NOW has 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 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. According to NOW, 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, and the recent discussion of ISO accreditation for dietary supplement sellers on Amazon, NOW decided to add ISO accreditation to their existing range of third party certifications.

“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,” said Aaron Secrist, executive vice president of quality, R&D and operations, NOW Health Group.

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.  NOW will be adding to this scope on an annual basis until eventually the company has most, if not all, of the methods they run regularly within the scope of their accreditation.

For more information, visit www.nowfoods.com.