It was more than 30 years ago that Dr. Sears opened his first lab at 21 Tioga Way in Marblehead. Now Zone Labs is off to Peabody, MA for a fresh start. And Dr. Sears still has his man cave.
It was more than 30 years ago that I opened my first lab at 21 Tioga Way in Marblehead. Through the decades there have been many different manifestations of my technology that have provided a rich continuum in the history of anti-inflammatory nutrition.
I started with BioSyn and the first high-protein nutrition bar (not surprisingly named the BioSyn Nutrition Bar). I fondly remember our first marketing campaign my brother, Doug, and I developed for triathletes that featured a picture of the bar with a simple statement, “Just Eat It”. Real clever. We also sold our Eico series of omega-3 fatty acids and gamma linolenic acid (GLA). These two products were the keys used by the Stanford Swim Teams in 1992 to bring back seven Gold Medals from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. It was also the site of our general meetings for professional triathletes to discuss the role of the Zone Diet to improve their performance years before The Zone was ever published.
The construction of my lab at 21 Tioga Way also provided a great playground for my two young daughters as they used the empty fume hood as their personal playhouse. Of course, this immediately stopped once I started filling the fume hood with all sorts of toxic chemicals.
The chemicals that banned my daughters from their personal playground were used to make a wide variety of exotic surfactants for intravenous drug delivery systems for cancer treatment. Not surprisingly, my company that shared the space at 21 Tioga Way with BioSyn was called Surfactant Technologies.
Before the publication of The Zone in 1995, our business only required three employees (Doug, my mother and me). Doug and I would take orders in the morning and then go to our small warehouse to fill them in the afternoon. Inventory control was very easy. After the publication of The Zone, things changed. The publication of the book brought more recognition, more sales, more employees and more products; but fortunately, my laboratory (a man cave for geeky scientists) provided an intellectual anchor for me in the chaos of a growing business.
Now we are moving to our new location in Peabody. The address sounds so much more professional, but it retains one thing in common with 21 Tioga Way: my man cave. It’s bigger, but now has windows. That’s what I call progress.
Our new address is:
Zone Labs, Inc.
200 Corporate Place
Peabody, MA 01960
978 539-0100