4 Ways The Supplement Industry Is Making Your Life Easier

These days, it’s not enough to read a few five-star reviews or even the label on the bottle before buying a supplement. Chances are, you’ve got questions. And thankfully, many of the brands in the biz are making it easier for you to know exactly what you’re buying.

“The majority of the players in the supplement industry are passionate about providing transparency to the end consumer,” says Darrin Petersen, the founder and CEO of LifeSeasons supplements. “Unfortunately, there is the rare bad apple putting profits ahead of efficacy and safety. We’re getting better at weeding them out and supporting the FDA in taking them down,” he says, “but we’re also learning to empower our customers with more information and clearer messaging so they can make smarter choices.”

With tens of thousands of supplement brands in the space, the industry as a whole needed to step up its transparency game to help consumers shop with more confidence. So initiatives like New Hope’s Inside The Bottle started up, which gathered the leading companies from across the supply chain to define industrywide best practices on transparency over the course of several years. 

Supplement skeptics have long argued that if you eat well, you can get all the nutrients you need from food. But we now know that even the healthiest diets have gaps, in part due to soil degradation that is causing our food to be less nutrient-dense than ever. 

“Modern medicine is catching up and acknowledging that many of the chronic conditions people are struggling with can be traced back to poor dietary and lifestyle choices,” says Petersen. “And they’re coming around to the idea that natural products can be a powerful tool for correcting underlying deficiencies, supporting the body’s natural immune response, and more—even for those with healthy diets.”

That’s what Scott Steinford, managing partner at Trust Transparency Center, a supply-chain consulting firm, mentioned in a phone interview. Dietary supplements are commonly packaged in single-use plastic bottles—and there’s no denying they come with lots of empty airspace. 

But that might start to change. “China isn’t taking our recycled garbage anymore, specifically our plastic,” Steinford said. So what happens when the supplement industry is growing at the same time as plastic waste? “We’re looking to find innovative ways to solve this, like using refillable bottles with flat-pack replacement packs that can be sent in the mail.” 

QR codes are just the beginning. When consumers started asking for specifics about their supplements, certain manufacturers earned their trust not just by responding publicly, but also by tapping into opportunities like QR codes (popular in Europe and Asia)—beyond what fits on that FDA-mandated label. Though a massive undertaking, augmented reality—or "having a holographic personal discussion from the bottle to the consumers,” according to Steinford—might be a future iteration of this.   

For now, there’s a lot you can learn about what exactly is in your supplement and who’s behind the ingredients. Companies across the supply chain are providing extensive details about quality on their websites, from links to published clinical studies to video tours of their farms, labs, and manufacturing facilities.

Having information is great; understanding it all is a different story. “If you’re in the industry, being ‘totally transparent’ requires a whole different level [of knowledge] than if you’re on the outside,” says Steinford. What he means is that it’s possible to hit a point of TMI, where all that info is no longer actually helpful. “At Trust Transparency, we define ‘transparency’ as ‘do no harm’—we want to make sure we give the consumer all the information they need and want, but not so much as to cause confusion.”