1974

The year we started. Same company, same family ownership.

6,895

Test records on file from April 2025 through July 2026.

99.7%

Pass rate. Twenty-four failed. We'll tell you about those.

ZERO

Product recalls in fifty-two years.

WHO WE ARE

WE'RE A FACTORY THAT HAPPENS TO HAVE A BRAND.

Most supplement companies are marketing companies. They write a brief, send it to a contract manufacturer they have never toured, and spend the rest of the budget on ads. That model can produce a fine product. It can also produce rice flour in a capsule, and the brand selling it would have no way to know.

We are on the other side of that transaction. Highland Laboratories has been manufacturing dietary supplements since 1974, and Mt. Angel Vitamins is our own brand made on our own equipment. The people who formulate your multivitamin are down the hall from the people who assay it, who are down the hall from the people who bottle it. When something goes wrong we do not file a complaint with a vendor. We walk fifty feet and fix it.

Fifty thousand square feet in Mt. Angel, Oregon. Formulation, blending, encapsulation, tableting, liquids, packaging and a multi-million dollar analytical lab, all under one roof.

That is the whole argument. Everything below is evidence.

APRIL 2025 – JULY 2026

TWENTY-FOUR BATCHES FAILED. HERE'S WHAT WE DID ABOUT THEM.

Every supplement brand on earth will tell you their products are tested. Almost none of them will tell you how many tests they ran, and none of them will tell you how many came back wrong. That second number is the only one that proves the first one was real.

Ours is twenty-four.

Across sixteen months we logged 6,895 test records. 6,871 passed. 24 failed. That is a 99.7 percent pass rate, and the twenty-four are the part worth reading about.

Here is one. A lot of L-citrulline arrived specified at 200 mg per 0.558 g. Our assay returned 176 mg. Twelve percent light. Not dangerous, not adulterated, just not what the label would have said. It failed. It was quarantined, investigated and documented under corrective action. It never went in a bottle.

A testing program that has never rejected anything is not a testing program. It is a line item.

6,895

Test records on file

6,871

Passed

24

Failures, quarantined and documented

99.7%

Pass rate

FIVE GATES. ANY ONE OF THEM STOPS THE LINE.

1. THE MATERIAL ARRIVES AND GOES NOWHERE.

Every raw ingredient is quarantined on receipt. It sits physically segregated until Quality Control signs a release. Not purchasing, not production. QC.

2. WE CHECK THAT IT'S WHAT THE PAPERWORK SAYS.

Identity testing first, because the most common failure in this industry is not a contaminant, it is a substitution. Then potency, then impurities: heavy metals, insecticides, microbial contamination.

3. WE AUDIT THE PEOPLE WHO SOLD IT TO US.

Facilities, processes, standards and their certificates of analysis. A supplier's certificate is a starting point for our testing, never a substitute for it.

4. THE FINISHED PRODUCT GETS TESTED AGAIN.

Weight, hardness, conformation, disintegration, color. A capsule that will not break down in the time it is supposed to is a capsule that does not work, regardless of what is inside it.

5. EVERY LOT STAYS TRACEABLE.

Full lot and batch traceability on every raw ingredient in every finished good. Give us a lot number and we can tell you where each component came from.

GATE ONE

NOTHING MOVES WITHOUT A QC SIGNATURE.

Raw material is weighed and dispensed only after Quality Control releases it. Until then it is physically segregated, tagged and going nowhere. The orange hold tag is not decoration. It is the difference between a testing program and a marketing claim.

THE LAB

NINE WAYS TO FIND OUT WE WERE WRONG.

We put a multi-million dollar analytical lab inside the building, which is an absurd amount of money for a company our size to spend on machines that only ever tell us bad news. Six of the eight best-known brands in this category name no analytical equipment at all on their websites. Here is ours, by name.

HPLC and a quadrupole UPLC-MS answer “is the dose real?” Liquid chromatography separates a sample into its individual compounds and measures each one. It is how we know 500 mg on the label is 500 mg in the capsule, and it is how we caught that citrulline lot running twelve percent light. The UPLC-MS goes further and confirms the molecule by mass, so identity does not rest on retention time alone.

