Science Corner 57 | Expert Interview: Blake Ebersole - What "Quality" Actually Means in Supplements

A conversation with Blake Ebersole, quality expert and supplement industry veteran with over 20 years of experience in ingredient specification, manufacturing compliance, and food safety.

The supplement industry has a quality problem. Not a shortage of it. A definition problem. Every brand claims it. Almost none of them mean the same thing.

"Quality is like an onion with a thousand layers. By the time you get to the core, you've shed a few tears, because you've seen how things really work."

I sat down with Blake Ebersole to talk about what quality actually means when you strip away the marketing. Blake has spent more than two decades on the back end of this industry: reviewing labels, qualifying ingredient suppliers, auditing manufacturers, and building the kind of specifications that most brands don't know exist. What he described is a system so layered and so poorly understood by most people operating inside it that the word "quality" has become almost meaningless.

Here's what I took away.

Quality Is a Checklist… a Very Long One

Blake doesn't think in abstractions. He thinks in checkboxes.

Good Manufacturing Practices alone carry roughly 300 checkboxes mandated by FDA regulations. Label compliance adds another 100, down to the precise thickness of the lines in your Supplement Facts panel, which most companies get wrong because the regulation exists but isn't commonly enforced. Ingredient specifications for botanicals can add 200 more. Supplier qualification: another 150.

By his count, a truly rigorous quality framework has around 1,000 checkboxes. A typical Amazon-seller brand checks maybe 50 of them. Not because they're trying to cut corners, but often because they don't know the other 950 exist.

He breaks the industry into four tiers. Most brands fall into tier one or two: either well-intentioned but undereducated, or roughly FDA-compliant but missing the depth. Tier three is the established players who know what they're doing but rely heavily on outside consultants and still have gaps. Tier four, the true one-percenters, are companies like Amway Nutrilite, who have full testing systems, institutional knowledge built over decades, and enough scale that a single screw-up becomes an existential risk.

Most of what you see on shelves is tier two.

Where Good Intentions Break Down

The supplement supply chain has at least three links before a finished product reaches you: ingredient supplier, possibly a distributor, then a contract manufacturer, then the brand whose name is on the label. At each handoff, quality requirements only flow as far as the knowledge of the buyer.

If a brand doesn't know what a proper ingredient specification looks like, that gap travels all the way back to the raw material.

Blake's most common citation from FDA audits and warning letters: specifications and identity testing. The issue with specifications isn't usually what's on them. It's what's missing. A short spec for green tea extract might look fine on its face. But if you don't know what should be there, you don't know what's absent. Most brand owners aren't green tea extract experts. Nobody can be an expert in every ingredient.

Identity testing has its own games. Some companies send the same sample to multiple labs and keep the result that passes. Others use their supplier's test as their own verification without running it independently. There's no system-level control against either practice.

Botanicals Are a Different Beast

Single-molecule ingredients, vitamin C and magnesium glycinate for example, are relatively straightforward to specify and test. Botanicals are not.

A botanical isn't one molecule. It's a mixture of tens of thousands of compounds. Blake's analogy: you can manage one or two kids at home. Try being a principal managing a thousand who are fighting each other and going missing. That's botanicals.

Specifications for a botanical ingredient are often three to four times longer than for a synthetic vitamin. You're measuring marker compounds for potency, screening for adulterants, testing for pesticide residue, and trying to confirm identity in a matrix that can vary significantly between batches, farms, and seasons.

Adulteration in this category is common, but it's not always malicious. The most frequent form is economically motivated dilution: adding starch or maltodextrin to an extract to pad volume and margin. Starch is actually quite difficult to detect chemically, which is part of why it's so commonly used. The consumer ends up with a product that looks right on the label but doesn't deliver the potency they're paying for.

The worst adulteration isn't the deceptive kind. It's the accidental kind. An undeclared allergen from a labeling error. That can kill someone.

What Can Go Wrong in Manufacturing

Even when a brand starts with high-quality raw materials, problems can emerge at every stage of production. Blake broke it down clearly:

• Farm level: Drying and milling often happen at separate facilities, meaning the ingredient changes hands before it ever reaches a manufacturer. Salmonella and other pathogens can be introduced here, and insufficient processing later won't catch them.

