Mike Montemarano, Associate Editor 06.07.21
Supplement company NOW recently announced that it received ISO/IEC 17025:2017 accreditation from the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) for both of its in-house analytical and microbiological testing laboratories. The accreditation demonstrates that NOW meets technical and quality benchmarks as required by the certification.
Achieving ISO accreditation includes passing a comprehensive assessment and review of the lab’s quality management system and competence to perform specific tests. This accreditation isn’t typically something that in-house labs pursue, but rather something that contract labs will seek in order to show some measure of competency, NOW reports. NOW opted to add ISO accreditation to is existing range of third-party certifications given different regulatory environments throughout the world, and recent discussion of ISO accreditation for dietary supplement sellers on Amazon.
“NOW has spent a lot of time and resources over the last decade building up our in-house lab capabilities and expertise to ensure that the data coming out of our labs has integrity, which is crucial because we make regulatory and business decisions every da based on this data,” Aaron Secrist, executive vice president of Quality, R&D and Operations, NOW Health Group, said. “We have built our in-house labs into a very strong competitive advantage, not only because of the increased ability for us to test the incoming ingredients and finished products much faster than a contract lab ever could, but we are also able to validate our test methods against each of our thousand or so specific finished product matrices, something contract labs could never do for each company they service in an economical way.”
The accreditation NOW received includes: arsenic speciation in raw materials and finished products by HPLC-ICP-MS; determination of acid value by titration; determination of peroxide value by FoodLabFat; metal and mineral testing by ICP-MS (arsenic, cadmium, iodine, lead, and mercury); and multi-pesticide residue analysis by GC-MS/MS for 195 pesticides.
“We chose the scopes that we did because I have seen many labs pick the easiest and most basic test method and matrix in order to be able to say that they are an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited lab, even if the majority of the testing they do is outside of the scope of their accreditation,” Secrist said. “We wanted the accreditation to be meaningful, so we chose some of the most complex methods that we run, most of which have been developed in house, as well as a couple of simple ones.”
NOW reports that it will be adding more testing methods to its scope of accreditation in the future on an annual basis, aiming to have most if not all of the methods they run regularly within the scope of their accreditation.
The current accreditations, which can be viewed here, are valid until June 30, 2023.
Mike Montemarano has been the Associate Editor of Nutraceuticals World since February 2020. He can be reached at mmontemarano@rodmanmedia.com.
Achieving ISO accreditation includes passing a comprehensive assessment and review of the lab’s quality management system and competence to perform specific tests. This accreditation isn’t typically something that in-house labs pursue, but rather something that contract labs will seek in order to show some measure of competency, NOW reports. NOW opted to add ISO accreditation to is existing range of third-party certifications given different regulatory environments throughout the world, and recent discussion of ISO accreditation for dietary supplement sellers on Amazon.
“NOW has spent a lot of time and resources over the last decade building up our in-house lab capabilities and expertise to ensure that the data coming out of our labs has integrity, which is crucial because we make regulatory and business decisions every da based on this data,” Aaron Secrist, executive vice president of Quality, R&D and Operations, NOW Health Group, said. “We have built our in-house labs into a very strong competitive advantage, not only because of the increased ability for us to test the incoming ingredients and finished products much faster than a contract lab ever could, but we are also able to validate our test methods against each of our thousand or so specific finished product matrices, something contract labs could never do for each company they service in an economical way.”
The accreditation NOW received includes: arsenic speciation in raw materials and finished products by HPLC-ICP-MS; determination of acid value by titration; determination of peroxide value by FoodLabFat; metal and mineral testing by ICP-MS (arsenic, cadmium, iodine, lead, and mercury); and multi-pesticide residue analysis by GC-MS/MS for 195 pesticides.
“We chose the scopes that we did because I have seen many labs pick the easiest and most basic test method and matrix in order to be able to say that they are an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited lab, even if the majority of the testing they do is outside of the scope of their accreditation,” Secrist said. “We wanted the accreditation to be meaningful, so we chose some of the most complex methods that we run, most of which have been developed in house, as well as a couple of simple ones.”
NOW reports that it will be adding more testing methods to its scope of accreditation in the future on an annual basis, aiming to have most if not all of the methods they run regularly within the scope of their accreditation.
The current accreditations, which can be viewed here, are valid until June 30, 2023.
Mike Montemarano has been the Associate Editor of Nutraceuticals World since February 2020. He can be reached at mmontemarano@rodmanmedia.com.
