Who makes your supplements?

Bonnie - One of our primary tenets has always been to choose dietary supplement manufacturers who are in control of their products from the raw material stage to the finished product. As you will learn below, this is the exception, not the rule when it comes to most dietary supplements. In some cases, there are formulas that we have used used for decades that are not manufactured in-house. In these instances, we track and investigate each party involved in process of making the formula so we can make sure it meets our standards of quality.

While we all have our favorite brands of dietary supplements, the brands may not be as distinct as we think from a manufacturing perspective. One of the most common manufacturing methods is for a finished product company to contract the manufacturing to another entity. This practice is referred to as contract manufacturing or outsourced manufacturing. Contract manufacturers have been part of the dietary supplement industry from its inception, when most finished product companies were retailers and not manufacturers.

While there are certainly excellent examples of vertically integrated companies that manufacture their own consistently high-quality, unique, and reliable products, it is rare to find a finished product company with a sizable breadth of products that manufactures all its own products. Most companies outsource the manufacturing of some of their products, and some companies outsource all their products.

Why do companies outsource manufacturing?
Manufacturing dietary supplements has become increasingly complex with the requirements of the dietary supplement current good manufacturing processes (cGMPs). However, the main reason is the cost of manufacturing is prohibitive. Manufacturing requires significant investments into infrastructure, quality and regulatory compliance, and technology. For smaller companies, these capital and operating costs may far outweigh the benefits derived from any savings brought by bringing manufacturing in-house.

Challenges of Outsourcing
The use of contract manufacturers presents some challenges. The finished product company bears ultimate responsibility for the quality of the products that bear their label. This means that the finished product company must trust their contract manufacturers. With the globalization of the ingredient supply, outsourcing even by contract manufacturers, and the variability in cGMP compliance by contract manufacturers, can be challenging to assess.

Conclusion
The bottom line is that patients have to trust that their practitioners are performing their due diligence. The longer a product has been offered by a practitioner, the longer the track record. There is a good reason why at our office, we introduce very few new products. And if we do, they have been vetted them for months, if not years, for efficacy and quality. Of course, you can always do a little homework yourself, which we always encourage.