Varsity Stack is now officially working with INFORMED, the LGC backed family of independent testing and certification programmes used across the sports nutrition industry.
For an athlete, what is printed on a label is worth reading. It is just not the whole story.
Contamination can happen during manufacturing. A prohibited substance can be present without ever appearing on the panel. And under strict liability, an athlete who never knew it was there is still responsible for it.
That is the gap independent testing exists to narrow, and it is why Informed Sport has become part of how serious programmes manage supplement risk. Through this partnership we are working to make that certification information easier for athletes and sports nutrition staff to find, understand and act on.
Sixty years of anti doping science
The laboratory behind INFORMED is LGC, whose site in Cambridgeshire is one of the world's leading sports doping control and supplement testing laboratories, with more than 60 years of experience in anti doping and supplement analysis. [1]
LGC, previously trading as HFL Sport Science, was accredited by WADA and the IOC for testing athlete samples between 2004 and 2007. As it became clear that athletes were failing tests because of contaminated supplements rather than deliberate use, the company turned that same analytical capability toward the supplements themselves. It has been testing supplements for prohibited substances since 2002 and has run hundreds of thousands of product and ingredient samples since. [2]
Informed Sport was established in 2008 to turn that testing into a certification programme built specifically for elite and drug tested populations. It has since certified more than 3,000 unique products sold in over 127 countries. [3]
Inside an LGC laboratory. Photo courtesy of LGC.
All five programmes, and what each one actually covers
Our partnership is with INFORMED as a whole, so it is worth laying out the full set before going deep on the one athletes care about most. There are five programmes, and they are not tiers of the same certificate. They check different things at different points in the supply chain, and they are usually held by different companies.
1. Informed Ingredient works furthest upstream. It screens raw materials and ingredients against the same list of more than 285 banned substances, so a problem is caught before it is ever formulated into a finished product. [6]
2. Informed Manufacturer certifies the facility rather than anything made in it. A site's quality management systems are reviewed, then the facility itself is swab tested for banned substances on a routine basis, screened to parts per billion. Certified facilities now sit in more than 10 countries. [7]
This is the seal most often over read, so it is worth being blunt about. A facility holding Informed Manufacturer certification is not the same as every product made there being Informed Sport certified. Good rooms lower the odds. They do not test the tub.
3. Informed Sport tests finished products, and it is the programme built for drug tested athletes. Every batch is tested before it is released for sale. The rest of this article is mostly about this one. [4]
4. Informed Choice also tests finished products, but by monitoring retail rather than testing every batch. It is the programme people most often mistake for Sport, and the difference is worth its own section below. [4]
5. Informed Protein sits outside that chain, because it asks a different question. Not whether a product is contaminated, but whether the protein claimed on the label is actually in the tub. It checks total protein alongside free amino acid content and a targeted screen for common adulterants, the things behind what the industry calls amino spiking and nitrogen spiking. [8]
So the first four are a chain and the fifth is a separate check. A single tub can sit downstream of all four, and each link is a different certificate held by a different company: the ingredient supplier, the contract manufacturer, and the brand on the label.
Informed Sport: every batch, tested
For a drug tested athlete, one feature separates Informed Sport from most certification on the market.
Every certified finished product batch is tested before it is released for sale. [4]
Not one test of a formula followed by a permanent logo. Every batch, including flavour and format variants, before it goes anywhere near a shelf.
Getting there takes two stages. First INFORMED reviews the product and the operation behind it: quality systems and audits, staff training on cross contamination prevention, raw materials, supplier assessment procedures, and traceability and recall processes. Then a minimum of three finished product samples go to the LGC laboratories for pre certification testing using the ISO 17025 accredited prohibited substances screen. [5]
Two details from the ongoing programme are worth knowing, because they are what stop certification from becoming a rubber stamp:
- An extra unit of every tested batch is kept in secure storage at the LGC laboratory for that product's shelf life. If a question comes up later, there is a retained sample to go back to. [5]
- Blind retail testing continues after certification. The programme team buys the product from actual shops and websites and tests it again, rather than relying only on what the manufacturer sends in. The schedule starts at between one and four blind purchases a year depending on batch volume, easing to a minimum of one per year once a product has built a testing history. [5]
What the screen actually looks for
LGC routinely screens supplements for more than 285 compounds that are prohibited in sport or considered a contamination risk: drugs of abuse, anabolic agents, stimulants, beta 2 agonists, diuretics, and new and emerging threats as they appear. [1]
The testing methods are accredited to ISO/IEC 17025, the international standard for laboratory competence, granted by UKAS under laboratory number 1187. LGC has held that accreditation for supplement analysis since 2003, and validates each compound against the product matrix before adding it to the core screen. [1]
That last part matters more than it sounds. Anti doping relevant contamination happens at concentrations most people cannot picture, and finding it in a protein powder is a different analytical problem from finding it in a capsule.
