If you’ve driven southbound on I-15 through American Fork and looked at the buildings to your right, you’ve seen sign after sign of companies located not so far off the road. One of the larger signs on an expansive warehouse reads “XLEAR INC.” It’s an immediate mystery — both what it is and how to say it out loud.
Even though the company is celebrating a quarter century in business this year, Xlear President Shad Slaughter is used to managing that ambiguity.
“Sometimes there’s skepticism, and maybe where we’re located doesn’t help that. But based on our address, there are a lot of assumptions we’re multi-level marketing,” Slaughter says. “The products we make have decades of research and support from the medical community.”
Today, Xlear, Inc. — pronounced “clear” — is a leading manufacturer of xylitol products in the United States and has nearly 100 employees. In its earliest days, though, it had one employee: owner Nathan Jones. After his father, Dr. Lon Jones, discovered what xylitol could do by researching studies conducted in Finland, he formulated a nasal spray using the ingredient. He tapped his son to build the company, which promotes natural ways to clean the nose airway in a variety of ways, protecting against everything from allergies and asthma to ear and sinus infections.
The presentation that started a company
In the company’s infancy, Nathan had a small office that didn’t allow for many niceties. There was a futon with xylitol products shoved underneath it, and a desk and computer he used to broadcast xylitol facts. And when he wasn’t in the office, he was traveling, spending most of his time at medical conventions for nurse practitioners and physician assistants, telling doctors and dentists about xylitol research and the sugar substitute’s benefits to dental health.
“When you’re talking to a person who is educated in healing, you can say a lot more than what you’re allowed to say to end consumers,” Nathan says. “Because enough of them told their patients about it, we’re in business today.”
The evidence that xylitol works well for a variety of issues is substantial. One review published in the Journal of International Society of Preventive & Community Dentistry, for example, notes adding just five to 10 grams of xylitol products per day to an everyday routine — including lozenges, chewing gum and toothpaste — can significantly prevent cavities and tooth decay compared to products with no xylitol.
Over 20 years ago, Nathan was at another convention to introduce his company, Xlear, and talk about how xylitol promotes oral health. Dr. David Williams was in the audience. Dr. Williams liked what he heard so much that he returned home and promptly wrote eight pages about what Nathan had presented. Williams shared what he learned about Xlear’s products in a newsletter sent to 250,000 people, which was a pivotal event in the company’s growth.
“Because he was already familiar with xylitol and the way it worked, it made sense to him,” Nathan says. “I’ll be ever thankful to David Williams.”
Before Williams even sent his newsletter out, calls were starting to trickle in at Xlear, an early sign of what would follow. The first caller said he’d read the newsletter and wanted to buy products. The next day, three others made similar requests. A day later, four people
A full week went by and Williams phoned Nathan about what he expected was about to happen. Interest was growing — quickly — and that was a problem.
“All the employees at the publishing company for the newsletter had read about Xlear and placed orders, and that newsletter hadn’t even been sent yet,” Nathan says. “Our nasal spray was one of the first products nearly all of their staff had unanimously bought … and now they were about to send it out to a quarter of a million people.”
The issue: If demand was already that strong, people would have a hard time getting through to place their orders. To combat that, Nathan took immediate action. With just 10 days left to go before the newsletter was to be sent to a lot of mailboxes, he withdrew cash from his retirement fund, borrowed additional funds from his brother, bought and installed more phones inside a storage unit, and ordered 100,000 additional bottles of nasal spray.
“A day later, my phone started ringing. Then again that night. Then it was ringing all day,” Nathan says. He eventually steered incoming calls to a call center of eight to manage the influx.
With large nationwide customers now regularly ordering everything from Xlear’s nasal spray to sugar-free cough drops from the Utah-based manufacturer, the demand for xylitol products has continued to grow steadily over time. While exact sales numbers weren’t shared, Slaughter says the company dispatches an average of 15-18 semitrucks of its products out from its 60,000-square-foot facility every week.
