First Virgin Coconut Oil Imported to the U.S. is Still the BEST – Now You Could Sell it Too!

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by Brian Shilhavy

Tropical Traditions: Supplying Coconut Oil to America for 25 Years!

Tropical Traditions began exporting Virgin Coconut Oil from the Philippines to the US in 2001.

At that time, there were only one or two other companies in the US even selling coconut oil, and they were highly refined coconut oils, mostly used for cosmetics and skincare products.

The prevailing belief was that coconut oil was dangerous to consume as an edible oil, due to its high saturated fat content.

But having lived in the Philippines for several years, I was forced to challenge my own thinking that coconut oil was bad, seeing firsthand how the older generations in rural areas consumed home-made coconut oil from fresh coconuts, and thriving from a high-fat diet where coconut oil was their main dietary oil.

We started making our own coconut oil by hand, the traditional way, and consuming it as a family. We decided to make this product available to the US market. Distinguishing this hand-made traditional coconut oil from the refined coconut oils mass produced by machine, we called it “Virgin Coconut Oil.”

We were the first ones to export Virgin Coconut Oil from the Philippines to the US market. The success overwhelmed us.

Today, more than 25 years later, there are many other companies now selling coconut oil again in the US, most of them mass-produced by machines.

But we are committed to time-honored traditional practices that have produced natural coconut oils for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Our Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil is still made by hand by small-scale family producers in the Philippines.

These producers have learned a lot of things over the years, since most of them have been producing this oil for over 20 years now.

They have learned how to pick out the best coconuts from each harvest that produce the best quality oil.

Independent laboratory analysis ^[2] shows this to be one of the highest quality coconut oils on the market, having the highest levels of antioxidants using a wet-milling process.

This hand-made artisanal Virgin Coconut Oil is marketed in the US under the Tropical Traditions Gold Label brand. It meets our strictest standards to earn this designation, and is also now part of our Glyphosate-tested program ^[3].

Today when you buy Tropical Traditions Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil, you are buying the highest quality coconut oil we have to offer, and it is still made by hand and benefiting families in the rural areas of the Philippines where the coconuts grow.

We are not aware of any other hand-made coconut oil like it in the market!

The Cost and Opposition to Bring This Product to Market

We had moved to the Philippines in 1998, mainly due to the concerns I had about the frailty of the emerging technology which was creating a society highly dependent upon that technology. I was part of online Y2K groups, and I was at that time working in the lucrative field of technology, as a Certified Microsoft Trainer and Systems Engineer.

Microsoft was taking over the world of business computing at that time, as they had finally produced a true 32 bit operating system in 1995, finally catching up with Apple, and they focused on networking systems in the business world.

I gave up that career to move my family back to the Philippines, to the home area where my Filipino wife was from, and where one of my sons had been born.

I began to study natural medicine in the Philippines, seeking to break our dependence upon western pharmaceutical drugs.

We did not start out as a coconut oil company. Our first products that we produced were from Philippine herbs, and after the year 2000 started and the technology did not crash, I began to publish my research on Philippine herbs on the Internet in 2000.

As our herb business quickly grew after securing a major contract with a U.S. company, we formed a Philippine corporation to handle the production and sale of these herbs.

Coconut oil, was actually an afterthought for us, even though we were using it personally and seeing tremendous health benefits.

But I decided to publish my research on the health benefits of coconut oil, citing peer-reviewed literature on the medium chain fatty acids found in coconut oil, particularly lauric acid, which is most abundantly found in nature in coconut oil. Human breast milk is a distance second for this natural, healthy fatty acid which is also a “saturated” fat.

And while the bulk of our sales in our new Philippine company were bulk herbs exported to the United States, the interest in the research I was publishing on coconut oil was so strong online, that we decided to offer our hand-made simple coconut oil online and ship it directly to consumers from the Philippines, using the Philippine postal system.

We honestly did not expect to get many sales. The availability of commodity mass-produced coconut oil was plentiful at the time in the Philippines, and it is known as RBD coconut oil: refined, bleached, and deodorized because it was mass produced and had to be “cleaned up” before exporting it.

