The market for off-the-shelf pharmaceutical products, including stomach-relief products and cough syrups, continues to expand. Individuals, when ill, have a tendency to look for a quick fix that will remedy their problems with little downtime and minimal effort on their behalf.  The pharmaceutical industry has capitalized on this trend with advertising campaigns emphasizing stress-induced symptoms and aimed at associating their products with fast relief.  Consumers have responded, purchasing these products in greater volume.

In addition to purchasing more each year, consumers continue to seek more choices in their form of medication.  Different forms (such as tablets, capsules, pills, and liquid), different flavors (i.e.-- regular, cool mint, honey lemon, cherry, etc.) and different sizes (travel size, family size, etc.) are just three examples of innovations in product availability that have contributed to increased consumer choice and enhanced demand.

Prices for these off-the-shelf pharmaceutical products are being sustained at unreasonably high levels.  Three large multinational corporations, with enormous advertising and promotional campaigns and distribution networks, have been able to set excessive price levels many times that of their production costs . The size of these companies allows their production costs to be kept low, since they are able to take advantage of opportunities such as vertical integration (in some cases they produce their own chemicals) and economies of scale (much of their work is automated and they receive substantial trade discounts).  

However, their size also makes overhead costs high.  Their expenses for sales and promotional campaigns, advertising, capital expenditures, research and development, and labor eat up much of their gross profit, requiring them to sustain extraordinarily high markups in order to maintain their profitability.

Value Drugs seeks to take advantage of a relatively new phenomenon in the industry -- the growing trends toward value production.  A group of companies has been emerging which are designed to compete with the three major pharmaceutical corporations.  

These companies have smaller research and development departments, much smaller advertising budgets, and are usually less than 50 employees -- keeping operating costs to a minimum.  These companies typically have smaller gross profit margins, since they charge up to 50% less than the brand names.  However, their low overhead has resulted in a consistently profitable record of growth.

Most importantly, these companies fill the consumer need for inexpensive products.  Value priced products contain the same ingredients as those from top selling, name brand products, but sell at lower costs to consumers due to smaller markups and an ability by smaller companies to keep costs to a minimum.  These products are valuable for all levels of consumers, but provide a special service to low-income and working class families whose budgets can be severely impacted by repeat purchases of overpriced brand name products.