Inside the Formula | The Brand That Was Rigorous Before Rigorous Was Cool

With Integrative Therapeutics & TESTED by SuppCo: Inside the Formula is a new sponsored series featuring brands in the TESTED by SuppCo certification program, where we spotlight the fascinating research behind products that have received the certification. Learn more about TESTED by SuppCo.

Here is something worth saying out loud: most supplement companies put "third-party tested" on their label and call it a day. Integrative Therapeutics thinks that barely scratches the surface.

Integrative Therapeutics was not born in a marketing department.

It traces its roots to the mid-1970s, when naturopathic doctors were building formulas for their own patients because the products they needed simply did not exist. One of those founding practitioners, Corey Resnick, still sits on the company's scientific advisory board today and still runs an active clinical practice. That lineage matters more than it might sound.

It means every product decision at Integrative Therapeutics is filtered through what Travis Borchardt, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and QC/QA, calls the "trust triangle": the practitioner trusts the brand, the patient trusts the practitioner's guidance, and the patient trusts that the product will actually do something for them. Fifty years later, that triangle still governs how the company formulates.

Travis himself joined the company in 1999, when it was still called Enzymatic Therapy, as a QA packaging coordinator. What drew him in, he told me, was a single word: potential. The potential of botanicals, enzymes, and probiotics to improve patient health before problems happened rather than after. He has been there ever since, 27 years and counting, watching the supplement industry grow from a niche corner of preventative medicine into a mainstream category, and working to make sure the science kept pace with the marketing. He also told me, unprompted, that he cannot get through allergy season without one of Integrative's own antihistamine formulas. We will come back to that.

The company now operates out of a 450,000 square foot manufacturing and distribution facility in Green Bay, Wisconsin, built and run to pharmaceutical standards. Before a new product can advance through development, it has to survive a formal charter process: define the patient and practitioner need, map the competitive landscape, assess the evidence, evaluate the risks, and bring it to an innovation steering committee for approval. That is before a single capsule is made. 

The scientific affairs team has internally earned the nickname "skeptical affairs" for how hard they push back on supplier marketing claims before any ingredient makes it into a formula. More on that in a moment.

SuppCo tested multiple Integrative Therapeutics products through the TESTED by SuppCo certification process, and they all passed. Two worth highlighting: their Active-B complex and their K2 + D3. SuppCo anonymously purchased each product the same way any consumer would, then sent them to an ISO 17025-accredited independent laboratory for analysis. Testing for both products (among others) confirmed what was on the label was in the product. For a brand whose practitioner customers stake their professional credibility on product integrity, label accuracy is not a nice-to-have: it is the foundation of the entire relationship.

I sat down with Travis Borchardt, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs and QC/QA, to dive deeper into the science.

JG: "You describe quality as a three-legged stool. What are the three legs, and where does that stool tend to collapse in this industry?"

TB: "The three legs are facility, processes, and people. On the facility side, I'm talking about equipment designed to deliver dose consistency from capsule to capsule, and that becomes genuinely complex when you're combining 40 to 50 actives at various particle sizes, some measured in micrograms. Processes means thousands of written SOPs covering everything from ingredient sourcing to claim substantiation to distribution. And people, I think that's the most important leg. You need folks who are not just trained and qualified, but who are genuinely passionate about patient outcomes. When people are passionate about quality, it stops being about meeting regulations and starts being about delivering integrity."

JG: "'Third-party tested' has become a marketing term. What does independent verification actually mean to you, and why did the TESTED by SuppCo certification appeal to you?"

TB: "Third-party testing is one piece, maybe even a small piece, of complete product verification. And even within that piece, there's a lot of variation in rigor. Not every lab has formulation-specific expertise or validated methods that fit your exact dose form and matrix. But the bigger gap I see in most third-party programs is that they focus on what should be in the product and do almost nothing on what shouldn't be there. Synthetic curcuminoids in turmeric, for example. The USP monograph doesn't even address that. What I love about the TESTED certification is that it builds in the broader picture: manufacturing standards, ingredient attributes, clinical substantiation, transparency, not just a label check. That gives the consumer a much more complete picture of trust."

JG: "Your scientific affairs team is apparently sometimes called 'skeptical affairs.' Where does the science have to be before you'll actually put a claim on a label?"

TB: "That nickname is well earned. Ingredient suppliers are becoming very good marketers, and our marketing team naturally gravitates toward impressive positioning statements. Scientific affairs' job is to ask: is the science as good as the marketing? For something like vitamin C, single entity, abundant data, evaluating the totality of evidence is straightforward. But for something like an ashwagandha root extract, the clinical study means nothing if I don't know what plant part was extracted, what solvent was used, what the withanolide fingerprint looked like. A study on one extract does not transfer automatically to a different extract. So we evaluate the relevance of the evidence, the totality of it, and the quality of it, and then we calibrate how much evidence we need against the magnitude of the claim being made."

JG: "Has there ever been a time when a product didn't pass your internal bar and you had to hold it back?"

TB: "Absolutely. I'd love to say everything goes perfectly, but in quality, we have a saying: every day is a heart attack. The most common issues come up with emerging ingredients or new dose forms. We've delayed launches because we couldn't align with a supplier on test methods and were getting vastly different results on the same active or contaminant, and until you know which result is right, you can't launch. We've also held back products in food-like dose forms where the stability of the actives just wasn't meeting our 18-month shelf life standard. Instead of hoping for the best, we hold them back."

When "Skeptical Affairs" Is a Compliment

Quality and compliance claims from supplement companies are among the easiest things to say and among the hardest things to verify. I see words like "pharmaceutical grade" and "rigorous standards" appear on a lot of labels from a lot of brands… and they might not come with anything concrete behind them.

The "skeptical affairs" nickname stuck with me because it points at something real. Most supplement companies have a scientific affairs function that exists, at least in part, to give marketing a green light. The internal dynamic Travis described is the opposite: a team whose default posture is to assume the supplier's marketing is better than the science, and whose job is to prove otherwise before any claim reaches a label. That posture, specifically naming it as skepticism rather than endorsement, is not how quality functions in this industry are typically positioned.

The nearly 80-person quality team, averaging 12 to 13 years of tenure, suggests it is not just a posture but a stable institutional value.

His point on third-party testing also landed as more sophisticated than many brands manage. The distinction between testing for what should be present versus testing for what should not be present, including adulterants, synthetic substitutes, and contamination profiles tied to known supply chain risks, is exactly the right question to ask. Most companies I speak with have not thought that carefully about it. The acknowledgment that even internal testing can produce misaligned results with supplier test methods, and that the right response is to delay launch rather than push forward, reflects genuine quality culture rather than a polished talking point.

And for what it is worth, a VP of Regulatory Affairs who cannot stop raving about an antihistamine supplement for allergy season has a certain kind of credibility you cannot manufacture.