For our Partners In Wellness Week we are going to be publishing some short interviews and vendor profiles to give more insight into our vendors - because it’s not just what we carry that’s important to us, it’s who we carry as well. For a list of vendor demos this week, visit our calendar. We use three top manufacturers for our Cambridge Naturals brand supplements: Reliance, Vitality Works, and Vitamer Labs. All three offer the highest quality sourcing and manufacturing and each one offers something unique for us and our customers. The first in our series of profiles is Reliance, written by Zach, our supplements manager.
Established in 1978, Reliance is a privately owned dietary supplements manufacturer making some of the highest quality products we carry. You'll recognize the green ginkgo Cambridge Naturals brand label in our store - many of these supplements are made for us by Reliance. What makes them high quality? For starters, Reliance is NSF Certified for Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMP) and is NSF Certified for Sport, meaning that their facilities, processes, etc. have been independently certified to follow the highest standards. On top of that their NSF dual-certifications, Reliance is Certified for CGMPs by the Natural Products Association (NPA), the leading industry body for natural products of all sorts.
These certifications aren’t just for show and they definitely aren’t given to just any company. To get these certifications, companies must go through a rigorous, in-depth evaluation which includes evaluations of ingredient sourcing, product testing (both during manufacturing and of finished products), and even record keeping. The fact that Reliance has these certifications means that their products always contain what’s on the label and never contain any unlabeled adulterants.
From Reliance: "You can observe a Quality team member utilizing advanced HPLC instrumentation to verify the purity and potency of products in our Quality Lab. In addition to our in house lab, we utilize independent labs for the analysis of finished products."
While we definitely choose our companies based on the quality products they can offer us and our customers, we also take into account what each company offers its stakeholders beyond a physical product. Reliance is a partner of Vitamin Angels, an organization that “provides life saving vitamins to mothers and children under five at risk of malnutrition, reducing preventable illness, blindness, and death and creating a healthier world.” Vitamin Angels is active in over 50 countries worldwide and reaches over 48 million children and mothers with their efforts.
We are proud to work with Reliance to make our private label products, and believe they offer some of the highest quality supplements out there. Ask us about our Cambridge Naturals brand and we're happy to show you some of our favorite items!
From Reliance: "You are looking on as one of our Quality Lab technicians prepares a sample."
(For an added bonus, check out this video from Dr. Brent Bauer, MD, the director of the Mayo Clinic Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program on ‘How To Choose The Right Supplements’ where he calls out the NSF CGMP certification as one of the essential certifications to look for in dietary supplements and dispels some of the myths about dietary supplement regulation.)