And in the U.S. market, it was mainly only used as an ingredient in cleaning or skincare products, but not as a dietary oil.

What we were making for ourselves as a dietary coconut oil, which most rural Filipinos also made from fresh coconuts, was very different than the commodity mass-produced coconut oils, so we named it “Virgin Coconut Oil” as it was minimally processed and unrefined.

At this time, there were only two companies in the United States selling coconut oil as a dietary oil, and both companies were selling RBD coconut oil. And it most certainly was NOT their main product, due to the negative reputation of coconut oil in the U.S.

When we put our Virgin Coconut Oil online and began to sell it directly to the consumer, we were soon overwhelmed by the demand. They had access to all the scientific literature regarding the health benefits of coconut oil that I had published online. One of the two companies that were selling RBD coconut oil as a dietary oil contacted us and asked if they could purchase it in bulk.

This presented quite a quandary for us. The only way I could think of to ramp up production to supply the kind of quantities they wanted, was to invest in commercial equipment to extract the oil, similar to what the coconut oil mills were already doing in our community.

Even if I could figure out a way to produce it slightly different from the way they were producing it, to give us a competitive advantage, it would not take long for them to figure out how to do the same thing, and then easily put us out of business.

I also did not have the capital to invest in such equipment, and I started with a business principle then that I have never changed, and that was to NEVER take on debt or investors to finance the business.

So what we did instead, was to “scale” production by NOT changing the way the product was produced by hand, but to simply hire and train more people to keep making it the same way as we had been making it, using traditional methods of grating the fresh coconut, squeezing out the fresh coconut milk, and then separate the oil from the water.

It required a lot more effort, and developing a standardized training program to make sure all the small-scale family producers were producing it the same way, but it also blessed many people and created streams of income revenue in a very poor, rural agricultural community.

And it worked! Our growth was much slower than taking on debt or investors and ramping up production quickly by mass producing it, but grow we did!

We eventually had to build warehouses for repacking and shipping, purchase trucks, find drums to package it in, etc.

So in 2002 we started Tropical Traditions, a U.S. based company, to brand the Virgin Coconut Oil and handle our own distribution, leveraging the power of the Internet and becoming an ecommerce company.

Ecommerce was just getting started back then, and Amazon.com was still a company that primarily sold books, so I remember how we had to go to great lengths to convince the public at that time that it was safe to actually buy things off of the Internet, especially food.

But along with that growth came unexpected problems. Living in a poor, rural area in Quezon Province, we were eventually viewed as “rich” because of our business expansion.

Communist insurgency groups like the New People’s Army (NPA) were prevalent in our area, because we lived on a mountain. They never actually bothered us, because my Filipino wife was from that area, and many of the people we were hiring to produce the coconut oil were actually former NPA members, and they were happy that we were providing jobs for people and improving their lives.

Forced to Leave Our Home

Our children were home educated during this time, and often they would play with their Filipino cousins after they got out of school in the local elementary school down the road from us.

One day, they did not come by after school, and we asked their mother, who was working with us in the production of coconut oil, why they did not come by.

She replied that she had sent them directly home, as some men had been spotted carrying assault rifles in the area, and she didn’t think it was safe.

Being the only American and non-Filipino living on the mountain, they were always concerned about my safety. This had happened once before, where strange armed men were in the area, and they had whisked me off of the mountain for a few days to be safe.

At that time, it was actually a false alarm, because a local police academy had sent their cadets into the area to do training, but never informed the local community about it.

We were concerned about this new report, and had actually been planning on taking a family vacation at a resort the next day. We contemplated just leaving early that night instead, but we had not packed or prepared for the vacation yet.

So we decided to just play it safe and drive off of the mountain down into town and stay at a hotel for the night, and then come back the next day and pack up and start our vacation.

We had had problems with people breaking into our warehouse and stealing equipment, so we had a guard who slept in the warehouse at night to prevent that.

As we drove down the mountain, the man we had hired to guard the warehouse, which was across the street from our house, was on his way up the mountain to begin his night shift.

