Key Takeaways
Topics Covered
Most supplement certifications work the same way: the brand submits a sample, the sample passes, the logo goes on the bottle. The sample is usually pristine, because the brand chose it.
TESTED by SuppCo doesn't ask brands to send anything. SuppCo buys the product anonymously from the brand's own website, the same way you would, and sends it to an ISO 17025-accredited laboratory. The lab verifies that the key active ingredients match what the label claims, with a hard requirement: meet or exceed 95% of the labeled amount, consistently, or no certification. The results get published for anyone to read. And the whole process repeats every year.
We signed up for that. Here's why.
The Supplement Industry Has A Verification Problem
Dietary supplements don't require pre-market approval in the United States. There is no agency confirming that what's printed on a label matches what's inside the bottle before a product reaches shelves. The system largely runs on trust, and the data suggests that trust is frequently misplaced.
blished research on exactly this problem. When our ISO 17025-accredited laboratory analyzed 39 nicotinamide riboside products purchased from Amazon and direct-to-consumer sites, 87% failed to meet their label claims. More than a third contained virtually no NR at all.
The same gap runs through NMN, the other precursor riding the NAD+ trend—yet our testing found that 9 out of 10 NMN products don't meet label claims.
That gap matters more in a category growing as fast as NAD+. New brands arrive monthly. Claims escalate. And a person standing in front of two nearly identical labels has almost no way to tell which one was made by a research organization and which one was assembled to ride a trend. Independent, unbiased testing is one of the most reliable ways to discern quality.
What Suppco Found
Tru Niagen was one of 10 brands selected as an inaugural TESTED by SuppCo launch partner, and earned a 9.99/10 Brand TrustScore across more than 30 quality indicators, including cGMP certification, heavy metal testing, and public batch-specific certificates of analysis.
We'll be honest: we expected to pass. Every lot of Tru Niagen already goes through 19 combined internal and third-party tests for identity, potency, and purity before release, including independent verification through Alkemist Assured. Every bottle is traceable through our certificate of analysis platform. We’ve been testing this way for decades, because Niagen Bioscience built its reputation supplying reference-standard ingredients to researchers long before there was a consumer brand to protect.
What the certification adds is the part we can't do ourselves. We can show you our data. We can't be the independent party that checks it. SuppCo can, and now does, annually, on products pulled from the same inventory that ships to your door.
Good Company
One more thing worth saying: we're glad to see who else stepped up. Brands like Solgar, Solaray, Thorne, and fatty15 chose the same scrutiny, and that's good for everyone. Every brand that volunteers for anonymous, off-the-shelf testing gives you one more label you can trust without taking anyone's word for it, ours included. A certification only means something if we keep volunteering for it, and if the brands that can't pass stay visible by their absence.
The NAD+ category, and the supplement industry as a whole, gets more trustworthy when verification becomes the norm rather than the exception. We'd rather compete in that market. It’s a market where the interests, safety, and health of people like you come first, always.
You can explore the full TESTED by SuppCo program and published lab results at supp.co/tested, or see Tru Niagen's certification details on our TESTED page.