Nutritional Outlook's 2024 Best of the Industry Awards, Industry Leader: Shaheen Majeed

Shaheen Majeed is the global CEO and managing director of Sami-Sabinsa Group. A fixture in the industry, Majeed has earned the respect of his peers as a leading figure at Sabinsa Corp.— the company his father Muhammed Majeed, PhD, built — where his accomplishments helped grow the brand and served as a model for the rest of the industry. Majeed briefly left Sabinsa to apply his skills as CEO of three BGG World subsidiaries — HB Natural Ingredients USA, BGG Americas, and Algae Health Sciences — but has now returned to his roots to lead Sami-Sabinsa Group and continue his father’s work while applying his own vision for the global company’s future.

The Family Business

Muhammed Majeed, PhD, founded Sabinsa Corp. in 1988. From a young age, the younger Majeed helped his father with the business. “He used to pick me up from high school and we would rush over to a self-storage garage. There used to be a cardboard box, maybe a small blue drum and we would pack up some samples,” he explains. “I’ll be brutally honest, I didn’t know what was going on. I mean, it was just my father picking me up after school and going and doing some things…That was our humble beginnings and so…I didn’t really feel like, wow, this is going to be such a big thing or huge deal. I was helping my dad out and that meant the world to me to spend time with him now that I reflect back.”

Of course, Sabinsa continued to grow, expanding into a global company, and by the time Majeed began working at Sabinsa as an adult, there was certainly pressure on him to perform at a high level. “It was around that time I realized that I was a terrible salesperson and there were a lot of expectations because obviously my father was the best salesperson for his company…He could sell anything and on a dime,” says Majeed. “And so just being associated with him, being his son, and having his last name, I think there was a lot of expectations.”

While sales was not a skillset that came naturally to Majeed, he did discover that marketing was something he could excel at and that skillset did not go unnoticed. “I was able to express what I wanted the company’s ingredients to say and look like, so I was put into what was then the marketing department of one,” he says. “We had marketing pieces and assets out there, but when I started writing the bullet points, which were basically translating what our scientists said...[for our] salespeople and then on to our customers, I think that’s when I found my calling. [It] just became more and more apparent that...I’m doing good for the brand, I’m doing good for the company and the representation of Sabinsa from there on started to grow.”

The value of strong and consistent branding is well understood by finished product manufacturers but as an ingredient supplier, Sabinsa also understood the value of brand-name recognition, not just for their customers, but for the end user as well. “I really give credit to Dr. Majeed for that,” he said. “Early on [he] saw very unique trends in that, a lot of these ingredients would need to reach consumers and once consumers appreciated it, they would keep coming back to those brand[ed ingredients]...That’s how we kind of became obsessed, if you will, with branding our ingredients and…now most of our competition does that and if they’re not doing it, they’re losing out.”

While Majeed says that his father’s foresight of giving the company’s ingredients recognizable brand names made his job easier, Majeed played a crucial role in strengthening Sabinsa’s branding in multiple ways. One of the simplest ways was ensuring consistent branding throughout the world. According to Majeed, there was a time when the company’s logo would look different in different parts of the world where it might look stretched and be formatted incorrectly. It was a simple problem, but an important one to solve. “Those were the days when we had to get those things right,” says Majeed. “Consistency mattered.”

Intellectual property protection became another important initiative for Majeed, who said that ingredients like Sabinsa’s LactoSpore probiotic were being sold for years without a patent. “Finding a very unique angle on an ingredient that we’ve been selling already, that also became kind of my calling and a challenge to our scientists to say ‘Hey, start looking at things a little differently,’ and it’s okay to do that because breaking that mold can be very challenging..And so we were able to do that,” he says.

This also coincided with efforts led by Majeed to increase the substantiation of the company’s ingredient portfolio with human clinical trials which help support patents. Additionally, Majeed helped expand the use of the company’s portfolio into foods and beverages through the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) process. Back when Majeed undertook this challenge, GRAS was not as commonly understood as it is now. “I kind of took it upon myself to go after it and I think now 6-7 GRAS ingredients later, we find ourselves pretty comfortable in the functional foods marketplace. But that was probably the highlight of my career where I could take something and drive it down the lane and get it done…and we were struggling with that.”

Ultimately, Majeed’s leadership helped bring Sabinsa’s ingredients to more people, offering them validated and therefore trusted solutions, solidifying the company’s brand and reputation.

Looking Ahead

Majeed has worked hard cultivating his leadership style, learning from his father and other mentors the kind of leader he wants to be and the kind of leader he doesn’t want to be. One of the many qualities Majeed recognized and admired about his father was how deeply he cared about people. As a global company with over 1,000 employees, that is a heavy burden to ensure payroll comes in and people have a livelihood. The way Majeed tells it, this was a burden that his father bore almost exclusively, with so many decisions going through him.

He tells a story about being in a field in India with his father, negotiating with a 96-year-old woman about the future of her land and the three sons who will inherit it. She wanted Sabinsa to cultivate the land and make sure it prospers after she’s gone. At the same time, Majeed’s father received a phone call from Japan about an issue with an ingredient not meeting certain standards. The night before that, says Majeed, his father was dealing with a shipment not passing customs, as well as a manufacturing issue at Sabinsa’s Utah facility. His father was able to swiftly deal with these issues, but as Majeed assumes leadership of Sabinsa following his father’s passing, he sees this approach of leadership as unsustainable and chaotic.

“When he himself decided to run all that, that was the chaos,” says Majeed who acknowledges that his father is probably the only person who could have run Sabinsa so successfully, yet so chaotically. For Majeed, adding structure to the company will make it more dynamic and fluid moving forward, with responsibilities and tasks delegated to the right people. Change can be hard for a family business, but Shaheen understands that it’s crucial for the future of the company.

Looking ahead, Majeed sees more partnerships on the horizon for Sabinsa. The company recently announced a partnership with Postbiotics Inc. for multinational distribution of the company’s PoZibio postbiotic ingredient. This is the first time Sabinsa has partnered to distribute another company’s product, says Majeed, and there will be more partnerships to follow. He also plans on building on Sami-Sabinsa’s manufacturing capabilities.

“I still have in my mind a few factories that I want to set up, and again, these were in conversations [we had] back in the days with Dr. Majeed and I’m looking forward to bringing them out. Some of them will answer gaps in what we are currently not delivering — but know we should be — and that our customers expect us to deliver on,” says Majeed. “Another area we’ll be fulfilling is in technology that we know we have the right to science, we just don’t yet have the right to manufacture, so we need to build that up. So, there are gaps we’re filling, there are partnerships we’re trying to do, and there are new technologies that we’re bringing out, and in all those cases, it cannot be done chaotically; that could only be done by my father Dr. Majeed, but this time around I’m going to try to do it as best as I can with structure.”