Elan Sudberg on the steady rise of the Alkemist Assured program

Speaking with NutraIngredients-USA at the SupplySide West, Sudberg explained that the spark for the program was born from a frustration with “how little we can say about the products and the narrative that we’re untested, unsafe, and unregulated, which is false, false, and false,” he said.

“So, I thought the industry needed a vehicle to share its quality.

“Alkemist Assured was developed to give our customers an avenue to share the CofAs [certificates of analysis] produced for them, with the ultimate goal of giving that data to the consumer in a form that they could understand,” he said.

The Alkemist program supplies participating companies with a clearly designed, simplified graphical representation of what the lab tested for, how it went about it, and what the tests found.  The simplified, engaging representation strips away the large amounts of peripheral ‘noise’ present in a typical CofA. 

“It’s been eight or nine of years of talking, talking, talking, but finally it’s caught on, basically because we finally launched the final product [the Alkemist Assured program].”

Originally envisaged for consumer brands, Alkemist Assured also covers ingredient suppliers and contract manufacturers, said Sudberg.

To date, nine companies have signed up to the program, including, for example, True Grace, QOL Labs, Verdure Sciences, BGG, Sabinsa, ChromaDex, and Arizona Nutritional Supplements. For a full list, please click HERE​​.

CofAs​

Sudberg also discussed the topic of counterfeit CofAs circulating in the industry, an issue he first sounded the alarm bell about several years ago​.

“It is still happening occasionally,” he said. “Right now, most of them [the discovery of fake CofAs] are coming from our clients. They actually recognize that the CofA looks off.

“We’re working with HealthLock to establish a way to have our customers go to a Blockchain-based website and verify the authenticity of the CofA.

“It [counterfeit CofAs] has been a plague of the industry and it’s kind of a scary thing because we can do all this great work and stand by it, and someone could potentially change that report and put out a poor product (that’s the least bad scenario).”

Watch the video for the full interview.