3rd party lab testing for ND?

...Continued from above...

That's the novel stuff. What about the basic everyday stuff? We do that all in-house? Hell no! We still have to send off TONS of samples to other 3rd party ISO certified labs, for methods we have not yet developed, for machines we don't yet have in our lab, or for difficult methodologies/methods we are just not suited to yet. We have a lot of smart people in our lab, but you can't be an expert on everything. I also can't afford every piece of equipment I would want in a lab, nor can I find all the qualified people to run the machines yet. We partner with a 3rd party lab in California to do all our NMR work, as those machines are millions of dollars, take up whole rooms, and need liquid nitrogen to run. We even work with another lab to do more complex two dimensional and quant NMR, as not all labs with an NMR can do all the specific types or methods on them. So just because a lab has an NMR doesn't mean they can do it all. There is proton NMR, carbon NMR, phosphorus NMR, etc. Then you have heavy metals. We send off all our heavy metals to another 3rrd party ISO certified lab, as we don't have an ICP-MS in our lab yet. They are just down the street from us, and we drop our samples off to them directly, so it's much easier to just let them do what they are best at and not spend $300K or more building out that capability in our lab. Then there is another 3rd party ISO certified lab we use in Utah for methods/methodologies we can't do in-house. They have a Karl Fischer water content method, which we don't have, so they run that for us. Some times the specific properties of a raw material means you have to run Karl Fischer instead of LOD. They have an ion pair detector on their UPLC, which we don't have. So they can run methods for things like L-5-Methyltetrahydrofolate Calcium. We can also do tests that they can't do. This means they send us samples as well. They don't have HP-TLC for the ID of species and plant part, so they send samples to us at Omnient to test for them, too. We often collaborate with other labs in the industry. It's not just a one way street. We also help out other supplement companies with testing through Omnient Labs. Arizona Nutritional Supplements had a bunch of their machines go down one day, so we were able to take over their sample load testing for a bit till they could get the machines back up. Multiple other supplement companies submit samples to us for testing. Omnient Labs is truly a 3rd party lab that any vendor can submit samples to and get COAs for their products. We aren't just working with other labs and supplement brands, either. We are part of the NIST\(National Institute of Standards and Technology\) proficiency testing program. That's a US government run organization that sets standards and operates programs to test the proficiency of analytical labs. We are part of that program, and have done multiple rounds of testing through it. We developed a cannabis assay method for one of their rounds, even though we don't sell cannabis. We also developed a comprehensive gingerols/shoagals assay for another round. The NIST proficiency program lets you run tests for samples that NIST sends you, then compares your results to labs from all over the US. We are also members of the AOAC (Association of Official Agricultural Chemists), and attend the annual AOAC conference every year. This year it was actually in Scottsdale, so our lab director just had to drive up there to attend. In previous years he has had to fly back to the east coast for it. Lots of lab directors go to this AOAC conference. He met the head of lab testing for NOW Foods at this last one, and has been fervently calling out the bad actors we have found at these conferences. This is where everyone gets together and discusses the current state of the analytical lab industry.

So that is a long-winded reply (not that anyone here expected less), but I have a lot to say about all the scientific work we have been doing over the years. It's the entire reason I built this company, and I am very proud of what we have accomplished. Simplifying things down into "in-house lab" and "3rd party lab" doesn't do the complexity justice. What matters is using validated chemistry to measuring things properly, and to ensure that the numbers you are getting are actually telling you what you think they are. Nobody cares more about that than I do. I spend years getting to the bottom of a chemistry problem, or decide to just not sell something till I can solve the science. Everyone on my team is passionate about analytical chemistry and the validity of the science we are using to prove our products are as we claim. I have built a world class ISO certified analytical lab. We also work with a handful of other 3rd party ISO certified analytical labs to get the scientific answers we need on every product. No one single lab can do all the chemistry right. Anyone that says otherwise is naive or a liar. It takes a community of labs working together to solve some of these more complex scientific things. This is especially true on the extremely novel work we are doing on products like lion's mane and other plants/fungi. I can honestly say that our lab, in concert with our various partner labs, are doing science that no other lab in the world is doing. Sometimes solving these things is more of a passion for me than anything else. I live for this stuff! So hopefully that adequately explains things a bit better. I know it is a meme from our competitors that "Nootropics Depot doesn't do 3rd party lab testing," but that can't be further from the truth. I bet we do more 3rd party lab testing every month than most of our competitors, on top of our in house lab. I see the bills, that's for sure! Everything we do is in furtherance of advancing the lab testing and quality control standards of not just ourselves, but the entire industry.

If you have not seen it, I did do a quick lab walk-through on YouTube where I show a lot of the machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VkhuGK21U8

Our product specialist, /u/PrettyChill, also has an Instagram where he shows a couple of our lion's mane grows: https://www.instagram.com/prettychill_nd/

Thank you for coming to my TEDx talk!