The supplier you don't vet is the one that hurts you
In most industries, a poor supplier relationship means late deliveries or inconsistent quality. Frustrating, but manageable. In wellness and supplements, a bad supplier can mean contaminated products reaching consumers, regulatory investigations, retail delistings, and reputational damage that takes years to repair.
The stakes are higher because the products are consumed. People take supplements to improve their health. When those products contain undisclosed ingredients, incorrect dosages, or dangerous contaminants, the consequences aren't just commercial — they're personal. And the brand whose name is on the label bears the responsibility, regardless of where the problem originated in the supply chain.
This is why supplier trust isn't a nice-to-have in wellness B2B. It's the foundation everything else is built on.
The scale of the problem
The data on product quality in the supplements industry is sobering.
Independent analyses routinely find that a significant proportion of tested supplements don't contain what their labels claim. Research published in peer-reviewed journals has found adulteration and mislabelling in a substantial share of tested products, with sports and weight-loss supplements among the worst affected. In 2025, a Consumer Reports investigation found that the majority of tested protein powders contained unsafe levels of lead — a heavy metal with well-documented health risks.
These aren't isolated incidents. The EU's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) regularly flags dietary supplement products for adulteration, unauthorised ingredients, and contamination. In the US, dietary supplements are linked to an estimated 23,000 emergency department visits each year, many involving otherwise healthy adults.
The root cause is structural. The global supplements supply chain relies heavily on manual documentation — lab certificates shared as PDFs, compliance reports emailed between parties, one-off audits. This documentation can't be verified at scale. A certificate might be genuine, or it might be outdated, fabricated, or simply from a different batch than the one you're receiving.
In this environment, even well-intentioned buyers can end up with products that don't meet the standards they expected. And opportunistic suppliers can exploit the opacity to cut corners, knowing that verification is difficult and enforcement is inconsistent.
What a bad supplier actually costs you
The direct cost of a bad batch — writing off inventory, replacing stock — is usually the smallest part of the damage. The real costs are indirect, cumulative, and often irreversible.
If a product is found to be non-compliant, adulterated, or contaminated, regulators can require recalls, issue public warnings, or take enforcement action against the brand. In the US, the FDA can pursue criminal prosecution in serious cases. In the UK, the FSA and local trading standards can seize products and take legal action.
Major retailers have zero tolerance for product quality issues. A single recall or compliance failure can result in immediate delisting — not just of the affected product, but of your entire range. Winning that shelf space back, if it's even possible, can take years.
In the age of social media, a product quality scandal travels fast. Consumer trust, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. For a wellness brand — where the entire value proposition is built on health and wellbeing — a contamination or mislabelling scandal strikes at the heart of what makes customers choose you.
Product liability claims following a quality failure can be substantial. Even if you're ultimately not found liable, the cost of defending claims and the impact on your insurance premiums can be significant. Some insurers may refuse to renew cover after a serious incident.
While you're managing recalls, responding to regulators, and handling customer complaints, you're not growing your business. The management time consumed by a supplier failure is enormous and comes at the expense of everything else.
If you discover a supplier is unreliable and need to switch, you face lead times, qualification processes, and potentially reformulation. In the meantime, you may not be able to fulfil orders, which damages your relationships with retailers and distributors.
Why traditional due diligence falls short
Most brands do conduct some form of supplier due diligence. The problem is that traditional approaches have significant limitations in the wellness supply chain.
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Point-in-time audits
A facility audit tells you what was happening on the day the auditor visited. It doesn't tell you what happens on the other 364 days. Suppliers who know an audit is coming can prepare accordingly. The audit report sits in a folder and goes stale immediately.
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Self-reported documentation
When suppliers provide their own lab certificates and compliance documents, there's an inherent conflict of interest. The buyer has limited ability to verify whether the certificate relates to the specific batch they're receiving, whether the lab is reputable, or whether the results have been altered.
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Reliance on personal relationships
In a fragmented industry with hundreds of suppliers, many buyer-supplier relationships are built on personal trust and reputation rather than verified data. This works well when it works — but it doesn't scale, and it provides no protection when a trusted supplier changes their practices, cuts corners under financial pressure, or subcontracts to a less reliable manufacturer.
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No shared infrastructure
There's no common system for recording and sharing supplier performance data across the industry. Each buyer conducts their own due diligence independently. A supplier who fails one buyer's quality checks can simply move on to the next buyer, who starts from scratch.
The industry's collective knowledge about supplier reliability is trapped in individual companies' files and employees' heads. It's a system that protects bad actors and penalises good ones.
What good supplier trust infrastructure looks like
The alternative to point-in-time, self-reported, fragmented verification is a system that captures supplier performance data continuously, transparently, and in a way that's accessible to everyone who needs it.
Verified lab testing
Test results come directly from accredited third-party laboratories and are linked to specific batches and transactions — creating an auditable chain from the test tube to the transaction.
Transaction history
Every completed trade generates data: was the order delivered on time? Was the quantity correct? Were there quality disputes? Over time, this builds a performance record far more meaningful than a single audit snapshot.
Payment behaviour
How a supplier handles financial commitments — paying their own suppliers, honouring agreed terms, managing disputes — tells you something about their reliability that a product audit never will.
Counterparty feedback
When multiple buyers trade with the same supplier through a shared platform, their experiences aggregate into a picture of that supplier's reliability that no single buyer could build alone — the same principle that makes marketplace ratings so powerful.
This kind of infrastructure doesn't just help individual buyers make better decisions. It changes the economics of the entire market. When quality can be evidenced and compared, high-quality suppliers gain a competitive advantage. When poor performance is visible, bad actors can't simply move on to unsuspecting new customers.
What this means for buyers and suppliers
For buyers
- Invest in verification, not just relationships — capture objective, verifiable data and review it regularly
- Ask for third-party evidence — request lab testing from independent, accredited facilities
- Track performance over time — monitor delivery accuracy, quality consistency, and responsiveness continuously
- Factor trust into your total cost of sourcing — the cheapest supplier isn't the most cost-effective when quality failures are accounted for
For suppliers
- Transparent trust infrastructure gives high-quality suppliers a verifiable competitive advantage
- Buyers actively seek verified suppliers because it reduces their own risk
- The premium that quality commands becomes visible and quantifiable rather than assumed
- In a transparent market, the best operators win — and that's good for the industry overall
The direction of travel
The wellness industry is moving towards greater transparency and accountability — driven by consumer expectations, regulatory pressure, and the commercial reality that trust has become a competitive advantage.
Brands like Momentous and Thorne Research are already commanding premium prices precisely because they invest in verified quality and make the evidence visible to consumers. Retailers are tightening their supplier requirements. Regulatory frameworks like the FDA's FSMA Rule 204 are mandating digital traceability across supply chains.
The question for every participant in the wellness supply chain isn't whether transparency is coming — it's whether you're positioned to benefit from it or be exposed by it.
Alethium is building the trust infrastructure for wellness trade — embedding verified lab testing, supplier credentialing, and transparent transaction data into every trade. If you want to source with confidence or prove your quality to buyers, book a demo and see how it works.