ICP-MS and GC-MS answer “is there anything in here that shouldn't be?” Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry detects heavy metals down to parts per billion. Lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury. Botanicals pull metals out of soil, so the only way to know a plant-derived ingredient is clean is to test it. Gas chromatography mass spectrometry covers what evaporates: residual solvents and pesticide residues.

FTIR and HPTLC answer “is this even the right plant?” The most common failure in this industry is substitution, not contamination. FTIR fingerprints a raw material against a reference spectrum the day it arrives. HPTLC is the reference method for authenticating a botanical and catching one that has been cut or swapped.

Then a full microbiology lab, digestion chambers for elemental sample prep, and dissolution chambers to confirm a capsule actually breaks down and releases in the window it is supposed to. A perfectly dosed tablet that will not dissolve is a rock.

Identity. Potency. Purity. Release. Four questions, and we do not ship until all four are answered.

HPLC

High-performance liquid chromatography. Separates a sample into its compounds and quantifies each one. Potency.

Quadrupole UPLC-MS

Ultra-high-pressure separation with mass-spec confirmation. Identifies a molecule by mass, not retention time alone.

ICP-MS

Heavy metals to parts per billion. Lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury.

GC-MS

Gas chromatography mass spectrometry. Residual solvents and pesticide residues.

FTIR

Infrared fingerprint of every raw material against a reference spectrum, the day it arrives.

HPTLC

High-performance thin-layer chromatography. The reference method for authenticating a botanical.

Microbiology lab

Plate counts, yeast and mold, E. coli, Salmonella, Staph aureus. Fully in-house.

Digestion chambers

Acid digestion sample prep, so elemental analysis measures the whole sample and not just its surface.

Dissolution chambers

Confirms a capsule or tablet breaks down and releases within its required window.

OUR NAME

NAMED AFTER A TOWN OF 3,500 PEOPLE.

Mt. Angel, Oregon sits in the Willamette Valley about forty minutes south of Portland. It is known for a Benedictine abbey founded in 1882, the oldest continuously running Oktoberfest in the state, and one of the largest hop-growing regions in the country. It is not known for being a place companies pretend to be from.

We could have named the brand something that sounds Scandinavian and clinical. Plenty of companies do. We put the town on the label because the town is where the building is, the building is where the lab is, and the lab is the reason to buy the product.

Fifty-two years. Same town. Same building.

OWNERSHIP

THE THREE PEOPLE WHO OWN THIS COMPANY RUN THE PLANT, THE BUSINESS, AND THE LAB.

In August 2017, three people bought Highland Laboratories: the chief executive, the chief financial and revenue officer, and the director of quality and compliance. They bought it from Ken and Candi Scott, who founded the company in 1974 and ran it for four decades.

The three of them divide the whole company. Rob owns manufacturing, supply chain, and process optimization, so the person deciding how a product gets made is an owner. Keith owns the commercial side and the back office, sales, marketing, customer relationships, finance, accounting, IT, HR, customer service, and industry relations, so the person who absorbs the cost of a rejected lot is an owner. John owns quality and compliance, so the person who signs the rejection notice is an owner too.

Read that last one again, because it is the unusual one. At most manufacturers quality reports to operations, operations reports to finance, and finance reports to whoever owns the building. Quality is a cost center. It loses arguments. Here it cannot be overruled, because the man holding it owns a third of the company and there is no holding company above him and no fund with a five-year exit horizon.

That is not a values statement. It is an org chart, and it is why the twenty-four failures further up this page exist in a document you are allowed to read.

LEADERSHIP

WHO ACTUALLY RUNS THIS.

Robert Ugianskis, Chief Executive Officer. Rob is a mechanical engineer and a metallurgist by training, University of Connecticut, and he spent a decade running plants for Owens Corning before he ever saw a capsule. Process engineer, operations leader, maintenance leader, then plant manager. He has published on Six Sigma. He lists Kaizen as a core skill, which in practice means he walks the floor looking for waste and does not accept “that is how we have always done it” as an answer. He came to supplements in 2015 from heavy industrial manufacturing, where a process failure is measured in tons and nobody gets to fix it with better packaging. He owns manufacturing, supply chain, and optimization here, which means the raw material decisions and the process decisions belong to the same person, and that person is an engineer.

