Two supplement certification marks look like siblings. They come from the same company, they use the same laboratory, and they screen for the same list of substances banned in sport. One of them tests every batch of a product before it is released to market, in every flavour. The other tests at least one lot a month, picked at random and bought off a shop shelf.
Nothing on the package tells you which one you are holding.
That is not a scandal. Both programmes describe themselves accurately on their own websites, for anyone who goes looking. It illustrates what is wrong with third-party seals. The problem is not that they mean nothing. It is that they mean very different things, and the differences are published somewhere you have almost certainly never looked.
Another article in this library covers the baseline point that no third-party mark is a government approval. This one is about the institutions behind the marks: who runs each programme, what it checks, how often it checks, who pays for it, and which of them has been accredited by anyone at all.
The one word that separates a certification scheme from a logo
Accreditation is the boring word that does the work here. It means an outside body has assessed the certifier itself, not the product.
There are two different accreditations in this field and they are easy to confuse. ISO/IEC 17025 applies to testing laboratories. It says an independent assessor has looked at how a lab runs its tests and found the methods sound. ISO/IEC 17065 applies to bodies that certify products. It covers the whole apparatus: the criteria, the decision to grant a certificate, the surveillance that follows, and what happens when a certified product fails.
A laboratory can hold 17025 and produce perfectly valid numbers for a certification scheme that has no accredited decision-making behind it. The lab is vouched for. The judgement is not.
NSF already holds that credential. In an announcement dated 26 July 2024, NSF said the ANSI National Accreditation Board had approved its Shanghai office as a key location for the NSF/ANSI 173 and NSF/ANSI 455 certification programmes, extending the geographic scope of NSF’s existing ISO/IEC 17065:2012 accreditation so that companies across China and the Asia Pacific region can be certified by the China team. The news in that announcement is the site, not the standard. The accreditation was already in place, and the page links to the certificate.
That appears to be the only ISO/IEC 17065 accreditation held by any supplement certifier. A review of the published material for USP, LGC, BSCG, ConsumerLab and UL turned up no equivalent. LGC states that its laboratory holds ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, assessed by UKAS and A2LA. BSCG’s own process page does not mention laboratory accreditation at all, although the company claims it in a comparison chart it produces.
One honest caveat. This is an absence of found evidence, not proof of absence. A public accreditation directory would settle it and was not reachable for this article. What can be said is that only one of these organizations advertises the credential that distinguishes a conformity assessment scheme from a trademark.
Who runs each mark, and what each one says it covers
NSF international
NSF is a private not-for-profit. It is the only operator in this set whose supplement work rests on a published consensus standard, NSF/ANSI 173, developed through the American National Standards Institute process. The American National Standards Institute lists the current edition as NSF/ANSI 173:2024. The Department of Defense’s supplement safety service still names the 2021 edition on its consumer page, which is one small sign of how quickly this material goes stale.
The standard provides test methods and criteria for confirming that a product contains the ingredients claimed on the label and does not contain specified undeclared contaminants, and it sets criteria for determining that good manufacturing practices were followed. It says nothing about whether a product works.
It also contains a sentence that almost no coverage of certification quotes. During committee balloting, members raised a concern that a product could be certified to the standard even if it did not meet regulatory requirements. Language was added in response. Manufacturers must exercise due diligence on regulatory compliance, the standard says, “but compliance with this Standard in itself does not imply that all regulatory requirements have been met.”
NSF runs a separate sport programme. It tests for 290 stimulants, narcotics, steroids, diuretics, beta-2-agonists, masking agents and other substances, and describes certification as helping to minimize the risk that a product contains banned substances, not eliminate it. Facilities are audited annually or every two years depending on grade. NSF also maintains a facility registration mark, which a 2016 review in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics described as intended for promotional materials rather than packaging. A registration badge on a bottle is not a product certification.
U.S. pharmacopeia
USP is a private non-profit standards body whose drug monographs carry legal weight in US law. Its supplement mark is voluntary and separate from that work.
USP says the mark indicates a product contains the ingredients listed on the label in the declared potency and amounts, does not contain harmful levels of specified contaminants, will break down and release into the body within a specified time, and has been made according to FDA current good manufacturing practices. A USP fact sheet describes six stages, beginning with a regulatory status screen and a site audit, and says the programme continues to monitor verified products annually through facility audits and annual testing of products randomly sampled at retail stores.