Sometimes that means demand outweighs how fast they’re able to produce, Slaughter says.
“Our cough drops got way more attention than we were expecting. We thought we were going to scale up into it,” Slaughter says. “Our first real customer to place an order was CVS for 2,000 of their stores. Following right after them was Sprouts. Then Natural Grocers. Now Walgreens wants them, but we can’t supply them quite yet. I’m figuring that out.”
In search of better health
In the late 90s, Nate’s father was a retired osteopathic physician based in Plainview, Texas, who focused primarily on children’s ear infections. His father’s then-girlfriend and future wife, Jerry Bozeman, had a granddaughter suffering from chronic ear infections. In his search for a solution, he repeatedly came across dental studies stating that natural sugar alcohol reduces cavities. In one study, kids who used xylitol in the test group experienced approximately 42 percent fewer ear and upper respiratory infections. In 1998, the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy showed why that was the case: xylitol blocked nasal pathogens (or viruses) from adhering to the tissue.
Finnish researchers showed that kids who chewed a xylitol gum to prevent tooth decay had 40 percent fewer ear infections, Lon says. The problem was that many small children suffering from ear infections hadn’t mastered the mechanics of chewing gum. There had to be an alternative way to provide the same kind of results or benefits.
“The authors of that finished study said [xylitol] worked on bacteria, and bacteria causing ear infections live in the back of the nose, so I put it [in a nasal spray],” Lon says. “That helped 10 kids in my practice who had the same problem as our granddaughter. I watched them for a year after they started using Xlear, and the number of infections dropped by 95 percent.”
Shortly after the nasal spray was patented, Xlear was built. Lon named the company, noting that the “X” in its name is for xylitol and its products serve to clear the nose.
Honesty breeds authenticity
Not everyone has agreed with how Nathan’s company promoted its products, including the federal government. When the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit in 2021, the organization contended that Xlear was deceptively marketing its products. It took four years for the team to prove they had not shared anything they couldn’t back up with multiple studies. Charges were abruptly dropped earlier this year. Cleared of wrongdoing, Nathan sees those results as a chance for his company to be even bolder in sharing what their xylitol-based products have been proven to do.
“Because of the way we won that lawsuit, we’re making a lot stronger claims for our products than we have in the past,” Nathan says, which includes a shield on its packaging that states it blocks bacteria and viruses. The company wants to continue to offer effective health and hygiene solutions in the simplest way possible, making it easier for consumers to follow.
“The trick is to make it simple. If a health protocol or routine is hard to follow, you’re going to get very little compliance with it. Making it as simple as, ‘Hey, you want good breath after you eat a meal, pop in the right kind of gum,’” Slaughter says. “Candidly, there are other gums that do what our gum does. We’d like you to use ours, but that little act of chewing xylitol gum versus another type of gum is going to give you the benefits of better breath. It’s going to make your mouth feel clean, and it’s actually going to help versus just masking.”
If there’s a message Nathan would like more people to understand, it’s that a person’s mouth and nose are the gateway bionome — a community of microorganisms including fungi, bacteria and viruses. Keeping that area clean and moist is integral to keeping bacteria out and maintaining overall health, which is precisely what his products do.
“[Considering the] thousands of studies published in medical literature [stating] that your oral microbiome is important to your health, the way dentistry treats tooth decay is absurd. It’s absurd beyond belief. What have they told you in your life, other than fluoride, fluoride, fluoride?” Nathan says. “Fluoride works to make your enamel stronger, but tooth decay is caused by a bacterial infection, which can create acid and cause inflammation.”
“Why not treat the bacterial infection instead of just making your enamel more resistant to the acid created by the infection? Dentists know how to treat bacterial infection, but they don’t. It makes the argument for fluoride a flimsy one. It’s an example of how our healthcare system treats the symptom and not the cause.”
As Xlear’s family of products continues to grow, so does the public’s understanding of what it is they’re trying to accomplish. It’s proof that better hygiene can make all the difference in someone’s health.