We told him what we heard about strange armed men in the area, and he told me he would check it out.

We came back early the next morning, and when we entered the house, the electricity was down, and the phone was dead.

The guard came over from across the street, and he was visibly upset and shaken.

“They came for you last night,” he said to me.

I asked him to step into the house and explain what happened. He then recounted how they originally came to the house, where they cut off the electricity and phone line first.

Not finding us there, they then proceeded to go across the street where the warehouse was. He said there were at least a dozen of them all armed with assault rifles.

They began to beat on the door of the warehouse, knowing that he was in there, demanding that he come out. At first he refused, but then when they threatened to burn down the warehouse with him inside, he came out.

They forced him to the ground and took away his sidearm (he was an off-duty Manila policeman from the area), and then asked him where the American was.

He told them that we had left and went on vacation. They told him to tell me that they were members of the NPA, and that they had come to collect their revolutionary tax which I had failed to pay. They passed on a message to me that they would “be back” to collect their tax.

The guard told us we should leave immediately, and so with tears in our eyes, we packed up our belongings as quickly as we could and left.

We were never to see that house again as a family.

We gathered with my in-laws in town that morning, as the guard went to visit his contacts with the NPA to figure out just who these men were.

My in-laws told us we needed to leave the Philippines as soon as possible, because there was no way they could protect us. They were surprised we were able to live on the mountain for as long as we did. One of my in-laws was a retired policeman, and one of my brother-in-laws was ex special forces military, and they all agreed we had to leave.

We found no indications that this group was actually part of the NPA. The NPA was very organized, and their usual MO was to send one of their leaders to a business owner with a letter that explained that the NPA was protecting their business, and that it was now time to pay their “revolutionary tax.”

They would actually give the business owner time to pay it, and most businesses did.

But that never happened with us. They never approached us, and as I wrote above, many of their members were actually now employed by us producing coconut oil. They loved us.

This group was apparently a kidnap-for-ransom group that was popular in the Philippines during this time. They mostly targeted rich foreigners in Manila, often kidnapping their children going to or coming home from school, and then holding them for ransom.

Since we were a home-based business and home educated our children, we had no predictable route to plan something like that. So they had to send some “scouts” the day before to case our place, and that is when members of the community spotted them, and tipped us off.

Up until the year before, Americans were never targeted by these kidnap-for-ransom terrorists. They mostly went after rich Chinese families. The Americans had too much of a military presence in the Philippines, and these groups never bothered with Americans.

But that all changed in 2001, when American missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham were kidnapped along with a bunch of others from a resort in Palawan by Muslim terrorists.

Unfortunately, Martin’s family paid a huge amount of money to secure their release, but Martin was killed in the rescue attempt anyway. You can search and find their story online.

But since Martin’s family paid a large sum of money to try and secure his release, it was now open season on Americans as well, unfortunately.

We traveled around staying in different places for about two weeks before we left the Philippines to fly back to the U.S., and during that time the group tried to extort money from us by threatening to burn down our warehouse (and anybody in it) if we did not comply.

I was under a lot of pressure from my in-laws to comply, but I refused, and they never carried out their threats.

So with a heavy heart, we left the our home in the Philippines, something we never intended to do. We loved living there, and all my closest friends lived there.

But God had other plans for us….

Back to the U.S. and Attacked by the FDA

So we went back to the United States at the end of 2002, homeless, and with most of our belongings left back in the Philippines.

But God turned it into a blessing, because sales were increasing, and lives were literally being changed by coconut oil, and I could manage the retail side of the business much better from the U.S.

Up until this point we had another family handling our distribution of the products we shipped from the Philippines. But apparently the success of the business convinced them that they no longer needed us, and they stole our customer database and started their own competing business and sourcing their coconut oil elsewhere.

Being back in the U.S., I could now take a more active role in the U.S. company.

The customer testimonials were pouring in, and in 2003 a supermarket checkout publication called “Woman’s World” ran their headline story that week as “The New Thyroid Cure” and used most of the information I had published on this topic, and then found some of our customers who they interviewed.

