The process includes passing a comprehensive assessment and review of the lab’s quality management system and competence in performing specific tests. The press release states that this accreditation isn’t generally pursued by in-house labs—it’s more commonly something that contract labs seek to attain, to prove competency. NOW chose to add ISO accreditation to its third-party certifications due to “different regulatory requirements throughout the world, and the recent discussion of ISO accreditation for dietary supplement sellers on Amazon.”
Aaron Secrist, EVP of Quality, R&D, and Operations, NOW Health Group, commented: “NOW has spent a lot of time and resources over the last decade building up our in-house lab capabilities and expertise to ensure that the data coming out of our labs has integrity, which is crucial because we make regulatory and business decisions every day based on this data. We have built our in-house labs into a very strong competitive advantage, not only because of the increased ability for us to test the incoming ingredients and finished products much faster than a contract lab ever could, but we are also able to validate our test methods against each of our thousand or so specific finished product matrices, something contract labs could never do for each company they service in an economical way.”
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The scopes of accreditation NOW received includes arsenic speciation in raw materials and finished products by HPLC-ICP-MS; determination of acid value by titration; determination of peroxide value by FoodLabFat; metal and mineral testing by ICP-MS (arsenic, cadmium, iodine, lead and mercury); and multi-pesticide residue analysis by GC-MS/MS for 195 pesticides.“We chose the scopes that we did because I have seen many labs pick the easiest and most basic test method and matrix in order to be able to say that they are an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited lab, even if the majority of the testing they do is outside of the scope of their accreditation,” Secrist added. “We wanted the accreditation to be meaningful, so we chose some of the most complex methods that we run, most of which have been developed in house, as well as a couple of simple ones.”
NOW intends to add to these scopes on an annual basis.
Theaccreditation certificate can be viewed here.
