NOW® Receives ISO Accreditation For In-House Laboratories
Ensuring quality through accreditation
As a leader in the natural products industry, NOW is always looking for ways we can exceed industry standards and provide the highest quality products at the best possible price. As such, NOW recently received ISO/IEC 17025:2017 accreditation from the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) for both the analytical and microbiological laboratories. The accreditation demonstrates that NOW meets technical and quality benchmarks as required by ISO/IEC 17025:2017. The accreditation is yet another example of NOW’s commitment to quality and cutting-edge labs, as well as our investments in third party certifications.
Global quality from in-house labs
The process of achieving ISO accreditation includes passing a comprehensive assessment and review of the lab’s quality management system and competence to perform specific tests. This accreditation isn’t typically something that in-house labs pursue, but rather something that contract labs will seek in order to show some measure of competency. Given different regulatory requirements throughout the world, NOW decided to invest in ISO accreditation to expand on our existing range of third-party certifications.
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 to each of our thousand or so specific finished product matrices; something contract labs could never do for each company in an economical way. This gives our customers the additional assurance that NOW’s testing is among the best in the industry, and allows us to save time and money by not having to outsource the testing so we can continue to provide value in products and services that empower people to lead healthier lives.
Our continued dedication to quality and safety
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.
These are just the first of many methods NOW plans to add to the scope of accreditation.
