Who Makes Nutricost? Budget Brand Under the Hood

This is a UV Brand File: a plain-language dossier on who actually makes a supplement brand, who owns it, and what its public quality record shows. Our method is simple. Every claim below is either verified against a source we pulled this session or flagged as not disclosed, and for Nutricost the "not disclosed" pile turned out to be the story.

Quick facts

Who actually makes it

Flip over a Nutricost bottle and read the fine print near the barcode. On the Magnesium+ Extra Strength label and the Creatine Monohydrate powder label, both hosted on the brand's own site as of August 2026, the distributor line reads "Manufactured for: Nutricost, 351 E 1750 N, Vineyard, UT 84059." That single word "for" is the whole answer. Under FDA labeling rules, "Manufactured by" means the named company ran the machines. "Manufactured for" or "Distributed by" means somebody else did.

So Nutricost products come out of contract factories, and Nutricost does not say which ones. The company's own quality page states that products are "made in an FDA-registered, GMP-compliant facility" and "go through third-party testing to meet safety and quality standards" on its mission and guarantee page. Notice what is missing from that sentence: a name, a location, an inspection report, any way for you to check. An FDA-registered facility is a low bar, not a credential. Registration means the plant told the FDA it exists, which every US food facility must do by law. It is not an audit, and the FDA does not publish the registry for you to confirm it.

This is worth one general lesson, because it works on any brand. The BY versus FOR check takes ten seconds in a store aisle and instantly separates companies that own their production from companies that buy it. Neither model is automatically bad. NOW Foods runs its own plants, while plenty of respected brands use contract manufacturers and then publish lot-specific COAs to close the trust gap. Nutricost does neither of those things, which is what pushes it to the bottom of our transparency scale rather than the middle.

History and ownership

Nutricost tells no origin story. There is no about page, no founder bio, no company history anywhere on nutricost.com that we could find. What we can reconstruct comes from archived pages and court paperwork.

The Wayback Machine shows nutricost.com was a parked ad page in June 2013. By February 2015 it was a multi-brand discount retailer with the tagline "Where Our Price is Your Price," selling other companies' pre-workouts and fat burners. By January 2018 the site had flipped into a single-brand Nutricost storefront. The brand grew out of a supplement reseller, not a lab or a factory, which fits the contract-manufacturing model on its labels today.

The corporate names are where it gets murky. The current terms of service and privacy policy on nutricost.com both identify the operating company as Advantage Nutraceuticals, LLC, with addresses in Orem and Vineyard, Utah. Meanwhile, every consumer lawsuit we found from 2022 through 2025 names the defendant as eSupplements, LLC dba Nutricost, a Utah limited liability company at the same Vineyard address. Two different LLC names stand behind one brand, and Nutricost explains the relationship nowhere that we could find.

One more layer came out through litigation. In a corporate disclosure statement filed December 5, 2022 in a California federal case, eSupplements, LLC identified its corporate parent as MAK Holdings, LLC. Who owns MAK Holdings is not publicly disclosed. No people are named on the website, and we are not going to guess. For a brand that moves this much product through Amazon and Walmart, that is an unusually anonymous setup, and it is exactly the kind of thing our full Nutricost review flagged from the consumer side.

Testing and quality record

Every Nutricost label carries three bullet points: Third Party Tested, Non-GMO, Gluten-Free, each with a small dagger symbol. The product pages expand the first one to say products are "tested by an independent, accredited lab to help verify that what's on the label is what's in the bottle." The lab is never named, and no test results are ever shown.

We went looking for the paper trail a claim like that should leave. There is no COA library on the site. The FAQ page covers returns, shipping claims, and subscription cancellations, and does not mention certificates of analysis, testing, or manufacturing even once. We also found no Nutricost products in the USP Verified, NSF, or Informed Sport certification programs, and the brand does not claim any of those marks on the labels we reviewed. The entire testing story rests on the company's word. Some shoppers report emailing support to request COAs for specific lots; we could not verify what, if anything, gets sent back, so treat that route as unconfirmed.

