eight to 10 years to yield fruit. As a result, they cannot be grown commercially in the contiguous United States. Fear of foreign pests and disease has made importing fresh mangosteens a problem, furthering its reputation as a forbidden fruit.
And then there's the taste.
The late R.W. Apple, a veteran journalist and self-described foodie, once wrote that he'd rather eat a mangoÂsteen than a hot fudge sundae, "which for a big Ohio boy is saying a lot."
"No other fruit, for me, is so thrillingly, intoxicatingly luscious, so evocative of the exotic East, with so precise a balance of acid and sugar, as a ripe mangosteen," Apple wrote in a 2004 piece that appeared in The New York Times and Gourmet magazine.
Joe Morton, who at the time was working for a supplement maker called Enrich, had the same reaction. But his interest soon turned to the beet-colored, inch-thick rind. According to folklore, healers used the peel in teas to treat bladder infections, gonorrhea and dysentery, and in ointments to soothe skin rashes.
Joe says he excitedly phoned his brothers in the United States: Gordon, who worked for Enrich, and David, who was earning a Ph.D. in anatomy at the University of Utah. They, in turn, dug up more modern studies (conducted around 1980, mostly in India and Japan), that say the rind contains alpha-mangostin, beta-mangostin, garcinone B, and garcinone E, compounds collectively called xanthones.
Laboratory tests suggest xanthones have anti-cancer effects when studied in test tubes, according to published articles on the studies. The rind also contains tannins, which help explain any anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, anti-fungal and antiseptic properties.
The Mortons knew they were onto something big. They set to work building a brand that would be synonymous with mangosteen and corporate responsibility; they wanted to be the Ben & Jerry's of the supplement industry.
They partnered with Wild Flavors, the German company that formulated Capri Sun, Arizona Ice Tea and SoBe. They hired Dan Matauch, the award-winning designer of bottles for SoBe, Sierra Mist and Samba.
They wrote a compensation plan that pumps 50 percent of all revenues into commissions. And they joined forces with Operation Kids, a charity, to which XanGo donates a portion of every sale.
"This was my dream, to bring something great to market that would change lives," Joe says.
Under scrutiny: Whether XanGo saves lives is another, more sensitive topic in XanGo nation, given the FDA's Sept. 20 warning letter. It's also the subject of a white paper on mangosteen written by Ralph Moss, founding adviser to the National Institutes of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine (now the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) and author of several books on alternative treatments for cancer.
Moss is hardly a supplement industry basher, but he is suspicious of multilevel marketers who target cancer patients with their products.
In his report, "A Friendly Skeptic Looks at MangoÂsteen," Moss lays out four elements necessary for any network marketing company selling dietary supplements: a kernel of promising scientific evidence, a credible and compelling story, a compliant doctor willing to underwrite the concept and patients willing to testify that the product has led to astounding cures.
Aloe vera, colloidal minerals, gingko biloba and ginseng were popularized this way. XanGo, too.
XanGo may be a healthful fruit drink, but so is pomegranate juice that retails for $6 a bottle. XanGo, Moss says, is "simply an overpriced fruit drink." And customers wouldn't pay $25 to $40 a bottle if they didn't believe there was some "magic" involved in treating cancer or some other disease.
Yet those claims are exaggerated, Moss says.
Of the 14 million-plus citations in PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine database, there are only 29 articles on the topic of Garcinia mangostana and only four that relate to cancer.
One test tube experiment showed a xanthone found in mangosteen kills cancer cells as effectively as many chemotherapeutic drugs, Moss says. Limited data also indicate that compounds found abundantly in mangosteen can inhibit the harmful Cox 1 and Cox 2 enzymes and can also kill aberrant cells.
"Mangosteen thus joins a fairly long list of naturally derived compounds that might potentially have some anti-cancer activity," Moss writes. But, he notes, there are no mangosteen-related clinical studies - tests performed on living patients - for cancer or any other disease.
Moss calls mangosteen juice a fad.
"I go to health shows with a cancer focus and you can see the buzz. It's palpable. It's visible. Everyone's talking about mangosteen and everyone's buying it," Moss said. "It's very sad to me to see people wasting their time and money on things like this when there are more-scientifically valid treatments out there."
XanGo-produced promotional materials warn distributors not to make curative or preventive claims about cancer or any other disease. And after the FDA's recent warning, which accused the company of using exaggerated health claims to sell the juice concentrate, XanGo issued an e-mail telling distributors not to disseminate questionable brochures sold by third-party publishers, and pledged to do a better job policing distributor Web sites.
But the FDA can't monitor what is said in someone's living room, and XanGo encourages its distributors to share their personal stories.
Natalie Williams has such a story. The Skyline High coach and former WNBA star spent 10 years playing professional basketball. She's had three knee surgeries, one ankle surgery, two foot surgeries and a wrist operation, she says. Williams consistently took Daypro, an anti-inflammatory drug used to relieve pain, tenderness and inflammation.
When she retired, Williams went off the drug.
"Three days later I was in so much pain. My body was in shock. It was crazy. I thought for sure I was going to have to have another surgery on my ankle," Williams says.
A family member who was into XanGo suggested she try it. Williams says she took it religiously, 2-3 ounces twice a day. Three weeks into the regimen, she woke up one morning and was pain free.
"And my ankle was smooth. I was like 'no way.' I couldn't believe it. After that I was a true believer."
Williams pays $35 a year to buy XanGo wholesale ($25 a bottle), and while she doesn't sell the juice, she does recommend it to others, including many former teammates. "The whole Indiana Fever team loved it."
Mangosteen pioneers: Today, XanGo owns a sprawling complex of smartly decorated offices at Thanksgiving Point, employs 600 workers and supplies 500,000 distributors. Yet for all its success, in one sense XanGo still operates in the red.
Gordon Morton explains. Type mangosteen into Microsoft Word and you'll get the red line, meaning it's not recognized. Morton's challenge: make the line disappear.
That day is fast-approaching. Mangosteen farms are popping up in Puerto Rico, providing a direct channel to specialty markets in Los Angeles and New York. And Hilary Duff, the 19-year-old former Disney star, just released a fragrance made with mangosteen blossoms. It's called With Love.
Talk about a generational shift.
"I love being able to say this is our territory," Gordon Morton says. "This is what we did."