Question about manufacturing?

We actually talk about it a bit on this page of the site. When I started this company 12 years ago, we used contract manufacturers like 99% of the supplement companies in the industry. That's just how supplement companies operate; even the large well-known ones that are household names. Almost nobody is vertically integrated. The contract manufacturing side of the industry is a whole separate beast, and most supplement brands just contract to one or multiple as needed. This is because the overhead of building a manufacturing facility is immense, on top of the difficulty of staffing it with qualified people, building all the SOPs for regulatory compliance, and then getting the facility cGMP certified. Supplement brands just build out the brand itself, and then contract with existing contract manufacturers as production demand increases or decreases. I can count on my fingers the brands that I know that actually have manufacturing facilities of their own. Those are usually massive brands like Nature's Way or NOW Foods. When I started this company, it was literally just me and one other guy. We had to build everything from scratch. This meant that we had to use contract manufacturers for things like encapsulation, as we didn't have a facility or machines to do it at scale. This was the same with lab testing. When I launched the company, we didn't have a lab either. We had to contract out to other labs. Back then I didn't know what I know now. I was still bright eyed and naive to the harsh realities of this industry. I still actually trusted people. That quickly changed as I built the company up and became more educated on not just manufacturing and quality standards, but analytical chemistry in general. I quickly realized that this industry is a den of fraudsters and cheats, with a thin layer of just sheer incompetence hiding the dark underbelly. I was lied to about batches, and constantly had these contract manufacturers cut corners and not meet specs. I even had one batch of berberine that was contaminated with black mold come back from a contract manufacturer. They denied it was them, and said it had to be from us, even though we had microbial testing from just before sending the raw materials over to them showing it was not. That was the last straw for me. That's when I knew I needed to build my own manufacturing facility. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

These days I don't trust anyone or anything that I can't personally hire and oversee. I am honestly about as jaded as you can get now. If I don't build a team, facility, and system around it, I just assume it is a lie. Perhaps I have pivoted far to the other direction, but I have been lied to and burned too many times over the years to have any other stance. However, Nootropics Depot is still just a supplement brand. I wanted clear delineations in companies, processes, and teams for different things. This is why I built Supplement Logistics as our manufacturing operation. This is the company that manufactures Nootropics Depot products. Here is our current cGMP cert. As you can see, it is in the same business complex as Nootropics Depot. The same goes for the analytical testing lab that I built: Omnient Labs. Here is our ISO accreditation certificate for Omnient. These are all separate companies with separate teams, but they are owned by me and managed by me. To even get an ISO certification, the lab has to be independent. This is why I built it as a totally separate company and team. We don't just do testing for Nootropics Depot, either. We do contract lab testing for multiple other brands and labs. The same goes for Supplement Logistics. We have manufactured for other brands outside of Nootropics Depot, too. Companies that I own currently occupy around 80,000 square feet across 7 different suites in that same business park, and we have around 90 employees working at the various operations. So while we manufacture in-house, meaning ourselves at the same facility, the companies and teams are different. This is why it says manufactured for Nootropics Depot. It's because the entity and team for Nootropics Depot doesn't legally manufacture the products. Supplement Logistics does. They are all just my companies that are managed and overseen by me. Nootropics Depot is the retail arm of my greater operation, but not the only arm.

Hopefully that makes sense. When we (the collective we) talk about what we are doing, we are talking about my entire operation, not just the team that works on Nootropics Depot. It's all built because I don't trust anyone anymore, and will only be satisfied if I know that I have complete control over the entire process. A lot of our operations these days is because I want to make supplements for myself and my family to take. I put all this stuff into my body, too. So I have to be absolutely sure it's held to the highest standard possible, and the only way that can happen is if my teams do it ourselves.