Quality Control & Certifications

Certificates are usually read as a single badge of quality, and they are not. GMP certifies the facility and the process — the building, the equipment, the documentation and the staff training — not any individual product. ISO 22000 certifies a food safety management system, which covers hazard analysis and traceability but says nothing about potency. HACCP is the hazard analysis method inside that system. ISO 9001 is quality management and is about consistency, not safety. NSF is different again: it can certify a facility or test a specific product against its label claim. A factory can hold GMP and still ship an under-potent batch if the finished-product testing is weak, which is why we show both the certificates and the release testing that happens per lot.

Two certificates cause the most confusion. FDA registration is not an approval: it means the facility has registered with the FDA and is subject to inspection, and no US authority has reviewed the formula. Halal certification is product- and line-specific — a plant can be Halal-certified for capsules and not for a gummy line that shares equipment with gelatin. If your market requires Halal, ask which lines and which products are in scope, not whether the company 'is Halal'.

Ask for the full PDF, not a cropped image of the front page, and check four things. First, the legal entity named on the certificate must match the entity on your contract and invoice — a trading company quoting with a factory's certificate is the most common problem in this industry. Second, check the scope wording: a certificate covering 'hard capsules' does not cover gummies or softgels. Third, check the expiry date and the surveillance audit date, because a certificate can be suspended between audits. Fourth, verify the certificate number directly with the issuer — Intertek, SGS, CQC and NSF all publish verification portals, and it takes two minutes.

For the US market, the FDA registration number can be checked in the FDA's own database, and the registered name should match the manufacturer, not the brand. For the EU, the relevant question is not a certificate at all but whether the ingredients are permitted in food supplements and whether any novel food authorisation applies. We send the certificate pack, the CoA template and the ingredient documentation together, so a buyer can verify the whole chain rather than one document.

The documents a shipment needs depend on the destination, and a certificate that satisfies one market may be irrelevant in another. US-bound supplements need an FDA-registered facility, compliance with FSMA preventive controls, and a Supplement Facts panel in the correct format. The EU and UK need compliance with the Food Supplements Directive or its UK equivalent, permitted ingredient lists, and allergen labelling under FIC. The Gulf states usually ask for a health certificate, a Halal certificate and Arabic labelling, and Saudi Arabia additionally requires SFDA registration for some categories. Japan and Korea have their own notification systems and label formats.

We prepare the export document set per destination — certificate of origin, health certificate, CoA, MSDS where relevant, and the label artwork checked against that market's rules — because the certificate alone does not clear customs. If you are launching in several markets from one production run, tell us before artwork is approved: the label, the ingredient list and sometimes the formula itself need to differ, and reprinting after the fact costs more than planning for it.