Nothing is "WADA approved"
If you take one piece of vocabulary from this article, take this one.
WADA does not approve, certify or test dietary supplements. LGC says so directly: WADA does not control the quality or the claims of the supplements industry, which may from time to time claim its products have been approved or certified by WADA. There is no such thing as a WADA test for a supplement. [2]
What Informed Sport does is independently test supplements against a broad range of substances on the WADA Prohibited List, and lists used in professional and collegiate sport, using its own accredited methods. That is a meaningful thing. It is not the same claim, and a brand that makes the other one is telling you something about itself.
Informed Sport is not Informed Choice
These two get mixed up constantly, and for a drug tested athlete the difference is the whole point.
Informed Sport tests every batch before it goes to market. [4]
Informed Choice is a retail monitoring programme, established in 2007, that works through regular blind testing. At least twelve lots are bought and tested at random each year, on a monthly schedule, and the batches that were tested are published. But unlike Informed Sport, there is no guarantee that the batch you are holding was one of them. [4]
Informed Choice is real quality assurance and useful for an active consumer. Informed Sport was built around the needs of people who get tested. If you compete under NCAA rules or any other anti doping programme, that distinction should decide which logo you look for.
Why the batch number matters
Here is the step almost everybody skips.
A logo on the packaging tells you the product line is in the programme. It does not, by itself, tell you about the container in your hand.
INFORMED publishes every batch tested product in a searchable database, and you can search it by batch number, brand name, product name and formulation. Their own recommendation is to verify the batch number before using a product. [2]
Which changes the question from:
"Is this brand certified?"
to:
"Has the exact batch in my hand been tested?"
For one athlete that is a thirty second check. For a sports nutrition department responsible for a few hundred products across a roster, it is the difference between a policy and a practice.
What certification does not do
No programme should be sold as permission to stop thinking.
The NCAA is blunt about it: there are no NCAA approved dietary supplements, supplements may contain banned substances that are not disclosed on the label, and student athletes have lost eligibility this way. Athletes are told to review any product with the appropriate athletics staff before using it. [9]
Third party certification is not a guarantee that an athlete cannot test positive. It is an additional layer of independent evidence, and evidence collected by a laboratory that tested the actual batch is the strongest kind available to a consumer.
Bringing INFORMED verification into Varsity Stack
INFORMED does the hard scientific part: testing and certifying ingredients, facilities, products and batches. What tends to get lost is the last few feet, between a certification database and an athlete standing in a kitchen at 6am.
Right now closing that gap means knowing five programmes exist, knowing which one applies to sport, finding the right database, and matching the container in your hand against an online record. Most athletes will not do that. Most staff cannot do it hundreds of times.
Varsity Stack is working to make that check part of one supplement workflow instead of a separate errand. An athlete identifies a product. Certification sits next to the ingredients and the product details rather than in another tab. The exact product can be shared with sports nutrition staff, who can approve or flag it and keep visibility into what athletes are actually taking.
The goal is not to replace certification bodies. It is to make the work they already do reachable at the moment a supplement decision actually gets made.
Because knowing the product name is useful. Knowing the certification is better. Knowing the exact batch in your hand was tested is better still.
About the partnership
Varsity Stack and INFORMED are officially working together to make trusted third party certification information more accessible inside the athlete supplement management experience. You can learn more about the programmes at Informed Sport.
If you want the other side of this picture, we covered what BSCG certification means for athletes in a companion article.
Download Varsity Stack to check and track the products you actually take, or request access for your program.
This article is for educational purposes only. Consult a qualified healthcare provider, registered dietitian, or your athletics compliance staff before starting any supplement regimen. Third party testing reduces risk but cannot guarantee that a supplement is appropriate for a particular athlete or eliminate all risk. For questions about specific governing body rules, consult your athletic compliance officer.
Sources
- INFORMED, Science and Testing: sport.wetestyoutrust.com
- INFORMED, Frequently Asked Questions: sport.wetestyoutrust.com
- INFORMED, About Informed Sport: sport.wetestyoutrust.com
- INFORMED, Informed Sport vs Informed Choice: sport.wetestyoutrust.com
- INFORMED, The Certification Process: sport.wetestyoutrust.com
- INFORMED, Informed Ingredient: ingredient.wetestyoutrust.com
- INFORMED, Informed Manufacturer: manufacturer.wetestyoutrust.com
- INFORMED, Informed Protein: protein.wetestyoutrust.com
- NCAA, FAQs About NCAA Banned Substances and Medical Exceptions Procedures: ncaa.org
- LGC: lgcgroup.com
