Our Mission
At New Life International, we never lose sight of who our real ‘consumers’ are: your aquarium dwelling companions. We’re focused on doing what’s best for them, not best for our marketing pitch or our bottom line. In fact, we believe creating extraordinary benefit for your aquarium is why we exist, and in doing so, the bottom line will take care of itself. Profit follows Product.
We’ve been proven right. Spectrum has grown through great word-of-mouth on it’s quality and effectiveness — only possible by putting out an extraordinary, no-compromise product. We do this by putting more of each jar’s sale price into ingredients. It’s easy to say you believe in quality — but harder to hold to that commitment. A product is a result of a thousand small decisions testing that commitment. It’s the sum of all these small choices… choosing the no-compromise path every time, that results in something extraordinary. We enjoy the aquarium hobby, and care about aquarium dwellers and their health. That’s our bottom line.
Words need to be backed-up by action. That’s why we don’t say we’re the best, we simply offer the Spectrum Guarantee. This philosophy and mission has served us well at New Life International. And it has served our aquarium users well. We plan to continue this approach into the future, because the day we settle for anything less than excellence is the day we disappear.
Our Story…
New Life Spectrum fish food was born from the attempt to answer a simple (yet surprisingly difficult to answer) question: why were so many fish difficult to maintain in home aquariums? This question came into focus in 1994 while Pablo Tepoot and Ian Tepoot were working on their third aquarium publication: The Marine Aquarium Companion. In that book, marine fish were given ratings on ease of care in captivity — and a worrying number were listed as difficult. This rating was a composite of many factors. In general, in the aquarium hobby, water quality and chemistry had been receiving a lot of attention and improvements over the years. But what about nutrition? Fish food hadn’t seemed to have advanced at the same pace in the last 20 years, and not much emphasis had been placed on it — despite it’s central contribution to health for every organism.
As owner of New Life Exotic fish, Pablo had confronted the issue of the color of Cichlids he sold fading over time as they were kept indoors and received inferior nutrition outside his facility. As a marine aquarium hobbyist, his fish likewise suffered color fading. He also faced issues of Surgeonfish getting Lateral Line Disease and Fin Erosion, and Angels coming down with Hole in the Head disease — all of which are nutrition related disorders. Working on the book brought these simmering questions to the forefront. Thus, Pablo decided to see if we could formulate a food that would increase vitality, color and address these common nutrition-related problems.
The year after the publication of Marine Aquarium Companion, the first two formulas of New Life Spectrum — NLS Freshwater and NLS Marine — were born and hit store shelves.
New Life Exotic Fish was founded in 1976 in Homestead, Florida. The company focused (and still does) on the breeding and wholesale distribution of African Cichlids; Malawi Cichlids in particular. New Life Exotic Fish has won numerous breeder awards for it’s high quality stock that were the result of the same commitment to quality that you see in Spectrum fish food today.
In 1992, New Life International was founded to publish aquarium books by Pablo Tepoot and Ian Tepoot. New Life Exotic Fish became a subsidiary of this new venture. In 1994 we began formulating New Life Spectrum fish food.
Since then, New Life Spectrum has become the main focus of the company, although we still have divisions selling tropical fish and books. (see Other Products). Today, Spectrum has formulas for almost every variety of aquarium fish, coral and invertebrate with over 100 individual products sold throughout North America, South America, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East.
