No more Expiry dates?

So the regulations regarding expiration dates are complex, and everyone else is violating them. The FDA states that you should NOT include an expiration date on a product unless you have compelling scientific evidence for the validity of that date. That means that you need to run an accelerated stability study on every single product you put an expiration date on. How you run an accelerated stability study is to take roughlly 10 units of each product, and have them in a stability chamber. This uses heat and humidity to accelerate the process. However, it still takes at least 6 months per product. You have predefined stages in the process where you take out one of the units, run a full battery of testing on it, and see how much it has degraded. Then you wait till the next stage to do it again. You have to do this for every single product you have, and it takes up a ton of room. If you changes bottles/jars, caps, or seals, you have to DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! Because maybe that HDPE cap kept your adrafinil stable in high humidity, but the PETE cap you were forced to use because of supply chain shortages might not. You can't just assume it will work the same. You have to prove it. So you have to start the entire process over again. It's an arduous process that almost nobody does. So most people slap a dte 2 years from the date of production, and call it a day. However, that is technically a violation of the guidelines. You can't just put a number for an expiration date based off assumptions. You have to prove it with data.

So in lieu of buying $100,000 in stability chambers, and reserving 1,500 square feet in lab space to place them, we decided to remove the expirations and do long-term stability testing. So we have retained samples of every lot going back years stored in our warehouse. As they approach the 2 year mark, we resample them and test them in the lab to see if they have had any degradation. It's a much longer process, but is more indicative of what real-world storage will be like. Accelerated stability testing puts it in very hot/humid conditions to accelerate things, but that's not always a perfect representation of what happens in the real world over time. We have yet to find any significant degradation in really anything. Things are a lot more stable when stored properly than most people think. Some things are 100% the same after 5 years. So putting an arbitrary expiration on things doesn't seem like it does anyone a whole lot of good. We do have expirations printed on some things, but that is usually Amazon stock. Amazon requires expirations on products sold through there. So like all of Amazon's half-asses ideas, they put a regulation in place to force you to violate FDA guidelines.

That being said, the production date is on all your bottles. It's the last six digits of the lot number. That tells you when your product was made. It's been that way for at least the last 5 years. So if you wanted to see when your product was made, just look at those last 6 digits. It's MMDDYY.

So moral of the story is that almost all expiration dates are meaningless. It's more of an issue for foods. Most supplements are very stable, and will act the same years down the road if you stored them properly. The expiration dates you see on most supplements you buy are just randomly chosen, not actually based in analytical data. Rather than doing that ourselves, we decided to follow the guidelines and remove them until we have valid analytical data for the validity of the date being used. The only exception is for Amazon stock, as they force us to do it.