Read the second claim again. Harmful levels of specified contaminants. The specification is the programme’s, and the programme does not publish a fee or a full criteria document on the consumer-facing page.
LGC
LGC is a private UK testing company. It runs the two sibling marks described at the top of this article. Its own page states the difference directly: one programme means every batch or lot of a product is tested before release, including every flavour or variation, while the other tests at least one lot at random every month, purchased by the laboratory team from retail outlets. Both screen for more than 285 substances prohibited in sport.
LGC is also unusually frank about the limit of the whole exercise. Its frequently asked questions page states that no supplement testing programme can test for every substance that would count as prohibited in sport.
Banned substances control group
BSCG is a small private US company founded by Don Catlin, who established the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, along with Oliver Catlin and Ryan Connolly. Its page states that every finished product lot is tested against a menu of more than 450 drugs, roughly 400 from the World Anti-Doping Agency prohibited list plus more than 50 prescription, over-the-counter and illicit substances. An initial good manufacturing practice audit is required and quality specifications are verified annually.
ConsumerLab
ConsumerLab is a privately held for-profit company, and it is the one organization here doing two jobs at once. Its own About page says revenues come primarily from online membership fees, and also from Quality Certification Program fees and authorized use of its seal. Manufacturers whose products pass may purchase a licence to use the seal on their labels. The same company publishes independent reviews of products it buys at retail and sells a certification to manufacturers.
ConsumerLab states that it is not affiliated with manufacturers of health and nutrition products and does not accept advertising for products it reviews. It also publishes its review results to members only. It is the one programme in this set whose findings the public cannot read.
Who pays, how often, and whether you can check
Every mark described above is paid for by the company whose product is being judged. None of them publishes a price. NSF’s sport programme invites manufacturers to request a quote.
Payment by the applicant is normal in conformity assessment and is how most product certification in every industry works, including pharmaceutical auditing. Another article in this library deals with seals that are deceptive, and a fee by itself is not what makes one deceptive. What separates a scheme from a badge is whether the criteria are published, whether an accreditation body checks the certifier, and whether a certificate can be suspended. That is why the accreditation question matters more than the money question.
Frequency is where the programmes genuinely diverge, and it is worth laying out:
- Every batch before release, every flavour: one LGC programme.
- Every finished product lot: BSCG.
- At least one random retail lot a month: the other LGC programme.
- Annual facility audit plus annual testing of products sampled at retail: USP.
- Twice-yearly surveillance testing: a UL programme announced in 2015, whose current status could not be confirmed.
NSF’s sport programme is the unresolved case. NSF’s own knowledge library describes product data in its app as tested on a lot-by-lot basis. Its certification process page declines to say how often production lots are tested. A comparison chart produced by BSCG, a direct competitor, says NSF tests customer-chosen lots or all lots at NSF’s discretion. The 2016 journal review said lot-by-lot testing. All four accounts are on the record and they do not reconcile. A reader should know that, rather than be handed one of them.
Visibility differs too. LGC lets anyone search certified products and tested batches by batch number. NSF lists tested lots on its sport site and in its app, although BSCG notes that NSF’s testing menu is no longer publicly available. BSCG publishes batch numbers. ConsumerLab’s results sit behind a paywall.
What none of them certify
The clearest statement of the limits comes from a government source, not from a certifier. Operation Supplement Safety, run by the Department of Defense through the Uniformed Services University, recognizes four programmes by name and then says plainly that “Third-party certification does not mean the product has been evaluated for safety” or for effectiveness, which it glosses as whether the product works the way it is claimed to. What certification does mean, in the same page’s words, is that the product content and label match.
The 2016 review in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics reached the same place from inside the industry. Assessment of inherent ingredient effects, interactions and side effects, it said, is beyond the scope of third-party quality certification, and certification of quality is not a product recommendation.
None of the certifiers’ own marketing pages carries an equivalent disclaimer. USP’s mark page lists four things the mark indicates and no exclusions at all.
That criticism is not new. In October 2002, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said USP’s supplement seal risked leaving consumers with the impression that it certified more than it did, and warned that USP risks losing its credibility if it is not clear about what is being certified and what is not. Twenty-four years later the mark page still has no exclusion statement, and a consumer who wants one has to get it from the Pentagon.
