Why Element5 Publishes Every Test Certificate — And Most Brands Don't

When you’re putting something into your body every day, you deserve to know exactly what’s in it. Not a marketing claim. Not a badge on a website. The actual documentation.

Element5 publishes every batch test certificate publicly on our product pages. Here’s why — and why so few other brands do the same.

“Third Party Tested” Has Become a Marketing Tactic

Spend five minutes browsing the NMN supplement market and you’ll see “third party tested” on almost every product page. It’s become a standard claim — the kind of thing brands add because it sounds credible, not because it represents a genuine commitment to transparency.

The problem is that “third party tested” means almost nothing on its own. It tells you a test happened at some point. It doesn’t always tell you:

If a brand is genuinely proud of their testing, they’ll show you the certificates. If they can’t — or won’t — that should tell you something.

One Test Is Not the Same as Every Batch

This is where the gap between marketing and reality becomes significant. Some brands do commission a genuine third party test. Once. On one batch. Then they use that result indefinitely — on every product listing, in every marketing campaign — regardless of whether subsequent batches were ever tested.

Manufacturing is not static. Suppliers change. Raw material sources shift. Contamination can enter at any stage of production. A test result from two years ago, on a different batch, from a potentially different supplier, tells you very little about what’s in the capsule you’re holding today.

If you’re looking at a brand’s test certificates, check the dates. Check the batch numbers. If you can’t find them, or if the same document keeps appearing regardless of what you’re buying, you’re looking at a certificate used for marketing — not a genuine quality assurance process.

Why Don’t More Brands Do It Properly?

Comprehensive, batch-by-batch independent testing is expensive. For every production run, Element5 commissions five separate documents:

Multiplied across every batch, this represents a meaningful cost — one that many brands choose not to absorb (or simply cannot afford, because it is expensive), because the market doesn’t always reward transparency over the appearance of it.

Cutting testing costs is a straightforward way to protect margin. And as long as customers can’t easily verify what “third party tested” actually means in practice, there’s limited commercial pressure to do more.

Why We Do It

Element5 was founded because our founders faced the same problem every supplement consumer faces: they didn’t know who to trust.

The supplement industry is largely unregulated compared to pharmaceuticals. Brands can make claims that are difficult to verify. Products can easily be mislabelled. Purity can vary dramatically between suppliers and between batches. And the people buying these products — people who care about their health, who are making real decisions about what they put into their bodies every day — often have no way of knowing what they’re actually getting.

That uncertainty was the starting point for Element5. Not a market opportunity. A genuine problem that needed a genuine answer.

The answer we arrived at was simple: complete transparency. If you’re buying Element5 NMN, you should be able to verify exactly what’s in it. Not because we say so — because you can read the same documents we have, for the exact batch number on your product.

What You Can Actually Verify

Every Element5 product page includes the test certificates for each batch. With your batch number, you can confirm:

This isn’t a marketing claim. It’s a document you can read.

The Standard We’d Like to See Everywhere

We’re not the only supplement brand that takes testing seriously. But we’d like to see the bar raised across the industry — because consumers deserve to be able to trust what they’re taking.

If you’re buying any supplement, NMN or otherwise, ask the brand for the batch-specific test certificate for your product. If they can’t provide one, or if the date on the document predates your purchase by years, you have your answer.