Hi, I'm Lee Swanson. I was President of Swanson Health Products for 30 years until 2016. Now my passion for healing and natural health continues with the Swanson Foundation, where our focus is to promote healthy lifestyles through natural treatments, supplements and more.
Lee Swanson
Educate, inform and help promote optimal healthy lifestyles
The Swanson Foundation wants to use its platform to provide, educate and inform about the benefits of natural health including hyperbaric oxygen, supplements, diet, and lifestyle changes.
Our Vision
The Swanson History
It was the late 1950s, and Leland Swanson's worst fear was starting to become reality. Arthritis was setting in and threatening his golf game. Golf was his passion. He loved the game, but what he loved even more was playing with friends and family and getting to know people on the course who shared his passion. Arthritis was slowly taking it all away from him, and so began his lifelong journey down the path of natural health and wellness.
Leland read everything he could get his hands on in relation to arthritis and overall wellness, including countless books and articles by natural health pioneers such as Paul Bragg and Adelle Davis. He attended lectures and conversed with other health-conscious individuals. Following up on what he learned, Leland began taking vitamin E supplements.
Leland's commitment to health expanded in 1968 when he decided to share this wellness knowledge with others. He ordered 5,000 vitamin E capsules from an Ohio manufacturer and started advertising to consumers through the mail. Other nutritional supplements followed,and before long he was sending out small catalogs to potential customers. A year later in 1969, Swanson Health Products was born.
When Swanson Health Products opened, Leland declared that "the satisfaction and goodwill of our valued customers is our most important asset." He pledged to "provide the world's finest dietary supplements at the lowest possible prices with honest, outstanding customer service." Those founding principles remain just as important today as they were back in 1969, and they remain that way because of the Swanson family vision.
While Leland's oldest son, Jay, was working at a bank when Swanson operations began, younger son Lee was still in school, and spent his free time helping his father. He was his father's first employee, and together they started offering a line of basic nutritional supplements. Swanson Health Products boomed in the 1970s, as more people became aware of their quality, pricing, and service.
"We went from zero customers in 1969 to about 30,000 by 1979," said Lee, Jr., who was named CEO in 1996.
Lee took the company his father started to incredible heights. At the time of its sale, Swanson Health Products sold nearly 28,000 unique products to more than 4.5 million customers. Lee sold the company in 2016 at a nine-figure payout. That didn't dampen his passion for spreading the good word about natural health and healing, though.
In 2021, he established the Leland A. Swanson Foundation. The Foundation supports a hyperbaric oxygen treatment clinic, Swanson Hyperbarics, which is scheduled to open in Fargo at the end of 2021. The Foundation also donated $50,000 to Essentia Hospital in Fargo to help with the purchase of a new hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
The Foundation will also continue the quest to educate and inform about the benefits of natural health through supplements, as well as diet, alternative therapies, and lifestyle changes.
The Swanson Foundation donated $50,000 to Essentia Hospital in Fargo to help with the cost of a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
Contact the Swanson Foundation
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