Former Teacher Creates Collagen Chew to Help Her Mom and Launches a Business

While visiting her 75-year-old mother in 2017,  Suzanna Kamphuis learned her mother had bulging discs in her back, several micro fractures in her spine, pain in her knees and hips, and was losing teeth. Kamphuis did more than worry. She began researching and found studies involving collagen supplementation and bone loss.

“A study showed scans of women who took collagen for six months had improvement in their bone scans,” Kamphuis says.

She found some collagen products on the market but thought she could make a better one and began experimenting in her kitchen. She made collagen chews. Her mom enjoyed the taste of them and said she would be willing to take them daily.

So Kamphuis, a former elementary school teacher, created TotumVos Collagen Chews. “I put together a product I wanted her to take,” she says, adding she buys collagen in powder form and incorporates it into her chews and adds vitamin C to them. “It’s most helpful for older people who have collagen loss.”

Kamphuis says her mother has been taking the collagen chews for more than five years and “her bone scans no longer show her being osteoporotic.”

Seeing how the product was helping her mother, Kamphuis decided to turn her chews into a business and launched TotumVos in late 2018 in Keene. “I started to realize there might be other people interested in a product like this,” she says.

She describes the texture of the chew as softer than a Tootsie Roll but emphasizes they do not have any sugar and adds the chews are in natural cellophane wrappers. “People can eat it straight out of the package,” she says, adding that some prefer to refrigerate it. Kamphuis recommends customers take one chew per day. “We designed it for joint pain and osteoporosis. It also helps with healing the intestinal lining,” she says.

Most of TotumVos’s revenue is generated from online sales, but it has some wholesale accounts, including the Brattleboro Food Co-op in Vermont and the Monadnock Food Co-op in Keene.

Kamphuis says the business is profitable and experiencing year-over year growth primarily through word of mouth. It is a true family affair with her husband and four children, ranging in age from 13 to 23, helping her out at a local commercial kitchen.

“Our passion is helping people to age better,” Kamphuis says. For more information, visit getchews.com.