Choosing a Sports Nutrition Brand

Naturally you want the best for your clients and yourself, whether it’s a perfectly tailored workout or the ideal diet and nutrition regimen. But when it comes to supplements, how do you assess quality? For 30 years, NOW Sports has been making pure, unadulterated sports nutrition products, and we have some helpful tips on what to look for when choosing a sports nutrition brand that’s ideal for you and your clients.

Testing. Testing is an incredibly important aspect of quality. With one of the most advanced private laboratory facilities in the natural products channel, NOW Sports is able to test exhaustively to ensure the purity and potency of our products.

NOW Sports parent company, NOW, performs approximately 16,000 tests internally on a monthly basis. Several PhDs, a medical doctor, and a board-certified toxicologist are constantly engaged in testing from start to finish to ensure that NOW Sports products are truly pure and efficacious. Our testing capabilities include analytical, microbiological, sensory, and methods development laboratories, and these labs are equipped with the latest instrumentation, such as gas chromatographs, infrared spectroscopes and more.

Informed-Sport/Informed-Choice. Although NOW maintains one of the most advanced laboratory facilities in the natural products industry, testing for banned substances requires extremely specialized analytical instrumentation and expertise.

When it comes to the testing of sports nutrition products for banned substances, many of the world’s top athletic organizations turn to LGC. LGC has more than 50 years of experience in doping detection and began offering their Informed-Sport banned substance testing program to manufacturers in 2007 to help better serve the athletes who use their products. LGC is ISO 17025 certified and has published numerous studies exploring the prevalence of prohibited substances in sports nutrition products.

NOW invested in the Informed-Sport program in 2017, and our sports nutrition products are now tested both during manufacturing and randomly at the retail level to ensure the absence of adulterants and banned substances. Informed-Sport certification demonstrates the highest level of commitment to quality assurance available in the industry today.

Quality Ingredients. We purchase only ingredients that meet our exacting quality benchmarks, and we require our ingredient vendors to submit detailed specifications; every lot of an ingredient is identity-tested prior to being accepted at any of our manufacturing facilities. We choose natural and organic ingredients whenever possible, and we don’t use artificial sweeteners or synthetic flavors.

Manufacturing. Since 1968 we’ve been meeting and exceeding natural product manufacturing regulations, even when none existed. We were one of the first manufacturers to seek certification through the Natural Products Association’s (then the NNFA) inaugural GMP (good manufacturing practices) program in 2000, for which we received an “A” rating, and we’ve been recertified with an “A” rating every year since.

NOW is also in full compliance with the Food and Drug Administration’s more recent Current Good Manufacturing Practices, or CGMPs. Introduced in 2007, federal CGMPs are published federal requirements for companies engaging in the manufacture, packaging, labeling or holding of dietary supplements. They assure the proper design, monitoring and control of manufacturing processes and facilities. They also establish minimum requirements for sanitation, record-keeping, packaging and labeling operations, and more.

At NOW Sports we focus on providing natural sports nutrition products that legitimately enhance athletic performance. Product purity, potency and safety are what matter most to us. This is why we’ve invested in world-class laboratory facilities and instrumentation that allow us to screen NOW Sports products, in conjunction with Informed-Sport, and ensure they’re free of adulterants.

Our unwavering dedication to quality, safety and purity has made NOW Sports one of the most trusted brands in sports nutrition.