For almost a month, I have been doing this routine everyday.(Obsession)

I'd love to have more accurate estimates for exactly when things will come out, but it is not that simple. There are so many hurdles between starting to develop a new product and actually getting it up. I could give better estimates if everything went perfectly, but that never happens. Something always comes up. My whole team has been focused on getting through our ISO audit the past month or so. It was something we have always planned on doing, but our timelines shifted up massively because of what Amazon is doing right now. Coming up in May, they are going to remove any supplement product from Amazon that does not have a COA from an ISO certified lab. That's actually not a bad idea, and something that has been needed for a while. However, some products just can't be tested by any of the available ISO labs, since they don't offer all the testing needed. This is one of the reasons I built our own lab out, so we can do testing of novel things properly. Well it won't matter to Amazon here in a few months unless the lab is ISO certified, so I put all hands on deck to get that done.

I can proudly say that our ISO certification audit ended yesterday, and we had ZERO nonconformances (major or minor) not a single observation for changes. It's literally a perfect score our lab got in the audit! I am so proud of my team right now! This means that our lab is now going to be ISO 17025:2017 certified! Moreover, we have novel things on our scope that no other lab in the United States can do. We will be the only ISO certified lab in the world that can test some of the things we do. That's pretty damn cool! On top of that, we are going to work towards ISO 17034:2016 certification as well, which would make us an official reference standard manufacturer like Sigma Aldrich! Some of the things we test don't have qualified reference materials, and we have to go through all the work to build them ourselves. If we get ISO 17034 certified, that means we can then supply them to other labs, too. This would help advance the testing standards of the industry, and provide much needed standards for some of these novel botanical extracts and other nootropics. I will do a bigger post on this lab stuff/ISO certification when all the documents are official. I just figured I would give people a heads up on what we have been doing.

So this is what a lot of our time has been spent working on the past month or so. The paperwork, validations, documentation, and effort a lab has to go through for an ISO audit is pretty crazy. It takes up a lot of time for the people in our lab, and it will be nice to have it done. Now we can get back to focusing on QC sample load and R&D of new methods. This should speed up things back to normal. I have considered a Nootropics Depot insider program for a while, though. It's something I want to get to at some point. There is a lot of cool inside info I think we could provide people that are interested in that. We could have ND Insiders get access to new products sooner than others. We could have other benefits to the program as well. I think it would be a fun program we could work on.