The Supp Digest | USDA Organic - The Guide for Clean Ingredients
Welcome to The Digest, your guide to key insights and updates across the SuppCo community.
In this series, we dig into the fascinating (and anonymous) trends SuppCo sees from our unique vantage point to help you make sense of supplements.
In a previous issue of The Digest, we dove into two sports certifications: NSF Certified for Sport and Informed Sport. Today, we're shifting our focus to another rigorous certification that's increasingly important to health-conscious consumers: USDA Organic.
While sports certifications focus on banned substance testing, USDA Organic certification addresses a different but equally important concern: ensuring your supplements are free from synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and other chemical additives from farm to bottle.
USDA Organic: More Than Just a Label
When you see that familiar green and white USDA Organic seal on a supplement bottle, it represents one of the most stringent certification processes in the food and supplement industry.
To earn USDA Organic certification, dietary supplements must meet strict criteria: at least 95% of their ingredients must be certified organic, meaning they're produced without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, antibiotics, or growth hormones from soil free of these contaminants for at least three years before harvest. The remaining 5% of ingredients must come from an approved list of non-organic substances.
But the rigor doesn't stop at ingredients. Manufacturing facilities must be inspected by USDA-accredited certifying agents, and brands undergo annual inspections to maintain their certification. This means every USDA Organic supplement has been vetted not just once, but continuously.
The SuppCo Database View
The SuppCo database tells a story of exclusivity when it comes to organic supplements. Across the over 230,000 products, just 1,900 products are USDA Organic Certified. That's less than 1% of all products in the SuppCo database, highlighting the rigor that comes with organic certification.
These 1,900 products cover 63 unique SuppCo product categories, with the majority being plant or crop-based supplements. Think greens powders, turmeric curcumin, lion's mane, ashwagandha, and other botanicals where farming practices directly impact product quality.
This concentration makes perfect sense—when you're dealing with ingredients that literally grow from the earth, knowing they weren't exposed to synthetic chemicals becomes paramount for quality-conscious consumers.
When there’s 230,000 products to choose from, certifications like USDA Organic can be a helpful filtering mechanism for finding high quality products. It’s why USDA Organic is one of the certifications included in SuppCo’s TrustScore and why we include a dedicated certifications filter in our product search. Finding organic products should be easy, and SuppCo is here to help.
The SuppCo Community View
While there are only 1,900 USDA Organic Certified products in the SuppCo database, over 29,000 SuppCo users have a USDA Organic product in their stack. That's roughly 10% of our community prioritizing organic certification when choosing supplements.
The most popular USDA Organic products across the SuppCo community tell an interesting story about product diversity with organic space:
Kirkland Signature's Organic Multivitamin is the most popular USDA Organic product in the SuppCo database with 678 stacks and highlights that more than just botanicals can achieve the USDA Organic designation. Even comprehensive multivitamins can meet these stringent standards.
Dose for Your Liver, which contains a number of plant-derived ingredients, takes a close second place, appearing in 656 user stacks.
Sport’s Research Organic Collagen Peptides take third place with 574 stacks.
These top 3 products highlight the range of USDA Organic certification. From multivitamins to classical botanicals and animal-based products, the USDA Organic certification serves as a signal of high quality farming and production.
Organic vs. Non-GMO: The Plot Thickens
A question we often get from SuppCo users is whether USDA Organic means that a product is also non-GMO. The answer, as is the case with many things in the supplement industry, isn't a straightforward yes or no.
We'll be diving into the nuances between organic and non-GMO certifications in upcoming issues of The Digest. Stay tuned for more to come.
Call for Topics
Do you have topics or trends you'd like to see covered in this newsletter? Drop us a note at support@supp.co.
Fresh Additions
Here are a few brands we've added TrustScores for recently that offer USDA Organic certified products:
Community
Help grow our community! Know someone who cares about clean, organic ingredients but isn't sure where to start? Share SuppCo with them—because when it comes to what goes in your body, transparency matters.