About Mikala and her role at Adaptive Health

I’m Mikala Hukka. I work for Adaptive Health. I am currently the quality director over the VMS division. So we have several subsidiaries that report under our Wellful line and in our branch we do product development and marketing for dietary supplements.

And when I first started at the company, which was six years ago now, it was a team of 20 of us and there was no product development team or quality team that even existed on this side.

So I was brought on board to help build up the entire quality department to what it is today. And since then, we've acquired numerous companies, Renew Vitality, Healthy Directions, Biovation being one of them, and we've merged with Nutrisystem and then Jenny Craig as well. So now it started as 20 plus employees, we’re over 800 now.

So I think Adaptive Health is unique in that quality is a part of the product development process from the start.

So Natalie, she basically develops the formulation through communications with our upper management of what kind of idea of a product that she wants to create. So she researches ingredients that achieve whatever they're going after. And then once she identifies those raw materials, I'll jump in and help get all the raw material documentation to make sure everything aligns with in our standards.

So GMO, gluten-free, make sure there's no allergens. There is a lot of, a lot of statements that I collect, upload all of that into Unifize right now. And then we kind of go through, make sure the checklist is fully complete and meets all of the requirements that we have, and then we have all the details and then both Natalie and I approve the raw materials, make sure the potencies and everything that align are squared away and then from there kicks it off into our request for quote module, which ties in the ingredient and the master formula all together for the Biovation team to go ahead and quote it.

They can already see which raw materials are winning the source, pricing is tied to the ingredient itself. So from request for quote then we kick it off to the piloting module and then finished good lot where it's approved.

It’s very easy now than where it used to be, everything was just an email it's everywhere it's all on Unifize now which is nice.