• Shipping and storage: Raw materials are sometimes transported overseas between processing steps. Temperature, humidity, and handling during transit can all degrade quality in ways that aren't visible in a finished product test.

• Contract manufacturing: Most brands don't manufacture their own products. Their contract manufacturer has 200 other customers. The brand assumes their standards are being applied, often without any verification mechanism in place.

• Final testing: A manufacturer can test a batch, get a negative result for pathogens, and still ship a product that causes illness. That's not a system failure. It's the nature of sampling in large-volume production. One drum can test clean while the one next to it is contaminated.

When something goes wrong, the FDA warning letter goes to the brand, not the manufacturer. The brand's name is on the label. That association lives in the public record indefinitely.

The Processing Paradox

There's a widely held belief in wellness culture that less processing is always better. Blake pushes back on this hard.

Processing exists, first and foremost, to make things safe. Cooking, drying, acidifying, milling: these aren't modern interventions. Humans have been dehydrating and grinding botanicals for 40,000 to 50,000 years.

His clearest example: greens powders. Consumers want a vibrant green product because green signals “fresh” and minimally processed. 

But chlorophyll is unstable; heat degrades it. So manufacturers under-process to preserve color, and in doing so they sacrifice food safety. Salmonella can be present in raw greens at the farm level, sometimes as an endophyte living inside the seed itself. Insufficient heat doesn't kill it. A bright green greens powder is actually a prompt to look more closely at that brand's food safety protocols, not a reassurance.

Third-Party Testing Is Not a Gold Standard

"Third-party tested" has become the default quality signal for consumers and retailers. Blake respects the concept. He has serious concerns about how it plays out in practice.

Labs are businesses. They compete on price. An HPLC test for $50, a price point he's seen in cannabis testing, is not running the controls between runs that ensure the equipment is working correctly. Someone on the brand or manufacturer side has to actually understand what good testing looks like to evaluate whether they're getting it.

ISO 17025 certification, now required by Amazon, is a step up. But it only covers validated methods at that lab, and many labs don't validate their methods for the specific product matrix they're testing. Turmeric is antimicrobial. If the test doesn't account for that, the turmeric can suppress the pathogen in the sample and the product registers as clean even when it isn't.

His rule: the lab report should state not just that the lab is ISO certified, but that the specific method used is ISO certified. That's a much shorter list.

What You Can Actually Do

Blake's practical framework for consumers:

• Learn what a compliant label looks like. Use an established brand like NOW Foods as a reference. If a label looks different in structure or formatting, that's worth a closer look.

• Buy from large, established brands. Companies that have survived FDA scrutiny and built institutional knowledge over decades are operating differently than a two-year-old brand.

• Price signals matter. A $20 multivitamin is almost certainly cutting somewhere. Compare cost per capsule at equivalent dosages. In this industry, there are no real deals.

• Watch the claims. Vague mechanism-of-action language is often a sign that there's no clinical evidence behind the product. Companies lean on it because it's harder to enforce.

• Invest time proportional to what you're investing in. If you spend ten hours a week on fitness, spending five minutes picking a supplement is a mismatch.

Watch the full conversation with Blake above for more on the supply chain opacity problem, what a proper ingredient specification actually looks like, and his take on the botanical formulation he helped develop that he thinks deserves more attention.

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Personal note from Jordan

Before joining SuppCo, I spent years in regulated healthcare and thought I had a pretty clear picture of what quality infrastructure looks like. Audits, certifications, testing protocols. Check the boxes, move on. This conversation reminded me I've been applying that same shortcut logic to supplements, and it doesn't hold.

What Blake described isn't a checklist. It's a thousand checklists nested inside each other, where the most important failures are invisible because they're things that were never written down. The spec looks fine. What's missing from it isn't on the page. The lab is ISO certified. The specific method they ran on your product isn't.

We've been trained to look for signals: certifications, labels, badges. Those signals are real, but they're the beginning of the question, not the answer. Quality looks like a checkbox from the outside. From the inside, it's a system most brands haven't fully built and most consumers have never been shown.