One of them claimed that Virgin Coconut Oil had cured her of Hashimoto’s disease, and they even published the link to our website right in the publication.

There were only a few of us selling coconut oil at the time, and we were all out of stock by the end of the week.

We were overwhelmed and totally unprepared for such traffic! We had a toll free number at the time, and I had to dedicate one person to just go in and clear our messages, because it would fill our maximum capacity for holding phone messages about every 20 minutes.

Our off-the-shelf ecommerce platform kept crashing due to the traffic.

Every single major vitamin and supplement company and health food store in America was contacting us to buy coconut oil, because of the volume of calls and requests they were getting as a result of that article.

It took us many, many months to catch up and completely revamp our website to handle the traffic. I hired a consultancy firm to design a custom ecommerce site to fit our needs.

The success was overwhelming. I had NYC publishing companies wanting to do a book deal, but ended up just self-publishing a book instead ^[4] in 2004.

Then the attacks came, in 2005.

First the IRS came after us, and audited us for 8 straight years, literally trying to destroy us. We were incorporated in Wisconsin, and our company just seemingly came out of nowhere, and I guess the IRS just assumed that we must have been doing something illegal to generate all of that income.

Then the FDA issued us a warning letter (see above) for selling unapproved drugs, because I quoted peer-reviewed literature and dared to publish testimonials from our customers who were actually being healed of various sicknesses by switching to coconut oil.

They threatened to seize all of our inventory and prosecute me as a criminal. I had to hire a very expensive Washington D.C. attorney who had experience in these areas, and then take all of the research and customer testimonials off of the website where we were selling the product and put it on a separate website with no links to be able to purchase the products.

This became CoconutOil.com ^[5], and still has all of the original research we have published over the years.

Later, because this kind of information that is routinely censored is a threat to Big Pharma and Big Food, I started publishing and sharing with the public, and developed an entire network called Health Impact News.

An Invitation to Other Online Retailers to Sell Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil

Today, it is much more difficult to market on the Internet, as the large Big Box retailers along with Amazon.com dominate search engines and other ways of attracting new customers.

Therefore, for the first time in our 25-year existence, we are extending an invitation to other online retailers who are interested in carrying the best Virgin Coconut Oil on the market on their website.

For now, one has to have their own online store on the Shopify platform to be considered for this new program.

Similar to what we announced last week where we introduced a new product line of Sea Moss ^[6] available for purchase on Healthy Traditions ^[7], this new program we are launching is seeking to collaborate with similar small-scale businesses who can benefit from selling the original, and still best Virgin Coconut Oil that has been sold in the U.S. for over 25 years now.

No purchase of inventory is necessary, as all fulfillment will be done by Healthy Traditions.

So if you have an online Shopify store, or know of others who do, and could benefit from selling our Gold Label Virgin Coconut Oil, please inquire here ^[8].

This high-quality premium Virgin Coconut Oil is not sold in the mass market, and we prefer to have like-minded businesses have the opportunity to sell this Virgin Coconut Oil that millions of Americans have enjoyed for the past 25 years.

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com ^[9].

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI) ^[10]

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See Also:

Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through

FREE eBook! The Concept of the American Christian Family is a Myth and is NOT Found Anywhere in the Bible – by Brian Shilhavy ^[13]

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FREE eBook! Restoring the Foundation of New Testament Faith in Jesus Christ – by Brian Shilhavy ^[14]

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The Brotherhood of Satan vs. The Brotherhood of Jesus Christ ^[15]

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KABBALAH: The Anti-Christ Religion of Satan that Controls the World Today ^[16]

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Exposing the Christian Zionism Cult ^[17]

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The Bewitching of America with the Evil Eye and the Mark of the Beast ^[18]

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Jesus Christ’s Opposition to the Jewish State: Lessons for Today ^[19]

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Identifying the Luciferian Globalists Implementing the New World Order – Who are the “Jews”? ^[20]

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The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain ^[21]

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What is the Condition of Your Heart? The Superiority of the Human Heart over the Human Brain ^[22]

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