Amazon has begun requiring supplement marketers to provide comprehensive testing results and other documentation in order to be able to sell products on its site.
The new requirements have been rolling out for the last few weeks.
Sellers now must provide documentation to prove the following:
- The product must meet the label claims
- The product MUST be manufactured by GMP certified manufacture
- Only lawful and safe ingredients are in the formula
- The active ingredients are safe for consumption
- Seller must provide current, up to date COA’s
This all started when supplement manufacturer NOW bought random products from Amazon and tested them. https://www.nowfoods.com/now/nowledge/now-testing-identifies-significant-quality-failings-coq10-and-same-supplements
“Today, especially, more people are buying their supplements online, which is why we are making this information public,” said Dan Richard, NOW’s vice president of global Sales and marketing, in a press release. “NOW takes defrauding consumers personally and it is in the best interest of the entire dietary supplements to identify and work to purge such bad actors to protect consumers.”
NOW tested ten CoQ10 products and ten SAMe products using High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) in its labs using validated methods. Of the CoQ10 products, six of the ten brands contained less than 20% of the labeled potency, two of which had no detectable CoQ10 at all (See Figure 1).
Analytical testing of the SAMe products also showed potencies well below the labeled claims. Because SAMe is typically unstable in heat and moisture, requiring an enteric coating in tablets to stabilize, or the use of the form S-Adenosyl-L-Methionine from disulfate tosylate salt, NOW speculates that the products were either low potency or in unstable form (See Figure 2).
“As a business partner of Amazon, we did report this information to them and hope they will take action,” said Richard. “Additionally, NOW has provided this information to other supplement brands, FDA, and to trade associations.”
This is a very good thing for legitimate Amazon sellers that have their supplements manufactured at a reputable manufacturer. It should clear some of the sellers that are not offering accurate information about their products.
