Van Andel is the former chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Van Andel was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan on June 3, 1924 to James and Petronilla (Van der Woude) Van Andel.
Van Andels strictly adhered to Reformed teachings. Van Andel recalled in his memoir that he could not play with the neighborhood kids on Sundays because he spent the entire day dressed for church.
He attended Calvin College and Pratt Business School in Kansas, and later served as a United States Army Air Force officer from 1942 to 1945.
His enterprising spirit started when at the age fifteen, Van Andel began charging classmates twenty-five cents for rides to school in his Model-A Ford.
Van Andel and DeVos began their friendship in 1940. On August 29, 1949, Van Andel’s second cousin, Neil Maaskant brought them into Nutrilite food supplements as "distributors" in a multilevel marketing system in which they earned profits selling products and earned bonuses recruiting new distributors.
Nutrilite was founded in the late 1930s by a physician named Carl Rehnborg specializing in vitamins and nutritional supplements. By the end of the 1950s, DeVos and Van Andel had made names for themselves as successful Nutrilite distributors.
Nutrilite became unstable in the late 1950s, Van Andel and DeVos acted quickly to protect their distribution system and in early 1958 established the American Way Association (later Amway Distributors Association) to provide security and cohesion to their distributors.
The company was started with the idea of providing entrepreneurial opportunity for anyone who wanted to own and run a business.
Jay Van Andel – founder of Amway
