Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photo: Getty
A few weeks after she started taking a supplement she bought on TikTok, Tamara Bundy woke up feeling awful. She had bought moringa capsules from a brand called Rosabella after the influencers on her feed claimed they would help with inflammation, bloating, weight loss, and “overall wellbeing,” she says. But suddenly she was bedridden and vomiting with cramps so bad they felt like labor pains. Bundy assumed it must have been something she ate — until she saw someone post on TikTok that Rosabella moringa capsules had been recalled owing to possible salmonella contamination and wondered whether her daily vitamin habit could be to blame.
Rosabella moringa isn’t the only supplement suspected of making people sick. Earlier this year, at least 55 people got salmonella after taking Live It Up Super Greens powder — another product containing moringa-leaf powder. Others have been treated for liver damage after taking pills that contained dangerously high doses of turmeric. The FDA recently warned that certain supplements sold on Amazon as tejocote root actually contained yellow oleander, which is poisonous. On Reddit, even supplement enthusiasts wonder whether the 20 capsules they swallow daily could be giving them lead poisoning or why their ashwagandha pills are giving them heart palpitations. Others fret about whether the labels on their bottles are even accurate. One study published in JAMA found that many supplements marketed for sexual enhancement actually included sildenafil — a.k.a. Viagra. Recently, gym bros were outraged after a redditor sent a popular protein powder to a lab for testing and claimed the contents were actually cake mix.
These days, everyone wants to tell you about their “stack” — and it’s not just random influencers on TikTok who want to sell you pills and powders with mystical properties. Naomi Watts has a magnesium blend to “soothe nighttime racing thoughts” during menopause; David Beckham is the co-founder of IM8, a 90-ingredient powder designed to help people achieve “optimal health and longevity”; and Kourtney Kardashian is selling vaginal probiotic gummies. Even doctors and telehealth platforms want you to buy their branded fiber gummies and chocolate protein powder. If it seems like a suspicious number of people on your feed suddenly have their own supplement line, that’s because anyone can start one — no medical expertise or FDA approval required. You don’t even have to tell customers where the supplements you’re selling are made or prove they’re safe.
In fact, some influencers with recently launched supplement brands could have spent just ten minutes on a website. If you Google “How to start your own supplement brand,” it doesn’t take long to find Supliful, one of a handful of new start-ups designed to make the process easier than ever. On Supliful’s website, you can browse its catalogue of over 200 products — everything from creatine powders to NAD+ capsules — which are sitting in its warehouse in blank bottles, waiting for you to slap your own branding on them. In less than an hour, you can start selling your own branded berberine from your Shopify storefront.
Supliful’s founder, Martins Lasmanis, a 37-year-old entrepreneur who recently moved to New York from Latvia, tells me he came up with the idea for the company after trying to launch his own protein shakes and discovering what a headache it was. Finding a manufacturer to make your product used to take “hours and hours of old-school research,” he says. Why bother to vet suppliers when you could sell a ready-made product under your own name? Once you put your label on it, would anyone know the difference?
When I visit Lasmanis at his co-working space in midtown, he’s eager to show me just how hands-off Supliful has made the process. Pulling up the brand’s AI assistant, he starts typing: “Let’s say, ‘I want a supplement to improve sleep without melatonin for busy executives.’” The chatbot recommends a sleep-support supplement, which Lasmanis tells me he plans to sell in his own Shopify storefront. As a side hustle, it’s an easy way to bring in $10,000 a month, he claims. “It’s so low-lift.” He tells me I could start selling my own supplements later that afternoon.
He’s not exaggerating. When I got home, I pulled up Supliful’s catalogue and picked out a few products I’d seen people talk about on social media: magnesium, creatine, and some chocolate libido strips (why not?). From there, Supliful prompted me to design my own label using Canva (Supliful provided the nutritional facts) and link the product to my online storefront. After 20 minutes of teaching myself graphic design, I was ready to start selling my own magnesium-glycinate capsules. When my first customer hit “purchase,” Supliful would put my label on a blank bottle and ship it out from its warehouse in Denver. I’d pay the company $11.65 plus the cost of shipping. I could charge whatever I wanted (the premium supplement brand Thorne sells a similar-looking bottle for $26). All that was left to do was come up with some creative advertising — never mind the fact that I had nothing to do with the product formulation and couldn’t tell you for sure what was in the bottle. In fact, I didn’t even know where the supplements I’d be selling were coming from. Lasmanis would tell me only that they were made at a handful of factories in the U.S. and wouldn’t get more specific.
