Function x SuppCo Deal and What It means for The Industry
Supplements, Supplements, Supplements
The Supplement Industry Just Lost Plausible Deniability
At a recent dinner on longevity, after the usual macro trends and clinic talk, the question landed where it always lands.
What supplements are you taking?
The answer worth giving is the same one worth giving every time the question comes up.
For what?
Three things happened over the past few weeks that mean the question is finally about to matter.
Three moves. One outcome.
1. Function Health acquired SuppCo (May 12, 2026).
SuppCo is the independent supplement verification platform that anonymously buys products off brand websites, ships them to ISO 17025 accredited labs, and posts the results, pass or fail, on a public product page.
TrustScore rates more than 35,000 products on a 10-point scale across 30-plus quality attributes.
In one round of testing, four of six popular creatine gummies on Amazon contained essentially no creatine. Two contained none at all. The failing products had sold more than 50,000 units on Amazon the month before.
Across SuppCo’s broader testing, roughly six in ten products fail basic identity and potency.
That platform now sits inside Function Health, which already runs diagnostic panels for hundreds of thousands of people (and i’m proud to be an early investor in). The watchdog nobody was paying for is now baked into the place people actually look at their numbers!!
2. H.R. 8370, the Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2026 (introduced April 20).
Rep. Maxine Dexter’s bill would create the first mandatory FDA listing regime for supplements.
Every supplement marketed in the U.S. has to register with the FDA.
Within 2 years, the agency builds a public, searchable database of every product, every ingredient, every claim.
Existing products get 18 months to list. Labels eventually carry a listing number.
The bill explicitly does not require pre-market approval, which is exactly why it has a real shot at passing.
3. FDA finalized its updated General Wellness guidance (January 6, 2026).
Wearables that measure blood pressure, glucose, HRV, blood oxygen can now sit in the wellness lane if they do not claim clinical equivalence. WHOOP got a warning letter in July 2025 for crossing that line. The rules are clearer now.
Read those three together. SuppCo inside Function is the consumer-facing verification layer. The Listing Act is the regulatory record. The wellness guidance is the lane control for the hardware on your wrist. The supplement industry just lost plausible deniability.
The boring true thing about blends
Most supplement blends cannot fit clinical doses of their headline ingredients into one capsule. The peer-reviewed sports medicine literature has been pointing this out for years (Burke et al. in Sports Medicine, on the dosing problem in multi-ingredient performance products). Even when an ingredient is well-studied at, say, three grams a day, the blend gives you two hundred milligrams of it on a base that may or may not disintegrate properly in the gut.
The brand is real. The dosing.. that’s another story.
This is the question the TrustScore is about to make legible to a normal consumer for the first time: not “is this product good,” but “does this product deliver what it says, at the dose the studies actually used?”
What supplement partnerships are actually solving
Inside any operator with a member base, gym, clinic, hotel, beauty platform, supplement deals usually solve one of three things:
A revenue line
A retention story
A perceived science gap in the offer
Almost none of them are solving a deficiency. Almost none of them are clinically dosed. The brands that get through a serious procurement filter, that is, the ones that survive on safety, dosing, and supply chain rather than margin, are a small subset of what the consumer sees at retail.
A 1:1 personalized service model breaks the minute the front desk becomes an upsell counter. That is the same structural problem the consumer faces in their own bathroom. The verification layer being built now collapses that asymmetry: the front-desk pitch and the lab report finally live in the same place.
What survives a verification layer
Mono-ingredients with real supply chain authority.
Vitamin D
Magnesium(s)
Creatine monohydrate (ironically, given the gummy story above) etc.
Thorne is the canonical example of a brand built to survive this kind of scrutiny: NSF-certified facility, 40+ NSF Certified for Sport products tested against 270+ banned substances, minimum four rounds of testing per product. That stack is defensible on paper. The TrustScore will reflect it.
Longevity-specific blends only when the trial work is actually there.
NOVOS Core is one of the few longevity-branded products with a registered human trial. Their randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial out of the University of Surrey (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06145087) showed:
+3.4% improvement in endothelial function (FMD)
−8.5 mmHg in systolic blood pressure over six months
The endothelial number is in the range of what sustained HIIT produces in published exercise studies. That is an uncommon result for a multi-ingredient supplement, which is precisely why it is worth pointing at.
What does not survive.
The rest of the longevity supplement aisle, the lifestyle blends, the celebrity-doctor-fronted stacks, the twenty-pill subscription “core” routines, are about to face the database, the TrustScore, and a consumer who can finally see the math.
What this means for the bathroom counter
It gets smaller, more boring, and more honest.
Legacy brands with real supply chain moats survive at scale.
The knock-offs get cleaned up.
Longevity supplements grow, but as a thin fringe on top of a defensible core stack, not as the whole stack.
The category levels up overall. That is good for the consumer. It is good for the science. It is bad for anyone who has been pricing branding into a capsule.
Back to the dinner question. The right one is still for what.
Are you deficient and your blood shows it?
Are you trying to sleep better, recover faster, hit a specific number?
Start there. Take the data. Then look at the product.
Now, for the first time, the data and the product finally meet in the same app.
Stop paying for expensive pee.
CTA
What is actually in the bottle on your counter? Take a photo, look it up, see what the TrustScore says. If something on the shelf surprises you, tell me. The group chat that swears by their twelve-pill stack probably needs this one more than you do.
Subscribe, share, see you next week.
References
Function Acquires SuppCo to Bring Trust and Clarity to Supplements. PR Newswire, May 12, 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/function-acquires-suppco-to-bring-trust-and-clarity-to-supplements-302769718.html
SuppCo. Creatine Reality Check: The Failures We Found When Testing Popular Products (lab analysis, four of six gummies failed). https://supp.co/articles/suppco-tested-creatine-testing-results-gummies-failed-lab-analysis
SuppCo. Product TrustScore methodology (10-point scale, 30+ quality attributes, 35k+ products). https://supp.co/trustscore/about/product-trustscore
H.R. 8370 - Dietary Supplement Listing Act of 2026, 119th Congress, introduced April 20, 2026. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8370/text
FDA. General Wellness: Policy for Low Risk Devices, final guidance, January 6, 2026. https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/general-wellness-policy-low-risk-devices
Burke, L.M., et al. (2017, with subsequent updates). Practical Issues in Evidence-Based Use of Performance Supplements. Sports Medicine, 47(Suppl 1). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-017-0687-1
NOVOS Core Clinical Trial Reveals Cardiovascular Benefits in Aging Adults. PR Newswire; trial registered as NCT06145087, University of Surrey. https://novoslabs.com/blog/supplements/novos-core-clinical-trial-results-longevity-supplement/
Thorne. Unparalleled Quality (NSF Certified for Sport program, 270+ banned substances tested). https://www.thorne.com/quality
Crawford, C., et al. (2024). Label Accuracy and Quality of Select Weight-Loss Dietary Supplements. PubMed: 39770990. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39770990/
Well done!!