National Safety Associates

National Safety Associates (NSA) is a privately owned multi-level marketing company based in Collierville, Tennessee, best known for selling the nutritional supplement Juice Plus.

The company was founded in 1970 by Jay Martin, a schoolteacher-turned-entrepreneur, who continues as CEO as of 2012. NSA initially sold home fire-protection equipment via door-to-door salespeople. In the late 1970s, they expanded into water filtration products. In 1986, they began using multi-level marketing, then expanding their product line to air filters and educational games for pre-schoolers. In 1993, they began selling the nutritional supplement Juice Plus, manufactured by Natural Alternatives International in San Marcos, California.

NSA had some legal troubles in 1993, as the United States Attorney General's office followed up on complaints that the company was deceptively requiring new distributors to make large upfront purchases of air and water filters. Each of the 32,000 distributors in Florida purchased an average of $7,000 worth of water filters, and many of these distributors were unable to sell all of them. The company's business in the United States decreased that year, requiring the layoff of dozens of employees.

Former professional athlete O. J. Simpson signed a multi-year six-figure contract with NSA in January 1994 and became an official celebrity endorser of Juice Plus. Simpson, who was tried and later acquitted for the June 12, 1994, murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman, was videotaped in March 1994 telling 8,000 Juice Plus distributors at a NSA convention in Dallas, Texas, that the product had cured his arthritis, improved his golf game, and freed him from using anti-arthritic drugs. However, during his criminal trial in 1995 and civil trial in 1997, and in his 2007 book If I Did It, Simpson claimed that he was too incapacitated by arthritis to have committed the murders and that he had continued to take a variety of potent anti-inflammatory drugs, including sulfasalazine and ibuprofen. After controversy surrounding Simpson erupted, NSA cancelled his endorsement contract and stopped using the Simpson videotape to promote Juice Plus.

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