The California-based contract testing lab also announced it has enhanced its heavy metals testing capabilities for products with higher serving sizes such as beverages and scooped powders, and is now offering astaxanthin testing per the USP monograph.
“For years clients have said they wished Alkemist could meet all their testing needs so they could be as confident in all aspects of testing as they are in botanical and fungal identity, and we heard them,” Sudberg said. “Although it takes time to acquire new instrumentation, develop and validate test methods, and then get all that included in our ISO accreditation, this is a great achievement. I’m proud of the Alkemist staff for this expansion, and excited to meet our clients’ needs in so many new areas.”
A full list of the expanded testing capabilities can be found HERE.
HealthLOQ
Speaking to NutraIngredients-USA, Sudberg also discussed the company’s implementation of a blockchain-based document protection software by HealthLOQ that protects its certificates of analysis (COAs) against counterfeits and unauthorized tampering.
Sudberg first sounded the alarm bell several years ago about counterfeit COAs circulating in the industry, and the new partnership with HealthLOQ allows the company to protect almost 300,000 historical COAs from would-be bad actors, while protecting client confidentiality.
Original, authentic documents are processed through an irreversible one-way encryption within the Alkemist Labs server environment, resulting in a unique “digital fingerprint” of the document, explained the company. This digital fingerprint is then stored on an unalterable blockchain ledger and is perpetually available for comparison against the digital fingerprint of any purported authentic documents that have been processed by the same encryption algorithm.
“There’s now a mechanism through our website to allow them [our clients] to check a COA in their possession,” Sudberg said. “To be clear, there’s no data behind it… HealthLOQ don’t have results from all of our clients’ analysis, it’s more like a really detailed map of [all of COAs]. It can pick up on a question mark change, or a small number change very quickly and easily [which would indicate counterfeiting].”
Watch the full video for more from Sudberg on the expanded testing capabilities and the HealthLOQ protection of COAs.
