Walmart, GNC, and other major supplement retailers are joining forces in the war against dangerous health supplements.
Together, these retailers have created the Supplement Safety & Compliance Initiative (SSCI). The news was announced on Walmart’s blog last summer, although further details were released this week:
“SSCI brings some of the largest retailers, raw material manufacturers and suppliers, dietary supplement manufacturers and other stakeholders together to assist in strengthening safeguards and helping to ensure regulatory compliance from harvest to retailer shelf.”
The Natural Products Association, which is a major force in the grocery industry, is also part of SSCI. Other founding members include Whole Foods and The Vitamin Shoppe.
“The goal of SSCI is to recognize and help ensure various safety and manufacturing standards provide greater assurance throughout the supply chain. Agreeing upon common standards is a critical piece in the initiative and a process that is proven to be effective with enhancing consumer safety.”
What Does The Movement Home To Accomplish?
The ultimate goal of the movement is to improve the health and nutrition of consumers everywhere – which is similar to the goal of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) when it first launched back in 2000. The GFSI was created by members of the food industry who wished to collaborate to promote harmonized food safety management across the industry.
The SSCI has a similar goal: it wants to promote consumer health while also implementing standardized safety practices industry-wide. Those safety practices include the following specific goals:
Reduce supplement safety risks, recalls, and harms by delivering equivalence and convergence between effective supplement safety management systems. In other words, companies like Walmart and GNC already have some sort of supplement safety system in place, but the systems can become more efficient by joining forces.
Develop core competencies and capacity building in supplement safety to create effective global systems.
Drive global change through benchmarking of all standards, domestic and international.
Develop a unique stakeholder platform that allows for collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and networking across the supplement industry.
Manage costs by eliminating redundancy in certification and improving operational efficiency.
Increase the number of qualified auditors available to manufacturers, further increasing consumer safety.
Address the myriad of standards available globally by allowing various schemes in the international community to benchmark their standard to one overarching standard. This is designed to solve the problem where supplements abide by different standards in different counties, leaving consumers utterly confused as to what standard “matters more”.
Create a tiered structure that accommodates the unique needs of small ingredient suppliers (like those who sell organic, wildcrafted herbs) along with manufacturers and retailers.
The movement will focus on all levels of the supplement industry, including everything from “pre-processing of plants” to farm production to packaging.
What Does This Mean For Shoppers?
Will this have any effect on your shopping experience? Will it meaningfully change the way you buy supplements?
Well, Walmart’s store-brand supplements already require third-party auditing and certification. With SSCI, however, similar standards will be adopted throughout the supply chain, which means all supplements sold in-store will go through additional auditing. As the blog post linked above explains,
“SSCI will ensure they meet our stringent expectations and a recognized high standard through the supply chain.”
The specific details of the SSCI have not been released. However, the goal is to create a unified certification platform that should make it easier to assess the value of supplements you’re using.
So instead of just trusting some manufacturer when they call their turmeric supplement “organic”, you can see that it’s “SSCI Certified Organic”. That’s the goal here.
The founding members of the SSCI include The Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, Whole Foods, and Walmart – so supplements sold by these retailers should be among the first affected.
Walmart summed up the blog post by calling SSCI a “bold step forward for the dietary supplement industry”, and expressed a wish for other major retailers and stakeholders to join the movement.
If the SSCI is successful, it will have a profound impact on the way we compare, review, and buy dietary supplements around the world.
