Vitamin Shoppe

The Vitamin Shoppe has announced the withdrawal of its women's multivitamin product from store and online sale while it investigates the cause of allegedly high lead content from ConsumerLab.com.
The review of multivitamin/multimineral products from ConsumerLab has attracted considerable interest from mainstream media. The singling out of Vitamin Shoppe's product has caused consternation from some in the industry who called on the retailer to take swift action to minimise potential damage to the category as a whole.
"Negative publicity won't go away until we, as an industry, engage in self-regulation and help ensure that current government regulation is enforced," the Council for Responsible Nutrition's vice president for communications, Judy Blatman, told NutraIngredients-USA.
CEO Tom Tolworthy said the company has asked its contract manufacturer and an independent scientific lab to conduct separate tests on the product.
"Using a scientifically valid testing methodology is absolutely necessary to achieve reliable results."
However this was disputed by Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab, who told NutraIngredients-USA: "Anyone can access our testing methods."
"Every problem we report is confirmed in two separate laboratories and the identity of the product was blinded to both," said Cooperman. The Vitamin Shoppe was not able to provide NutraIngredients-USA with further comment in time for this article.
"Because we've never seen such a high content of lead in a vitamin or mineral supplement before, we've only seen it with herbals."
ConsumberLab said it randomly selected 21 products that were then independently tested. "All Vitamin Shoppe products are manufactured in compliance with the Food and Drug Administration's Good Manufacturing Practices for food and highest industry standards," said Tolworthy. In Cooperman's opinion sufficient self-regulation is enough for dietary supplement manufacturers to avoid running into any such problems and he refuted the Vitamin Shoppe's defense that it uses Good Manufacturing Practices.
This newest wave of negative attention began with reviews of a recently released book - Natural Causes by Dan Hurley - which allegedly slams regulation of the supplement industry. The main trade associations have also stressed that the supplement industry needs to present a credible face through increased publicity.
For instance in 2006, the CRN announced its intention to armor a multimillion dollar industry-wide project to counter a proliferation of bad news on the industry. Similarly, the Dietary Supplement Education Alliance (DSEA), a industry coalition, this week announced a paid advertising campaign aimed at building consumer confidence in dietary supplements.