A certificate is about one batch and nothing else
This is the part most people skip, and it decides whether the rest of the document means anything.
A batch is a single production run: one filling, on one day, from one set of raw materials. It is given a code, the code is printed on the pack, and everything the laboratory says applies to that code and nothing else. A certificate for a different batch, however clean its numbers, tells you nothing about the bottle in your hand.
So the first thing to do with any certificate is not to read the results. It is to compare the batch on the document with the batch on the pack.
What is actually on the page
The header
A usable certificate names five things before it names a single result: the laboratory, the report number, the date, the sample as received, and the batch. You should be able to copy all five off the header without hunting for them: a named laboratory with a town attached, the report number in full, the date the report was issued, a description of the material the laboratory actually received, and the batch code that sample was drawn from.
Those five make it checkable. A laboratory with a town attached can be looked up. A report number can be quoted back. A date tells you whether this is recent work or a document from three product generations ago. Remove any of the five and the page becomes decoration.
Heavy metals
Four elements appear on almost every food supplement certificate: lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury. Nobody adds them. They occur in soil and water and travel into food through plants and through processing, so the question is never whether they exist but whether they are present above a limit.
The limits are set in law. Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/915 lays down maximum levels for certain contaminants in food, food supplements included. A result only means something when you can see it next to that maximum. A certificate that prints a figure with no limit beside it is asking you to be impressed by a number.
Read all four the same way: find the figure, find the maximum it is being judged against, and check that the maximum is the one that applies to food supplements rather than to food in general. The limits are not the same for every category of food, and a certificate that compares a supplement against the wrong column has answered a different question.
Why “below the reporting limit” is not “zero”
This is the most misread line on any certificate, and it is worth being exact about.
Every analytical method has a floor. Below a certain concentration an instrument can still see something but cannot say reliably how much; below a lower concentration it sees nothing at all. Laboratories express this as a limit of detection and a limit of quantitation, and the figure they report against is usually the second, often called the reporting limit.
So < 0.01 mg/kg means: whatever is there, this method could not measure it above one hundredth of a milligram per kilogram. It does not mean nothing is there. It means nothing was measurable at that sensitivity.
That is not evasion — a laboratory writing “0” would be claiming a precision no instrument has. What you want is the reporting limit printed beside the result, because the two together are the statement. A very low reporting limit with a “below” result is a strong finding. A high one with a “below” result is a much weaker finding wearing the same words.
Microbiology
Two kinds of number appear here and they work differently.
Some organisms are counted. Total viable count, yeasts, moulds: the result is colony-forming units per gram, with a threshold it has to stay under.
Others are tested for presence or absence in a stated mass of sample. Salmonella is the standard example, and the convention set out in Regulation (EC) No 2073/2005 on microbiological criteria for foodstuffs is absence in 25 g. There is no such thing as a low level of salmonella on a certificate. It is found or it is not.
So what you want on the page is the organism named, the mass of sample it was tested in, and a plain found-or-not-found result. Anything vaguer than that is not a microbiological result.
A free-sale certificate is a different document
This is the document most often mistaken for an analysis, and the confusion is worth clearing up.
A certificate of free sale attests that a product may lawfully be placed on the market in the country where it is made. It is a marketability document, used mostly for export. It says the product is legal there. It tests nothing.
Ours was issued on 14 July 2026 by UBF Untersuchungs- und Forschungslaboratorium GmbH in Altlandsberg, Germany, for batch A0206BODDK, against testing report 202607070300. It confirms conformity with Regulation (EU) 2023/915 on contaminants and with Regulation (EC) No 178/2002. What it does not do is print results, which is why it is not a substitute for the analysis. The batch number and the best-before date are printed on the base of the bottle; if you want to know what the analysis says for the batch you were sent, ask by that number.
HACCP, GMP and ISO 22000 certify three different things
These three usually appear in one breath, which makes them look like three grades of one badge. They are not.
HACCP — Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points — is a method: work out where in a process something can go wrong, decide what to measure there, and document what happens when a measurement falls out of range. In the EU it is not optional. Article 5 of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 requires food business operators to put HACCP-based procedures in place. A manufacturer telling you it works to HACCP is telling you it obeys the law. That is a floor, not a distinction.
ISO 22000 is an international standard for a food safety management system. It is certifiable: a third-party certification body audits the site and issues a certificate with a scope and an expiry date. This is the one where a document exists to ask for, and the useful questions are who certified it, for what scope, and when it runs out.
GMP — good manufacturing practice — is the loosest of the three on a food. For medicines, GMP is a statutory regime with inspections by a medicines regulator. For food supplements it is generally a private or industry scheme, and there is more than one. “Made under GMP” is incomplete until you know which scheme and who audited against it.
Our bottles are filled by Brands on Demand UG in Berlin under HACCP, GMP and ISO 22000 certified conditions. We write it that way because that is what the manufacturer certifies. You now know what each of the three words is worth on its own, which is more useful than the sentence.
What a certificate of analysis cannot tell you
- Whether the product does anything. A certificate measures composition and contamination. It has no opinion about effect, and nobody should present it as though it had one.
- Whether your bottle is covered, unless the batch matches.
- Anything that was not tested. A certificate states its scope. Substances outside it were not looked for, and their absence from the page is not a result.
- Whether the sample was representative. It reports on the sample the laboratory received.
Asking for one
Any seller can be asked for the certificate covering a named batch. It is a reasonable question, it costs nothing to answer, and the answer is informative either way — including when there is no answer.
For ours: email office@therapiummed.com with the batch code from your bottle and we will tell you what the report for that batch says — laboratory, report number, and each result against its limit. Not a summary, and not the figures from a different batch.