Source of Truth – The Claim

Most of the vitamin D3 in the world is not vegan and was never intended to be. Conventional cholecalciferol is extracted from lanolin, the waxy grease recovered from sheep wool. It is effective, inexpensive, and found in a very large proportion of the supplements on the shelf today. Nobody in the industry is confused about this.

The plant-source alternative exists because a growing number of brands need to make a vegan claim they can stand behind. Plant-source vitamin D3 is the same molecule, cholecalciferol, produced without animal input at any stage. For a vegan supplement brand, it is not a refinement. It is the difference between a claim that holds and a claim that does not.

Which is why what we have seen in the market this year is worth stopping for.

First, why vitamin D3 and why now.

Between roughly October and early March, the sun across the UK and northern Europe does not carry enough UVB for the body to make vitamin D from sunlight. It is not a matter of how much time somebody spends outdoors. At this latitude, the ultraviolet is not present for around five months of the year. NHS advice is therefore that everyone aged one and over should consider taking a daily supplement containing 10 micrograms (400 IU) throughout the autumn and winter, because food alone rarely provides enough. UK Biobank data across roughly 450,000 adults shows the effect directly, with 38 to 46 per cent below 50 nmol/L in summer and autumn, rising to 68 to 71 per cent in winter and spring.

So, this is a category in which a large part of the population is being told, with good reason, to take a supplement during the darker half of the year. Which raises the stakes considerably on whether that supplement is what it says it is.

A vegan claim with animal testing behind it.

A vitamin D3 ingredient marketed as vegan has animal-testing data attached. Not historic data from a different era of the industry, and not something buried in a regulatory file nobody was meant to read. It has been published, used to support the ingredient commercially, and continues to be promoted to vegan and cruelty-free brands.

We are not naming the ingredient or the company, and we are not going to. This is not a campaign about one supplier. It is about a category in which a claim can move through a supply chain faster than the evidence supporting it, arriving at a consumer entirely intact.

This is not a technicality.

It would be easy to file this under paperwork, the kind of discrepancy resolved quietly between two companies that never troubles anybody else. It is not that, for one straightforward reason.

Vegan certification schemes prohibit animal testing. It is not an optional module or a premium tier of the standard. It is a condition of the certification itself, written into the policies of the certifiers whose marks appear on finished products. An ingredient cannot satisfy that condition and carry animal testing data at the same time. If both exist, one of them is not what it appears to be.

How a claim outruns its evidence.

Consider the chain as it actually works.

• An ingredient is manufactured, and at some point in its development, testing takes place.
• A certificate is issued based on a submission.
• A brand buys the ingredient and buys the certificate with it because that is what the certificate is for.
• The brand prints vegan on the front of the pack, and cruelty-free alongside it, because as far as the brand knows, both are true.
• A consumer picks the product up and trusts the brand.

Every link in that chain trusted the link before it. Not one of them behaved unreasonably. And at the end of it, a consumer who cares enough about this issue to pay more for it has been told something that does not hold.

The brand carries that. Not the ingredient supplier, and not the certifier. The brand, whose name is on the pack and whose customer it is.

Why this matters now.

Vitamin D3 is about to enter its busiest quarter, for the reasons set out above. Demand climbs from October and holds through to early spring, and for a great many supplement brands it is one of the few genuinely seasonal lines in the range. That makes now the moment these questions are worth asking, before the season is underway and the stock is already moving. Nobody wants to discover a sourcing problem halfway through their most important selling period.

The question is not whether your supplier holds a certificate. Almost all of them do. The question is whether you know what the certificate is built on, and whether you could show that to a customer who asked.

Where we stand.

ProTec Nutra has never conducted, commissioned, or supported animal testing on any product in our range, including Vitamin D3V^®, our plant-source vitamin D3. That is not a position adopted in response to this issue. It is how the business has always operated, and we will confirm it in writing to any customer who asks.

Over the next three weeks, we will set out what a vegan certification commits a supplier to, where genuine plant-source vitamin D3 comes from, and the five questions we think every buyer should put to any supplier, ourselves included.

To discuss plant-source Vitamin D3V^® for your next formulation, or to request our written animal testing policy, speak to the ProTec Nutra team.