The study nobody has published
Here is the question most readers want answered: are certified products more accurately labelled than uncertified ones?
No published study answers it. Not one. The certification industry has not run that comparison, and no independent group has either. That absence is itself a finding, and it deserves stating rather than papering over with adjacent numbers.
The two nearest things are worth knowing precisely because they are not the thing itself.
The first is from 2004. An international study of 634 non-hormonal sports supplements, bought from 215 suppliers across 13 countries, found that 94 of them, 14.8 percent, contained anabolic androgenic steroids not declared on the label. The United States was among the worst markets at 18.8 percent. The finding that matters most here is the split by supplier: 21.1 percent of supplements from companies that also sold prohormones tested positive, against 9.6 percent from companies that did not. Who makes a product predicted contamination. Choosing a supplier carefully is exactly what certification formalizes, and that study is the oldest evidence that the variable is real.
The second is from December 2024 and it is funded by the Department of Defense. Researchers bought 44 weight-loss supplements at retailers on and near 12 US military installations between March 2023 and January 2024 and analysed them by mass spectrometry. None of the 44 carried a BSCG, Informed Sport, NSF or USP seal. Two carried seals reading “quality tested” or claiming an ironclad quality guarantee, with no third-party organization behind either phrase. Thirty-six of the 44, 82 percent, had inaccurate labels.
Because not one product was certified, the study could not compare certified against uncertified. In the product category where a consumer would most want a seal, the seals were absent and invented language had filled the space.
Who funded what you read about certification
Two disclosures belong in any honest account of this subject.
The first concerns the main academic overview of supplement certification, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in 2016. Its authors include the senior director of USP’s verification programmes, the general manager of NSF’s dietary supplements division and the president of ConsumerLab. Three of the certifiers being described wrote the description. The funding statement records that Columbia University received an unrestricted educational grant from Pharmavite, a supplement manufacturer, which supported the workshop the manuscript came out of. The authors reported no conflicts of interest. It remains the best single overview in the literature. It is not independent.
The second concerns the most-cited evidence that uncertified sports supplements are risky. A 2021 study in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine bought 66 deliberately high-risk sports nutrition products from Dutch web shops and found that 25 of them, 38 percent, contained undeclared doping substances, including anabolic steroids, a beta-blocker and several stimulants. The products were analysed by LGC, using an extended version of its accredited supplement screen. LGC owns and sells the certification programmes discussed above. The company that measured how dangerous the uncertified market is also sells the certification.
Neither fact invalidates the findings. Both belong next to them. A 2026 global review in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism makes a related structural point: third-party testing programmes are concentrated in Europe, North America and Australasia, cost and label language are real barriers, and misconceptions about what certification covers are widespread even where the programmes exist.
There is also a quieter overlap. NSF’s laboratory analysts appear as co-authors on a good deal of the independent research into supplement adulteration, including the 2023 sports-supplement survey discussed in the companion article on purity and potency. The certifiers and the evidence base are not separate worlds.
Six questions to ask before a seal changes your decision
None of these is a buying rule. Each can be answered from the certifier’s own website in a few minutes, and the answers tell you how much weight the logo deserves.
- Whose name is on the mark, and is the product on that organization’s own list? A certifier that certifies a product publishes it. If you cannot find the product in the certifier’s database, the logo is doing something other than certifying.
- Does the mark attach to a batch or to a product line? If a batch number on the tub can be searched and matched, you know something about what you are holding. If it cannot, you know something about a programme.
- Is this a sport programme or a content programme? Screening for 290 substances banned in competition is a different job from verifying that the label is accurate. Some programmes do both and say so. Several do one.
- Is it a facility registration rather than a product certification? Good manufacturing practice compliance is a legal requirement for every supplement maker in the United States. A badge announcing it is announcing the minimum.
- Where are the criteria published? One programme in this field certifies to a balloted public standard. The rest publish summaries.
- What does the certifier say it does not cover? The useful finding is usually that it says nothing, and that you had to go to a government page to find out.
If you take prescription medicines, no mark in this field screens for interactions with them, and a pharmacist with your full medication list can do in five minutes what no seal does at all. If you are a drug-tested athlete or a service member, your anti-doping authority or the Department of Defense’s supplement safety service maintains current programme guidance, and that guidance changes faster than packaging does.
