The Supp Digest | What We've Learned From 20k TrustScores
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.
Back in April, we launched Product TrustScore with a mission to bring transparency to the wild world of supplement quality. This week, we hit a major milestone: over 20,000 TrustScored products across more than 630 different supplement brands.
With all that data in hand, we're focusing this issue of The Digest on the emerging patterns of how products, and our community, are measuring up.
Product TrustScore: 20k Products and Counting
The supplement landscape is vast. There are roughly 70,000 unique products taken across SuppCo’s entire 160k user base, about half of which are stacked by just a single user. (Remember that long tail we keep talking about? We’re telling you, it's real.)
Despite the enormity of this space, the SuppCo team has been working relentlessly to bring TrustScores to the most popular products on the platform. We now have TrustScores for:
90% of products being stacked by at least 100 users
96% of products being stacked by at least 200 users
100% of products being stacked by at least 500 users
Our commitment to bringing transparency to our community is unwavering, and we're continuing to score roughly 1,000 new products every week.
Curious about new scores? You can see a feed of newly released scores in your Product Research Hub.
How Products Are Scoring
Across the 20,000 products we've scored, the average TrustScore is 7.4—classified as "Good" on our rating system. Not terrible, but definitely room for improvement across the industry.
On the extremes of our scale, 19% of products scored "Poor" (below 6), while 11% earned "Excellent" ratings (above 9).
The gap between good and poor products? It all comes down to two critical factors: manufacturing standards and testing protocols.
Every single product scoring Good, Very Good, or Excellent shared these characteristics:
The manufacturer is cGMP certified by a third-party auditing group like NSF or UL
The brand uses third-party lab testing to ensure every batch contains the right ingredients at the right levels—and no undue levels of unwanted guests like contaminants or heavy metals
To jump from Good to Excellent, products went the extra mile with:
Ingredient quality: selecting nutrients with formal efficacy studies, plus non-GMO or organic options when possible
Testing transparency: the highest-scoring brands publish their testing results online, so any consumer can verify quality for themselves
Want to learn more about what cGMP certification is, and the other aspects that go into TrustScore? We have you covered. Check out our Science Corner deep-dive on TrustScore's algorithm.
How Users Are Scoring
Our SuppScore feature examines the average TrustScore of products in every SuppCo user’s stack, and the results reveal something encouraging about our community: their average Product TrustScore came out to 7.7 (Good).
What does that tell us? The 160,000-strong SuppCo community is a discerning group. With users averaging 5-7 products in their stacks, most are choosing Good, Very Good, or Excellent products for their supplement needs.
But there's always room to level up. Of the stacks analyzed, 48% had at least one product with a "Poor" rating (less than 6).
If you're wondering whether that might include you, just head to Your Stack page and review your TrustScores.
And if you need to make a swap? Our Product Research Hub lets you browse supplement categories ranked by TrustScore, making it easy to find high-quality replacements.
TrustScore is Going Deeper
While TrustScore captures 29 different aspects of supplement manufacturing, ingredient selection, and testing, the ultimate test of quality is actually analyzing what's inside the bottle.
That's why we recently launched SuppCo Tested—a new program that enhances Product TrustScore with real-world testing data. We started with creatine, and news of what we’ve found is spreading fast with articles in WIRED, Men’s Fitness, and Athletech (just to name a few!). You can see the full results from the 5 creatine powders and 6 creatine gummies we tested in our latest Science Corner.
Spoiler alert: 4 of the gummies failed our testing.
Sometimes data tells a story you weren't expecting, and we believe that supplement users should know when a product can’t deliver on its promises. In that light, for any product that goes through the SuppCo Tested program and does not pass, we’ll make that clear in our TrustScore overviews going forward.
We believe that the supplement industry has immense potential to drive positive health impacts. But we know there are bad actors out there too, and we’re here to be your partner in making sure the supplements you take are truly in service of your goals.
Call for Topics
Do you have topics or trends you'd like to see covered in this newsletter? Drop us a note using the Feedback feature in your app.
Fresh Additions
Here are a few brands we've added TrustScores for recently that received Very Good (8-9) or Excellent (9+) ratings:
Community
Help grow our community! Know someone who's flying blind with supplement quality? Share SuppCo with them and be their hero this week.