News
LYSI celebrates 70 years
26.05.2008
LYSI Ltd. was established in 1938 by Tryggvi Olafsson and his brother Thordur, in response to a general need for vitamins A and D.
The Great Depression was coming to an end and ahead was World War II. The difficulties during the Depression caused a number of new companies to be established in Iceland. In the case of LYSI it was a sudden drop of vitamins A and D in Norwegian cod liver oil that forced a US company to seek alternate supplies. It got in touch with Olafsson by telegram and ended up with placing a sizable order. The snag was that Olafsson did not have a factory, but he had a building site and in the end he went to Norway to select and order machinery. The construction of the factory was completed by the end of that year and LYSI was formally established on 10 January 1938.
The company has since come far measured in years, know how and experience, and the new processing plant bears little resemblance to the first one. Inaugurated in 2005, it is uniquely equipped for the production of marine lipids, utilizing state-of-the-art technology at all stages of processing. In 2007 the factory was approved by the Icelandic Medicines Control Agency (IMCA) to be fully GMP (API) licensed. The company’s sales and marketing efforts over past decades received recognition in 2007 when LYSI won the President of Iceland’s Export Achievement Award.