Inside the Formula | Swanson Does the Homework So You Don't Have To

With Swanson & 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.

Most weeks, Swanson's R&D team is on the phone with 30 to 50 different ingredient vendors. Not once a quarter. Every week. That's the unglamorous part of building a supplement brand: the part that never makes it onto a label, and the part that decides whether anything on that label can be trusted.

Every ingredient goes through two full rounds of vetting before it reaches a benchtop, one from the product team and a second from quality and regulatory.

Swanson now carries the TESTED by SuppCo quality seal of approval and I got a look behind the scenes from people who take true care of their product development and quality. Anushka Chhabria leads R&D at Swanson. She trained in biotech engineering, then food science at Rutgers, and spent time in consumer research at GlaxoSmithKline and formulation work at Universal Nutrition before joining Swanson last September. Kevin Soiseth has spent close to 30 years in quality and regulatory roles across pharmaceuticals, food, and animal health, the last decade of them at Swanson. Between the two of them, they cover the full distance from "here's an interesting ingredient" to "here's a bottle on a shelf."

What follows is what they told me about how Swanson gets there.

(Almost) Nothing Gets Outsourced

Swanson is one of the few brands with a fully in-house infrastructure. Formulation, manufacturing, packaging, and a quality control lab with state-of-the-art instrumentation all sit under one roof, all built to GMP requirements. Kevin's quality unit works directly with manufacturing, packaging, and regulatory instead of handing a product between separate outside companies. Anushka has her own pilot lab on site for development work and troubleshooting. The structure has held up under scrutiny. Kevin said the organization has performed exceptionally well through third-party audits and FDA visits over the past 10 years.

How an Ingredient Earns a Spot on the Label

A new product idea at Swanson can come from anywhere: regulatory, R&D, merchandising, sales. Once an idea surfaces, Anushka's team runs a first round of vetting on the ingredient, looking at the clinical trial evidence behind it, before handing it to Kevin's regulatory team for a second round. The two teams talk through bioavailability and absorption directly with the ingredient's suppliers, then check that a supplier's paperwork matches what they're claiming about the ingredient. Only after that does a product move to benchtop testing, where Anushka's team confirms the delivery format holds up: that a capsule or softgel releases where it's supposed to, stomach versus intestine, matching what the documentation says it should do.

Anushka was direct about where the bar sits. Most ingredients only earn a claim once there are human clinical trials behind them, run on a sample size large enough to hold up scientifically. At Swanson, she said, nothing less is acceptable.

Testing Built Around Risk, Not Assumption

Kevin's team layers controls on top of that vetting: supplier qualification, ingredient specifications, identity and authenticity checks, in-process controls, finished product testing, and third-party testing when it's warranted. What warrants outside testing comes down largely to cost and volume.

If Swanson's own lab can run an analysis at the standard it needs (and usually it can), the work stays in-house. If not, or if an instrument goes down, the sample goes to a fully qualified third-party lab, partly to keep products moving and partly as a check against Swanson's own internal results. Kevin summed up the philosophy directly: put the strongest controls where the risk is, rather than assuming any single test result represents quality.

Betting on Trends Before They Were Trends

Anushka pointed to a handful of categories she and her team are watching closely right now: GLP-1 support products for people using or weaning off GLP-1 medications, protein, berberine, creatine for muscle support, longevity ingredients like NAD+ and NMN, and ashwagandha, which she noted carries centuries of use in Ayurvedic medicine behind its reputation for cognitive support and stress relief.

Kevin’s note: They were doing this before it was popular… Swanson worked on these concepts before they were “trendy.”

"We carried a lot of those products before they were trendy."

Longevity ingredients like NAD+ and NMN carried that label for Swanson long before the word "longevity" turned into a marketing category. The team is now looking at combinations across those ingredients, chasing what Kevin called a synergistic benefit, rather than treating each trend as a standalone product to chase one at a time.

An Ethos Built on One Word

I asked both of them what single idea captures Swanson. Kevin's answer came immediately: integrity. He pointed out that Swanson's products deliver on label claim through the entire dating period assigned to them, and that anyone can verify that themselves by pulling a bottle off a shelf and running the test. He said it happens with real frequency, and the product meets label claims every time.

Anushka agreed without hesitation, then added her own version of it. A customer who buys a Swanson product at a reasonable price should get exactly the benefit the label promises, backed by real clinical trials, without needing to pay more for a competing brand chasing a claim that was never validated in the first place.

I asked them one more question before we wrapped: if there's one thing consumers should take away from all of this, something that never makes it onto a label, what would it be?

"We do the homework for you."

That's the plainest version of what trust and integrity mean for them. A vendor call sheet with 30 to 50 names on it, every week. Two full rounds of vetting before an ingredient ever reaches a benchtop. A quality unit built to catch a problem before a third-party auditor does.

None of that shows up on the packaging (it would look quite cluttered, if so). It's the work that has to happen first, so that what does show up on the label is something a customer can rely on.

I for one am very excited to welcome Swanson to the TESTED community.