Jarrow L. Rogovin

Jarrow L. Rogovin founded Jarrow Formulas in 1977. The company was incorporated in 1988. After more than two decades of solid growth, Jarrow Industries, Inc. was founded in 2000 as the main manufacturer of the parent company. Mr. Rogovin’s background was in literature at UCLA, with a particular interest in the effect of technology on social change as reflected particularly in English and American literature. Mr. Rogovin sees the ability of technology to affect our diet for the good or bad to be akin to his scholastic interest in technology and social change. "We can see various technologies having profound effects, including simultaneously for the better and worse just as transportation has increased mobility and has brought us economic, social, intellectual and cultural globalization. As it is also impacting the environment and indigenous cultures, so too is food processing technology bringing us simultaneously a plague of diseases while at the same time it can offer nutraceuticals with enormous health benefits. We are at a crossroad as to how we develop and implement various technologies and the dietary supplement industry is part of the complex of biotechnology, transportation (providing the possibility of global sourcing and exporting of ingredients, processing, products, technology and ideas), and cultural acceptance. It would be a tragedy at this point of achievement if legislative, regulation and litigation regressiveness cause a serious set back and long term damage to what has otherwise been an evolving benefit. We need to remember that apathy – forgetting our roots, forgetting that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty – is all that is needed to result in so much being lost. There is never an end to history and always a need to renew ourselves."

Mr. Rogovin's interests include early 20th century modern art, supervising a large garden and a strong commitment to the support of Israel.

The Jarrow group is over $65 million, manufactures close to 400 products, and sells throughout the United States and various foreign countries. Jarrow Formulas conducts clinical scientific research in support of its products and is highly active in supporting DSHEA as well as litigation reform. Mr. Rogovin is taking his message out that the tidal wave of gratuitous, opportunistic and bad faith litigation that has so seriously damaged California and its budget will also bring great harm to much of the rest of the country. "There is no such thing as 'frivolous' litigation. The time, money and tactics involved are little more than false imprisonment, grand larceny, gross exaggeration and misrepresentation, and wholesale character assassination. Those cases are a little more than white collar terrorism and they are destroying the fabric of trust every bit as much as an act of terrorism. Trial lawyers have become a self-executing, unsupervised, unaccountable autocratically imposed tax on society. The Press, formerly the Fourth Estate, has become the fifth wheel, substituting sensationalism for the real story of the usurpation and degradation of the judicial branch of government by the trial lawyers."

Mr. Rogovin believes that it is imperative that Congress and State legislators convene televised legislative hearings immediately at the start of the new congressional session and begin to expose the enormous amount of injustice, economic damage and lack of fairness that has been perpetrated by trial lawyers, incompetent and biased judges and nonsensical and unfair statutes, case law and rulings, with corporate litigants feeling compelled to pay exorbitant 'settlements’ rather than face even more extravagant litigation costs to defend from what has become an endless stream of lawsuits.

Mr. Rogovin believes that only the future will be able to judge whether his greatest contribution will be the founding of the institution bearing his name and dedicated to nutritional health or helping to restore some modicum of fairness and reason to the nation’s legal system on behalf of business.