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Times Leader staff

PITTSTON TWP. – A group of inventors from China has found a way to take water, the nation’s top-selling bottled drink, and infuse it with omega-3 fatty acids, the second-best-selling supplement. And Nature’s Way Pure Water Systems Inc., the Pittston-area bottler, will be the only source in the U.S. of the revolutionary product for years to come.

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Nature’s Way President and CEO Sandy Insalaco describes the mineral injection system at the Pittston Township facility.

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One-gallon bottles of water are packaged into cases at Nature’s Way bottlers. CEO Sandy Insalaco says he knows well the value of omega-3.

BILL TARUTIS photos/FOR THE TIMES LEADER

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The product is going into limited-batch testing in December, followed by full production in January.

“Omega-3, next to multivitamins, that’s the No. 2 item that’s sold in health stores throughout the country … but it’s never been in water because (the industry) never had the technology to break it down,” the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer Sandy Insalaco said. “They (the inventors) have chemically engineered a way where they can break that down and it blends with the water and it is tasteless and odorless. … This is going be a vitamin water plus omega-3. That’s something that no one else can duplicate in the country.”

Insalaco himself knows the combination’s potential benefit: he takes six omega-3 tablets a day, a total of 650 milligrams. They’re large pills, hard to swallow, he says. But omega-3 is what’s known as an “essential fatty acid,” one that the body requires but doesn’t manufacture on its own.

If each bottle of water has perhaps 75 milligrams of the supplement in it, just keeping hydrated could provide all of the omega-3 needed each day.

The achievement is one of many at the company since Insalaco signed on about eight years ago.

. “They (the inventors) saw the total package here: quality assurance, logistics, everything. This is what we do. They just said they would rather partner with us because they thought that was the easiest way to get it to market,” Insalaco said. “I think we’ve changed the company with new technology. … It has paid off in our ability to attract some of the best clients in the country.”

The company is licensed to ship water throughout the country and currently ships to about 30 states and Canada. For a period several years ago when another bottler was having problems, Nature’s Way became the only U.S. supplier for Starbucks, shipping to all 50 states.

Insalaco plans to keep adding to the company’s success far into the future. “I prefer death to retirement,” he said. “I really, really enjoy this. It’s new, the technology is phenomenal.”

When his family sold its supermarket chain in 1993, Insalaco was 53 and, by his own words, “a little young to retire.” His relatives were involved in the family-owned Insalaco Development Group, but he decided to branch out into an industry about which he knew nothing. “I’m a fast learner. … The growth over the last 10 years (in U.S. bottled water sales) has been phenomenal,” he said. “I spent my life in the supermarket business and the real estate business. … It’s not that big a transition.”

About 90 percent of the company’s business is in bottling for store-brand customers. It trucks water from springs in West Hazleton and White Haven and also bottle city water that is distilled, deionized or treated through reverse osmosis.

Insalaco acknowledges the omega-3 partnership is “an opportunity of a lifetime, to say the least.” Any development in the industry so far “pales in comparison to what this will do in the marketplace,” he said. “Something with this type of tech in the water industry isn’t going to come by tomorrow. This is the most dramatic change that we’ve ever seen.”

Details of how the water will be marketed aren’t finalized yet, he said, but noted that the price will, obviously, be more than the average bottle of water. “It’s not going to be double the price of a vitamin water … (but) it’s going to be a higher priced item,” he said. “The cost of vitamins is expensive. … We’re going to establish the value in it because it has more value that a regular bottle of water. … If you drink a bottle or two of this every day, the bottom line is you’re going to get a substantial amount of Omega 3 in your system.”

Geographically, Insalaco hasn’t gotten far since he graduated from West Pittston High School in 1957, but he’s proud to have never lived elsewhere. “I never had any ambitions to leave the area,” he said. “I felt this was as good any area to conduct business as anywhere in the country. And that’s been proven over many times.”

He said the area never gets too active when times are vibrant and never too depressed when they’re meager. That even-keeled mentality and residents’ work ethic makes for a stable economy, he said. “I’ve been in 45 states. Never found one that I like more than this area. I love the change of the seasons,” he said.

Though he spends roughly 50 hours each week at the office, Insalaco also enjoys outdoors activities. He has a 75-acre summer home in the Beaumont area, and he rides snowmobiles and hunts for bear, wild boar and deer.