Behind the 2025 Industry Leader Award: Jim Emme discusses his journey to NOW Health Group

Editor's Note: This article has been updated on December 23, 2025 at 4:13PM ET to include a partial transcript of the interview.

Jim Emme, CEO of NOW Health Group and and chairman for the Natural Products Association (NPA), was awarded Nutritional Outlook's 2025 Best of the Industry award for Industry Leader.

In part I of our interview, Emme shares his journey from a small family farm, early experiences in food handling, and education in food science at Purdue. He discusses his tenure at Pillsbury, learning about business operations and leadership before joining NOW Health Group in 1994, drawn by its vision and ethics, and has since grown the company significantly. He emphasizes the importance of culture, honesty, and ethical business practices, noting NOW Health Group's average employee tenure of nine years and its commitment to quality and safety.

Transcript

Sebastian Krawiec: Hello everyone. My name is Sebastian Krawiec, managing editor of Nutritional Outlook. I am joined today by Jim Emme, who is the CEO of NOW Health Group, who we are recognizing as this year's industry leader as part of our 2025 Best of the Industry awards. Congratulations, Jim, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Jim Emme: Thank you for the opportunity, Sebastian, and thank you for the recognition that's very humbling.

Sebastian Krawiec: You know it's a pleasure, and I think you've earned it. You've been leading NOW Health Group for a long time now, great leadership. And then, recently, starting your tenure with NPA as Chair of the Board of Directors, I think you're showing a lot of leadership there as well. So we look forward to continuing to see what you do in the industry and all your accomplishments, but in the meantime, we'll recognize what you've accomplished so far.

Jim Emme: Well, thank you for that.

Sebastian Krawiec: So it kind of just start off with, I want to look back and, in previous interviews to me, you've mentioned coming up in the mainstream food space, specifically like Pillsbury. And I wonder if you can talk about how that experience, the mainstream space, influenced your decision to join NOW Foods, and your career in the natural product space. How did that color, what you do now, and how you approach the business.

Jim Emme: Well, in order to discuss that, we've got to go back even further. I was born and raised on a small family farm in East Central Indiana, as I was even in elementary school, the farm had been in the family for well over 100 years, and that's been well over 50 years ago. So yeah, yeah, I'm that old. But anyway, growing up on the farm and being a small family farm, and near my maternal grandparents, and they weren't organic, but they were more about being natural and not using as many pesticides and fertilizers. And to them, it was about too much expense, that you had to be careful. And my father, who was originally from South Dakota, was a farmer, and met my mother, and he moved to Indiana and took over management of the farm. I learned a lot of things about that. Our farm was small enough. We had chickens, we had dairy cows, we had a variety of livestock. And it made me realize, my first job, I look back on it, I guess I would have been a preschooler at the time, but we didn't have preschools back then, but my first job was weighing the eggs from the chickens, because we would sell some of the eggs to the supermarket, and Mom and Dad would get store credit there. But every August, my mother and grandmother would can vegetables from our garden. We did a lot of things that were, in hindsight, very much oriented in that. And then when I moved into high school, I was the youngest of three, so when I was 14, my father had to talk with me that there wasn't enough farm for all three of us, so I needed to go get an education. So I ended up working in an FFA work program and half days in high school. My junior and senior year. I played sports, and some of the things that one does in a small town in Indiana. Our county didn't have an interstate going through it, so we were small. There were maybe 9500 people in the county, and so my roots were really of a small area and more family oriented.