Whole Foods Magazine: August 1998
Looking at Sabinsa Corporation today, seeing it as one of the natural products industry’s more prominent suppliers of both standardized herbal extracts and nutritional fine chemicals, recognizing that it has facilities in both New Jersey and Utah (as well as an exclusive working arrangement with a large, modern manufacturing operation in India), knowing that its principal policy makers and product development people combine decades of Western scientific training and experience with centuries of background in Eastern and alternative medical traditions, it is sometimes easy to forget that this rapidly growing, financially sound business entity started out just 10 years ago...and that its founder, Muhammed Majeed, Ph.D., was thwarted in his first effort to get the company off the ground.

Majeed’s original intent was to create a pharmaceutical company, not one devoted to natural remedies. Born in Trivandrum, a city in southern India with a population of more than a half-million, he had come to the U.S. in 1974 after earning an undergraduate degree in pharmacy from Kerala University. He was 23 years old and had the grand sum of $8 in his pocket when he arrived, that being the maximum amount that emigres were allowed to remove from India at the time.

A willing worker, Majeed landed a maintenance job with a relatively small Chicago, IL-based pharmaceutical manufacturer, switched over to the production side and quickly worked his way up so that he was in charge of manufacturing operations in the short span of three years. Then, in 1977, he moved to the East Coast to go to work in Pfizer’s R&D department and to continue his education.

Majeed lived and worked in New Jersey and commuted more than 80 miles in each direction so that he could attend Long Island University’s Arnold and Marie Schwartz School of Pharmacy. He earned his master’s degree in industrial pharmacy in 1980.

The following year, Majeed took a job as senior research pharmacist and manager of special projects for Carter-Wallace, located in Cranbury. By 1984, he had been promoted to a post where he headed up all product development. He was, in fact, the only person in the history of the company to serve in that position without having yet earned a Ph.D.

It took Majeed until 1986 to fill in this last gap in his education, and by that time he was no longer working for Carter-Wallace. In 1985, he had accepted a job with Lakewood, NJ-based Paco Pharmaceuticals. At this company, he says, the focus was on the formulation of sterile products.

With this background, it isn’t surprising that Majeed targeted the pharmaceutical industry when, in 1988, he resigned from Paco and struck out on his own, using Sabinsa, his wife’s name, as the appellation for the new company.