@sns8778
whatever happened to TTA? it used to be popular then just suddenly disappeared?
From Steve previously:
“Ha. This is awkward for me to explain the TTA situation because this thread started asking specifically about TTA-500 and then other companies products got mentioned in the thread. I have a policy of never saying anything negative about anyone else's products but it makes it really hard to answer the question without coming off like I may be putting anyone else's product(s) down. So, for the sake of this reply lets pretend no one else's products got mentioned in the thread bc my intention is only to answer the question.
TTA is and always has been a raw material that was hard to source because there were only a couple of factories that made quality TTA raw materials. Note that I didn't say just say raw materials, I said quality raw materials. There were a lot of suppliers that offered it on their product lists, but there were only a couple places that actually made it. For the same reason, the price was extremely volatile. I've seen the price per kg. go up and down to the degree that it would cost us more to make it at times than we were selling it for at others. That was one of the reasons that most companies stopped making it long ago and also why I think some looked to blame it possibly being 'banned' bc it created a good sales run to help them sell out of inventory. If there were truly ever any mention of it being 'banned' we never heard anything about it and neither did the industry attorney we consulted on it back at the time that rumor was going around. We couldn't just change our price dramatically up and down all the time because of that so we always would go through periods of being out of stock because quality raw materials weren't available at a good price. I suppose some companies would have just permanently increased their prices and took advantage of the extra margins when the prices came down but thats not us.
Note: What I'm saying about the quality is a big reason over the years that some companies and bulk suppliers would post COA's from the supplier company (worthless because of course they weren't going to tell the truth if their product didn't contain a high enough purity level) or even independent results that tested for the PRESENCE of TTA but not the percentage of purity.
Back to present day. The main factory that made TTA was closed down by the Chinese government about a year ago for pollution laws because China is really cracking down on environmental pollution. This had nothing to do with TTA itself but it eliminated the only high quality manufacturer of TTA that I'm aware of as the other one had closed down the year prior. Since then, we have tested several suppliers TTA materials and haven't found any that tested above 92% purity.
A lot of companies may would have taken the approach of 'well, if that's the best we can get....' but that's not the way we do things.
TTA is a very difficult ingredient for manufacturing facilities to produce. We have been in consistent contact with several facilities that are trying to produce TTA to a purity level that is high enough to be acceptable for us. One of the places we are working with is supposed to be doing a run in March if their test run turns out good.
So basically, TTA-500 is not discontinued but we have not been able to find quality raw materials that were up to our standards so its been out of stock for a long time.
Sorry for writing you guys a book but I wanted to give a thorough explanation.”