The one thing to take from this
A third-party seal narrows one specific risk, and the only way to know which risk is to read the programme’s own page. Two marks from one company can mean every batch of this flavour was tested before release, or one random tub was bought and tested last month, and the package will not tell you which.
What no mark in this field narrows is the question of whether the product does anything. The certifiers say so when asked, the Department of Defense says so in writing, and the 2019 consensus statement written by anti-doping authorities, professional leagues and military health researchers opens by noting that no regulatory authority conducts or mandates a quality review before supplements are sold. The seals exist because of that gap. They do not close it.
Sources
- U.S. Department of Defense, Operation Supplement Safety (CHAMP, Uniformed Services University). “Third-Party Certification: Why It's Important.” opss.org
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Using Dietary Supplements.” fda.gov
- NSF. “NSF Shanghai Named Critical Site for NSF/ANSI 455 and NSF/ANSI 173 by ANSI National Accreditation Board (26 July 2024).” nsf.org
- NSF International. “NSF/ANSI 173-2011, Dietary Supplements, Issue 43 Revision 2 (balloting document, January 2012).” standards.nsf.org
- American National Standards Institute. “NSF/ANSI 173-2024: Dietary Supplements.” blog.ansi.org
- NSF International. “Certified for Sport Program.” nsf.org
- NSF International. “NSF Certified for Sport: Get Certified.” nsfsport.com
- U.S. Pharmacopeia. “USP Verified Mark.” usp.org
- U.S. Pharmacopeia. “USP Dietary Supplement Verification Program fact sheet (DSC047F, 2017).” quality-supplements.org
- LGC (Informed Sport). “Informed Sport and Informed Choice: What Is the Difference?.” sport.wetestyoutrust.com
- LGC (Informed Sport). “Frequently Asked Questions.” sport.wetestyoutrust.com
- Banned Substances Control Group. “BSCG Certified Drug Free Supplement Certification Process.” bscg.org
- ConsumerLab.com, LLC. “About ConsumerLab.com.” consumerlab.com
- Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “Akabas SR, Vannice G, Atwater JB, Cooperman T, Cotter R, Thomas L. "Quality Certification Programs for Dietary Supplements." 2016. Authors include staff of USP, NSF International and ConsumerLab; Columbia University received an unrestricted educational grant from Pharmavite..” jandonline.org
- Current Sports Medicine Reports (PubMed). “Eichner AK, Coyles J, Fedoruk M, et al. "Essential Features of Third-Party Certification Programs for Dietary Supplements: A Consensus Statement." 2019;18(5):178-182. DOI: 10.1249/JSR.0000000000000595.” doi.org
- Nutrients (PubMed). “Crawford C, Avula B, Katragunta K, Khan IA, Lindsey AT, Deuster PA. "Label Accuracy and Quality of Select Weight-Loss Dietary Supplements Sold on or near US Military Bases." 2024;16(24):4369. Funded by the Consortium for Health and Military Performance / Operation Supplement Safety, award HU0001-23-2-0048. DOI: 10.3390/nu16244369.” doi.org
- International Journal of Sports Medicine (PubMed). “Geyer H, Parr MK, Mareck U, Reinhart U, Schrader Y, Schanzer W. "Analysis of non-hormonal nutritional supplements for anabolic-androgenic steroids: results of an international study." 2004;25(2):124-129. DOI: 10.1055/s-2004-819955.” doi.org
- Journal of Sports Science and Medicine (PubMed). “Duiven E, van Loon LJC, Spruijt L, Koert W, de Hon OM. "Undeclared Doping Substances are Highly Prevalent in Commercial Sports Nutrition Supplements." 2021;20(2):328-338. Products analysed by LGC, which owns the Informed Sport and Informed Choice marks. DOI: 10.52082/jssm.2021.328.” doi.org
- International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism (PubMed). “Wardenaar FC, Burns SF, Campos M, et al. "Navigating the Risks Beyond the Label: Unpacking Global Nutritional Supplement Safety." 2026;36(2):134-166. DOI: 10.1123/ijsnem.2025-0177.” doi.org
- Center for Science in the Public Interest. “USP Supplement Seal Could Mislead Consumers (4 October 2002).” cspi.org