Living Las Vegas

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Vitamin See: The National Vitamin Company’s Factory Tour

Given the choice between touring a vitamin factory and a chocolate factory, I think most people would go for the fudge. I include myself in that number, but here’s some good news. Vitamin factories are fun, too, and chewable vitamin C tablets taste almost like candy. At the National Vitamin Company, they’re each embossed with a cute little triceratops, which, as we’ve all known from a tender age, makes them taste even better.

But even shaped liked dinosaurs, no vitamin ever tasted like a chocolate-covered cherry. Fortunately, Las Vegas’s one and only vitamin factory tour makes up for the fact that its products will never be cargo on the good ship Lollipop. What it lacks in mouth-watering samples, it makes up for with its machinery.

At the National Vitamin Factory Tour, which opened to the public a few years ago, you walk down a wide hall that has glass windows along one side. Each one reaveals a different part of the vitamin-making process, from blending to packaging. In between, there are machines that stamp out tablets, give them a slick coating, dry them, make hard capsules, and - my favorite - make soft capsules out of sheets of gelatin. This machine is not only useful in making vitamins. The same apparatus can be used to make paint balls and little pillows filled with bubble bath.

In case some of the machines aren’t working, there are video monitors running constantly, explaining how the different contraptions work and why vitamins look they way they do. If a dinosaur who sounds a bit too much like Barney does some of the talking, well, forgive him. The tour’s good anyway, and the vitamin store at the end is one of the best-stocked such establishments in Las Vegas. A true factory store, it always features specials, sales, and discounts. When I was there, you could buy a bottle of Vitamin C tablets for 99 cents.

You can also buy smoothies at the snack bar before you leave, and the $1 discount coupon you get when you take the tour makes these a good value, too. I tried one with eight “boosters,” additives including bee pollen and Siberian ginseng. I don’t know whether the slightly pinkish concoction was in fact healthier than an Ethel M liqueur-filled chocolate, but it was easy to convince myself that it had to be. It tasted slightly herbal, slightly fruity, and a lot like a chewable multivitamin.

The National Vitamin Company tour will never eclipse Hoover Dam, and it can’t compete with the romance of chocolate. But for anyone who ever admired Rube Goldberg or wants a good deal on a bottle of B-1, it’s the best destination in town.

What's it like to live in Las Vegas? You'll find answers here! Living Las Vegas features news and views from nine local writers who call Southern Nevada home.