Health-Food Firm Employs Green Magma Man’s Sales Powers

Move over Batman. Here comes Green Magma Man.

The latter is the latest marketing tool of the Green Foods Corp., an Oxnard-based manufacturer of powdered health-food supplements.

The company introduced a Green Magma Man comic book at a health-food-industry trade show in Anaheim last month and will use the superhero to promote its Green Magma powdered extract.

“Baby boomers are driving the health-food industry right now, and we realized a lot of them were raised on comic books,” said Stephen Hartmann, marketing manager for Green Foods Corp. and coauthor of the comic book. “We thought this might be a friendly format to promote our product. It’s primarily a retail and trade-show gimmick.”

Green Magma, made from young barley grass, contains vitamins, minerals, amino acids and--like its superhero spokesman--chlorophyll. The full-color glossy Green Magma Man comic book is primarily for use in health-food stores.

Green Foods Corp., a privately held company, had sales in excess of $15 million in 1995, Hartmann said. Its leading products were the Green Magma extract and a pet health supplement called Barley Dog. Hartmann said the company spends about $1 million annually to market the two products.

“Like most manufacturers, we promote products through brochures, consumer magazine ads, newspapers, radio, TV. We’re doing all that plus the comic book,” Hartmann said. “Printing of the comic books cost 55 cents each. Like any promotional thing there are a lot of costs. We hope to make up those costs in retail sale of the product.”

Green Foods Corp. printed 30,000 copies of the comic book. In addition to serving a promotional purpose, the books will be sold for $1.75 at health food stores and directly through the Green Foods Corp.

Karen Benezra of Brandweek, a national advertising magazine, said the use of comic book characters to market products to both adults and children is gaining in popularity.

“We’re seeing a real resurgence in a lot of the companies who are marketing to youths looking to superheroes, like Marvel’s Spider-Man,” she said. Spider-Man “has his own cereal, he’s been on fruit roll-ups, he’s popped out of a [McDonald’s] Happy Meal once in awhile. It’s a kid magnet.”

Comic book characters, she said, seem to attract nostalgic baby boomers as well. “Businesses are going for that warm, fuzzy feeling with adults when they get a comic book character out there.”

Benezra said this connection with superheroes might make the Green Magma supplement more appealing to the average consumer.

“The product sounds like its pretty technical, scientific stuff that wouldn’t tug at consumer heartstrings,” she said. “Maybe using a comic book character will help.”

Green Foods, founded in 1979, operates out of a 20,000-square-foot, $21-million processing facility in Oxnard and an identical facility in Osaka, Japan. The company is an offshoot of the Japan Pharmaceutical Development Co. Ltd., founded by Dr. Yoshihide Hagiwara in the mid-1960s in Osaka.

Hartmann said the Green Magma Man comic book is scheduled to make its Japanese debut within the next couple of months. He said the company also plans to contact Marvel Comics and DC Comics to see if there is interest in a Green Magma Man series. As the story goes, Green Magma Man is college student Jarred Hamilton, who has fallen into a coma after an auto accident. He is nursed backed to health and given superhero powers by a scientist who transfuses chlorophyll into the young man’s body.

“Green Magma just naturally has a comic book, superhero sound to it,” Hartmann said. “It was when a manufacturer came up to me at the trade show and asked for my autograph that I realized maybe we had something here.”