Testing & Quality.

Every ingredient arrives with its supplier’s certificate of analysis, or COA: the supplier’s test results for that specific lot. The first thing a COA confirms is identity, that the material is the species, form, and grade on the order.

Suppliers confirm identity with methods suited to the ingredient, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), or comparison to reference samples.

Purity results show what the supplier screened that lot for. For botanical ingredients, common screens include heavy metals, microbial contamination, residual solvents, and pesticide residues, each with an acceptance limit.

For standardized extracts, the COA reports how much of the marker compound the lot contains. That is what stands behind a ratio like 20:1 or a standard like 95% curcumin on a label.

Some certificates come printed with the shipment. Others we download from the supplier. Either way, we keep each one on file with the ingredient it belongs to.

CAROL, our in-house lot tracking system, attaches each certificate of analysis to its lot when the ingredient comes in, so the paperwork travels with the material. CAROL is in Beta.

The supplement industry has a long, well-documented record of labels that do not match what is in the package. Working from documented ingredients, with a certificate of analysis on file for every one, is how we start from what is actually there.