Where are nootropics manufactured?

1) Are you talking about Powder City's? I assume they test each batch, but you have to ask them. We certainly do, multiple times in the production process. We are about to put up a Curcumin extract, but have not offered one until now.

2) COA is just certificate of authenticity. It doesn't intrinsically mean anything. The testing method used determines what is and is not able to be seen. A really accurate FTIR, like our Thermo IS50, will be able to identify a compound by using infrared light to see what function groups there are in the sample. Ours can even tell minute differences in the synthesis methods used, based on the solvent residue. However, if a sample has an impurity, it cannot tell you the exact percentage the impurity is. You can tell if it is pure or not, and the type of impurity. However, not the exact % of the impurity. That is where an HPLC comes in.

An HPLC uses various solvents to pass a sample through a column. Then you measure the retention time for each peak. That will tell you an exact percentage of purity. However, it will not tell you what the impurities are specifically. You can deduce what they are from the FTIR readout, and the relative retention time, though. If you have a mass spec attachment, then you can get even more data, as it will tell you the mass of compound in each peak.

If you have solvents left over, a GC-IR is great to use. That uses a gas chromatograph to separate the compounds by heating them to a gas, and then uses the FTIR to pass IR light through the gaseous sample, which tells you exactly what solvent it is. The GC-IR will also tell you what enantiomer you are working with. So it's a pretty cool attachment.

If you have an NMR, then you can use that to count the protons or carbons in a sample. The issue with that is that NMRs are EXTREMELY expensive, since they use cryomagnets, and are hard to interpret. Also, some compounds have the same amount of protons, just in different configurations. So sometimes and NMR is not accurate enough to tell the difference. Then you have other methods for testing, for other specific things. We have an near IR beamsplitter on our FTIR, so that we can add an NIR detector at some point. Then you have HP-TLC, and UV-VIS units too, which are more for natural extracts. It just depends on what you are testing, and what you are looking for.

3) It depends on the Nootropic vendor and the supplement vendor. Jarrow does not have their own in-house lab like we do. They supposedly send off to other labs for testing on each batch. NOW Foods has their own in-house lab. They seem to be pretty serious about it. Swanson is notorious for never giving people COAs when they ask, or giving them manufacturer COAs. They do not seem to care about testing, and might not even be testing each batch on their own. Just because something is in a store, or the company is large, does not mean they are doing proper testing of all their batches. Similarly, many Nootropics vendors out there are not testing each batch, or doing any internal/3rd party testing of their own. So it just depends on the individual company. You can't generalize whole industries. We have better testing than Swanson, but NOW Foods has top quality testing as well. However, I could name many Nootropics vendors that do not do any testing.