Anchors Away

How a Creative Company Exploded Sales by Inventing a New-Style Dental Anchor

Story and photos by C. H. Bush, Editor

Zest Anchors, Inc. operates 28 Citizen screw machines, including 19 C16s 2 L20s, an L3, an L5 and 5 B12s. All are equipped with subspindles and LNS bar feeders. Shown here are Javier Martinez, setup, Operations manager, Mike Lyons looks on as Melissa Dixon, machinist assistant, checks a part using one of the microscopes located near the machines in the shop.

“Absolutely,” says Paul Zuest, president of Escondido, CA’s Zest Anchors, Inc. “I know because at Zest we’ve had it both ways. First we built a pretty good anchor system for dentures, and we were modestly successful. But then we invented and patented a completely new and better way to anchor overdentures, and we’ve almost been overwhelmed by the demand for our products from all over the world. Since the new system’s introduction in 1991 our sales have increased forty percent a year.”

Mousetrap No. 1 — Dental Anchors

Years ago, Paul Zuest’s father, Max, founder of Zest Anchors, ran a very successful dental lab with 100 employees. It was one of the largest dental laboratories on the west coast, building and repairing dentures for hundreds of dentists in the San Diego area.

“It was a full service lab, producing all the various kinds of dentures,” Zuest says. “Back then they were importing all the attachments for overdentures from Switzerland and other places in Europe, because there were no sources here at that time. For those who don’t know the difference,

regular dentures are the kind you use adhesive to hold in. Overdentures use some kind of attachment that is connected to the denture and snaps in to a metal retainer anchored in the patients roots or implants.”

VP Scott Mullaly, left, Zest president Paul Zuest, center, and Mike Lyons, operations manager check out a new packaging machine in their equipment line up.

Max Zuest didn’t like having to import the attachments, however, so he decided to do something about it.

“My dad was an inventor,” Zuest says. “So, he designed and patented the Zest Anchor attachment. This was before people had learned to do dental implants. In 1972, the way the anchor system worked, they would cement a stainless steel anchor into the root. Then they attached a nylon male to the denture itself and that would snap in to the anchor. It made a strong anchor for dentures and eliminated the need for a mouth full of adhesive. Dad’s original anchors were very popular and the company did well.”

In 1977 Max Zuest sold his dental lab and started Zest Anchors, Inc. to manufacture his products.

“Dad bought a Tornos CAM Swiss Turning machine to produce the parts on,” Zuest says. “Back then we had a large dental distributor that was selling our products directly to dentists. That was the same year I graduated from college, so, instead of going to dental school, I decided to join Dad at the company. I’ve never once been sorry about that.”

Mousetrap No. 2 — New and Improved Anchor

Zuest says things moved along very nicely for the company through the 70’s and 80’s, manufacturing the anchor components and selling through the sales company.

“In 1994 we came out with a new, patented anchor system we called the ZAAG,” Zuest says. “By then dentists were starting to implant standalone teeth directly into the jaw bone. Our new ZAAG was a threaded titanium connection that would screw into the dental implant. This expanded our market because our normal root anchors and the new implanted anchors still had the same kind of socket. We didn’t have to change the male attachments at all.”

In 1994 Max Zuest built a new 19000 sq ft facility in Escondido, CA.

“We rented out most of the building,” Zuest recalls. “We only used a small part of it in the front. Over the years we have slowly occupied the whole building and have moved into a second facility nearby.”

10x models showing parts of the anchor system. Upper right is a Locator abutment. Upper left is an overdenture. Lower right is cap that goes into an acrylic overdenture. Bottom left is a model showing how implants are placed in the patients jaw bone. Zest produces both the abutment and the cap.

The Best Mousetrap—The Locator

Denture users apparently have a bad habit of chomping down hard on on their teeth before they have the dentures properly aligned. The result is costly: broken teeth, broken anchors and other problems.

“Scott Mullaly, our vice-president who has been with Zest twenty-two years, and I got together and came up with a new system to solve the problem of seating the dentures,” Zuest says. “We received two patents covering the system in the year 2000.”

“We called the new system the Locator,” says Mullaly. “It’s basically a self-aligning attachment for dentures. With the locator the denture will slide into place without having to first be perfectly positioned. In dentistry it’s called the guide-plane principal. We couldn’t change the patient's’ habits, so we designed a system that they didn’t need to.”

“Our new system made it so wonderful for patient's and doctors, that people keep asking, ‘Why didn’t you come up with this idea 20 years ago.’ I always answer, ‘Well, things come when they’re ready.’

Explosive GrowthZest’s new anchor hit the market in 2001, and since then the company’s growth has been an explosive 40% a year.

“We knew we finally had a better mousetrap,” Mullaly says. “The Locator solved the alignment problem and once dentists discover it, they love it.”

The new product brought about a lot of changes at Zest, including the need for machines and people to produce the products.

“For one thing, our original sales company decided to copy our product for themselves once the patent ran out, but we don’t care,” Zuest says. “That just pushed us into our own sales effort. Now we sell direct to 22,000 dentists,” says Zuest. “We have a customer service department with five people on the phone constantly taking orders. We are selling worldwide in thirty countries through distributors and by partnering with dental implant manufacturers. Their customers want our Locators, so we use their specs to make our anchors fit their implants. We don’t have to change our nylon and denture attachment, except for the length to allow for people’s bite differences.”

Sandra Hernandez, QC inspector, uses a Scienscope Seabreeze Vision system to check parts for conformance to specifications. Microscopes on the shop floor are used by Citizen operators to do batch checks on completed parts.

No Production Problems

Altogether, with all the variations required by their implant manufacturing customers and dentists needing to fit their patients’ bites, Zest produces and inventories thousands of parts.

“In spite of the number of parts we produce, we really haven’t had any major problems in production,” Mullaly says. “We’ve been a Citizen screw machine shop almost from the beginning. We have 28 Citizens right now and we keeping adding more as our production needs increase. We have 45 employees working two twelve-hour shifts five days a week. Our biggest problem is finding the employees we need to run the Citizens. The Citizens are very reliable and perfect for what we do.”

Zest uses the Citizen sub spindles either for back work or for collection of the parts after manufacturing.

“We like these machines because they are easy to learn to operate,” adds Mullaly. “With the bar feed, because our parts are small, we frequently get 8-12 hour runs. That leaves our operators free to do QC using microscopes located near their machines.”

“We buy our Citizens from Methods Machine Tools,” Zuest adds. “We don’t need much service, but when we do, they show up fast, any time of the day and often at night. We’re very pleased with the Citizens and expect to continue using them until someone builds a better one.”

The Next Mousetrap

Where does Zest Anchors go from here?

“Well, we’re not sitting around waiting for someone to build a better system than ours,” Zuest says. “So we’ve hired engineers to do research on using our locator system for other things, like maxillo-facial applications. We believe the locator has a real future in helping other types of patients have better lives. Better mousetraps ought to help people. If they do, we’re all rewarded.”