Your dedication demonstrates our industry’s commitment to providing safe, quality product to consumers.
- Are you accurately labeling your caffeine-containing dietary supplements with the total caffeine content (including caffeine from various natural sources like green tea or guarana)?
- When calculating the protein content of your supplements, are you calculating that value based only on nitrogen being contributed from proteins—and not including the values contributed by nonprotein amino acids?
- Are you labeling your probiotic products with a live organism content (such as CFU) and not solely using metric weight? Are they labeled for live organism content through the shelf life of the product?
- If you market melatonin products, does the content stay at or below the 10 mg suggested serving recommendation? If not, do you have independent substantiation for the safety of these higher content products? Do you provide adequate label advisories?
- If you market a multivitamin/mineral supplement intended for pregnant and lactating women in the U.S., do you include a daily serving of at least 150 mcg of iodine?
Because you are a CRN member, hopefully the answer to all these questions is a resounding YES. All of these issues are addressed in various CRN Voluntary Guidelines and Best Practices documents that have been developed and approved by our membership. Each year, when your company renews its membership with CRN, you commit to uphold and support these principles.
So if you aren’t quite sure of your company’s response, or if it has been awhile since you reviewed the CRN Voluntary Guidelines and Best Practiceswebpage, consider this a friendly reminder that now is a good time to confirm your company’s compliance and reaffirm your commitment to self-regulation.
Our members’ dedication to self-regulation has been a defining principle of CRN’s culture. It demonstrates our industry’s commitment to providing safe, quality product to consumers. And the compliance with these programs is often pointed to as a reason for not having government further intrude into the industry with its own burdensome versions of similar requirements.
That’s why it’s so important that all our members periodically review the guidelines and best practices to assure their conformity with them. All our CRN programs can be found here on the CRN website. If you have any questions or concerns about these materials, please contact me, (smister@crnusa.org or 202-204-7676) or Dr. Andrea Wong, our Senior Vice President, Science & Regulatory Affairs (awong@crnusa.org or 202-204-7660).