I’m sure many influencers put more time and thought into launching their signature elixirs than I did. But when you start looking behind the curtain, a lot of supplement brands are just as shady about where their pills come from. There are thousands of supplement manufacturers in the U.S., and they vary widely in terms of quality. Yet it’s rare for brands to disclose where their products are made — never mind where the ingredients are sourced. (Technically, companies don’t even have to tell you when their products were made: The FDA doesn’t require that supplements list an expiration date.) It’s not unusual that “the ingredients are coming in bulk quantities from China and then there’s a warehouse in the U.S. where they’re putting the powder into the pills and the bottles — and no one has any idea what’s actually in the powder,” says Pieter Cohen, a professor at Harvard Medical School who studies supplement safety. While manufacturers are supposed to comply with current good manufacturing practices — a list of rules to ensure sanitary conditions in factories — the FDA only inspects a limited number of factories each year. It also doesn’t require third-party testing before supplements hit the market.
If you want to make sure the contents of your creatine actually match what’s on the label, Cohen says you should look for one certified by either NSF or USP — which means it’s been tested by an independent lab to confirm the ingredients and the dose and screen for heavy metals and other contaminants. (One person I spoke to at NSF told me to beware of vague claims like “third-party tested”: “Anyone can just go and get that label off Google Images.”) Yet going through thorough third-party testing is expensive and time consuming. “Most brands don’t want to do those things because it shrinks their margins,” one supplement maker told me — and there’s no good regulation to prevent them for doing whatever they want and selling it.
Supliful is launching new products each week, like brain-focus powder and methylene blue drops. Lasmanis tells me the company doesn’t have anyone with medical or nutrition expertise on staff. When I ask how it makes sure its product formulations are safe — given that certain ingredients, like melatonin or even turmeric, can be dangerous in the wrong dose — Lasmanis says it relies on its manufacturing partners. When I sent the magnesium I ordered from Supliful to an accredited lab to get it tested, the results showed that it did in fact have a higher dose than the 275 mg. listed on the label. This didn’t exactly reassure me, though Lasmanis said the magnesium levels observed were “normal and expected.” In the future, Supliful even plans to use AI to help users design their own custom formulas.
According to Cohen, all of this is “100 percent legal”: “The way the supplement industry is set up, anyone off the street can sell anything at any dose they want, regardless of any safety concerns.” It doesn’t even matter if they know what they’re selling. Djeffson Athis — a “business-scaling coach” with 25,000 followers on Instagram — has used Supliful to launch two supplement brands with his sister, which he says brought in $500,000 in sales last year. He tells me one of their top-selling products is a supplement that helps stabilize blood sugar — but when I ask what’s in it, he’s not sure. “You’d have to ask my sister; she’s a doctor,” he says. “I’m mostly the marketer — I don’t pay a lot of attention to the ingredients.” When I ask how he determined the supplements he was selling were safe, he tells me he looked at reviews on Google.
Lasmanis says he’s “very confident” in Supliful’s manufacturing process and that they’ve shipped out 2 million products with no health issues so far. But even if someone did have an issue, it’s not clear they’d know that Supliful was to blame. The fitness coaches and influencers who use the company to start their own vitamin lines aren’t required to tell their customers that. When Bundy got sick after taking the moringa capsules, she had no luck getting a refund from TikTok and couldn’t even figure out how to contact the brand. (TikTok declined to comment for this story, and Rosabella didn’t respond to a request for comment.) A week after the recall, the company appeared to still be selling the same supplements. In retrospect, Bundy says, “I just feel really stupid.”
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