This week the Norcross, GA company announced it had won a judgement that could allow it to recover attorneys fee totaling almost $1 million in a patent infringement suit brought by Thermolife International. Thermolife’s case against Hi-Tech centered on patents connected to the action of amino acid l-arginine. Thermolife licensed the patent from Stanford University, based on work done by a university-associated researcher in the 1990s.
Expansion
Hi Tech was also in the news recently when it lost a case brought against it by the Food and Drug Administration over the company’s use of DMAA. Hi Tech has always claimed that this ingredient can be found in geraniums, and its use of a synthetic version was legal under existing federal laws. In his decision, Judge Willis B. Hunt Jr. said the intention of Congress in passing DSHEA was clearly to connect botanical ingredients with a significant source in nature.
“It is inconceivable that in passing the DSHEA Congress intended for supplement manufacturers to take a chemical that heretofore had only been manufactured in a laboratory and to scour the globe in search of minuscule amounts of that chemical in obscure plants so that they could declare the substance a dietary ingredient under the statue,” he wrote.
None of Hi-Tech’s legal issues have seemed to have restrained the company’s growth. This week the company announced the grand opening for a new distribution center located on the West Coast. Operations are slated to begin as early as May of this year to support the ongoing expansion and growth of Hi-Tech. Hi-Tech has distribution and manufacturing sites in Georgia and Pennsylvania already, and this will be Hi-Tech's third national distribution center. The company said the new distribution center will use cutting-edge technology and will significantly improve logistics as well as meet the company’s growing customer base.