Keith Gregory, Chief Financial and Revenue Officer. Keith carries the commercial side and the back office both. Sales, marketing, customer relationships, finance, accounting, IT, HR, customer service, and industry relations. That is an unusual pairing on purpose: the person deciding what we spend on testing is the same person answerable for what we sell. When a lot fails, the write-off lands on his desk, and the quarantine decision still is not his to make. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for international business with an economics minor, then an IMBA at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. He came out of manufacturing finance, not supplement marketing. Product costing and yield analysis at Pilgrim’s Pride, operations finance across sixteen plants at Dairy Farmers of America, then here since 2015. He also sits on the board of directors of the Natural Products Association, the industry’s oldest trade group, founded 1936, which means he spends part of his year arguing about the rules the rest of this page has to satisfy.

John Mills, Director of Quality and Compliance. Master’s in chemistry. Ten years in biochemical research before this, implementing Good Laboratory Practice in an analytical lab. Quality Manager here since 1994, and he designed the lab facilities we run today. The specifications your product is held to are the ones he wrote. He is also, and this is the point, a co-owner.

An engineer, a manufacturing finance guy, and a chemist. Nobody in this building came up through brand management.

Chief Executive Officer

Robert Ugianskis. Owns manufacturing, supply chain, and process optimization. Engineer by training, plant manager by trade. Here since 2015, co-owner since 2017.

Chief Financial and Revenue Officer

Keith Gregory. Owns sales, marketing, customer relationships, finance, accounting, IT, HR, customer service, and industry relations. Everything except how it gets made and whether it passes. NPA board director. Here since 2015, co-owner since 2017.

Director of Quality and Compliance

John Mills. Owns specifications, methods, and the authority to reject. Thirty-two years, and he built the lab. Co-owner since 2017.

Laboratory and Regulatory Affairs

Karl Coreson. Runs the lab day to day and carries regulatory affairs. Decides what gets tested, on what, and whether it releases. Ten years.

AUDITED BY PEOPLE WHO DON'T WORK FOR US.

UL NPA GMP CERTIFIED

Current Good Manufacturing Practice per 21 CFR Part 111, verified by outside audit rather than self-attested.

USDA ORGANIC, OREGON TILTH

Including National Organic Program Handling certification and NSF/ANSI 305 for personal care products containing organic ingredients.

REGISTERED & AUDITED

Operating under DSHEA with structure and function claims only. No disease claims, ever.

TWELVE OUTSIDE LABS

Outside labs hold our finished-goods and raw-material testing on purpose. A manufacturer grading its own homework is a conflict of interest.

CONTRACT MANUFACTURING

IF YOU'RE HERE BECAUSE YOU WANT US TO MAKE YOURS, START HERE.

Mt. Angel Vitamins is one of three brands Highland Laboratories owns. The rest of what comes off our line has somebody else's name on it.

Custom formulation, private label and contract manufacturing across capsules, tablets, powders and liquids. Same lab, same quarantine protocol, same testing regimen as the products carrying our own name, because it is the same building and the same people.

If you are evaluating manufacturers, the questions to ask are: do you own your lab, will you show me lot-level test records, and can I tour the facility. We answer yes to all three.

Talk to us about manufacturing

WE WON'T TELL YOU A VITAMIN CURES ANYTHING.

Dietary supplements do not treat, cure or prevent disease. That is not lawyer caution, it is the actual regulatory line under DSHEA, and the brands that cross it are telling you something about how they operate. So our labels say supports and maintains and promotes, and they say it because those are the claims the science supports and the law permits. A company willing to lie about what a capsule does is a company willing to lie about what is in it.

LOT-LEVEL DOCUMENTATION

ASK US FOR THE PAPERWORK ON YOUR BOTTLE.

Two of the eight brands we researched let you look up a certificate of analysis by lot number. Four publish nothing at all.

Every lot we produce has a certificate of analysis behind it. Find the lot number on the bottom of your bottle, send it to us, and we will send you the document: identity, potency and purity results for what is actually in your hand.

Request a certificate of analysis

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