To be fair about the other side of the ledger: Nutricost formulas are usually short and honest in structure. Single ingredients, standard doses, hypromellose capsules, minimal excipients. The creatine line even offers a Creapure version, which means the raw material comes from a branded German source, though an ingredient trademark is not the same thing as finished-product certification. Cheap and simple is a real virtue, and it is why the brand keeps showing up in our budget supplement stack despite everything else in this file.

Recalls, warning letters, lawsuits

We checked the public enforcement record three ways on August 10, 2026. Searches of the FDA recall database via the openFDA enforcement API returned no recalls under Nutricost or eSupplements. The FDA warning letter database returned zero results for Nutricost, eSupplements, and Advantage Nutraceuticals. On the regulatory side, the record is clean as far as public databases show. The usual caveat applies: these databases list actions the agency took and posted, not everything inspectors ever saw.

The civil courts are a different story. Here is what the dockets show, with the reminder that allegations are claims, not proven facts.

The big one is Cohen v. eSupplements, LLC, a proposed class action filed August 25, 2023 in federal court in New York, case 2:23-cv-06387. The plaintiffs allege that Nutricost's Magnesium Glycinate capsules, labeled 420 mg per two-capsule serving, could not physically contain that much magnesium from glycinate. Their math: magnesium glycinate is roughly 14 percent elemental magnesium, so 420 mg of elemental magnesium would require about 3,000 mg of the compound, far more than two size 00 capsules can hold. The NIH magnesium fact sheet they cite notes that the Supplement Facts panel declares elemental magnesium, not the weight of the whole compound. If the label was right about the element, the complaint argues, it had to be wrong about the source.

A companion case, Kurtz v. Nutricost, was filed in Ohio in June 2024 and made a further allegation: that after the Cohen suit landed, Nutricost renamed the product "Magnesium+ Extra-Strength" and quietly added magnesium oxide to the ingredient line. We verified the current state ourselves. The old magnesium glycinate product URL on nutricost.com now redirects to Magnesium+ (Extra Strength), and the current label art discloses "Magnesium (as magnesium oxide, magnesium glycinate)" at the same 420 mg dose. The relabeling happened; why it happened is the contested part. The Kurtz case was stayed, then dismissed without prejudice by agreement in October 2024, and Kurtz joined Cohen as a co-plaintiff. eSupplements answered the amended complaint in November 2024 without any court ruling that the claims are true, discovery ran through 2025, and the docket still showed filings as of July 2026. No court has decided the merits as of this writing.

Earlier, Scheibe v. eSupplements, LLC dba Nutricost, filed November 2022 in California, alleged that Nutricost's EAA and pre-workout powders omitted required calorie declarations. That case ended May 1, 2024 in a joint voluntary dismissal, with the plaintiff's individual claims dismissed with prejudice and the class claims without prejudice. No wrongdoing was established, and any terms of the resolution are not public. A settlement or a walk-away is not an admission of guilt, and we have no evidence of either beyond the dismissal itself.

For completeness: a pending 2025 New York suit, Moran v. eSupplements, is an Americans with Disabilities Act case about website accessibility, not product quality. And the magnesium dispute directly touches a category we cover; if glycinate specifically is what you want, our cheap magnesium glycinate roundup explains how to read the elemental-magnesium line so the label math works in your favor.

UV Transparency Score: 1/10

Here is the rubric we apply to every Brand File, scored line by line with the evidence.

Publishes COAs to consumers (+2): denied, 0 points. No COA library exists on nutricost.com, and the FAQ never mentions testing documents. A brand built on "trust the quality" shows you no lab paper at all.

Names or operates its own manufacturing facility (+2): denied, 0 points. Labels say "Manufactured for: Nutricost," and the contract factories are unnamed. We know who the products are made for, not who makes them.

Third-party certification on core SKUs, USP, NSF, or UL (+2): denied, 0 points. We found no certified Nutricost products in any major program, and the brand claims none. "Third party tested" with an unnamed lab is a claim, not a certification.

Clear ownership disclosure (+1): denied, 0 points. You need to read the terms of service to learn Advantage Nutraceuticals exists, and a court filing to learn about eSupplements and MAK Holdings. No consumer should need PACER to find out who they are buying from.

Clean recent recall record or exemplary recall handling (+1): awarded, 1 point. FDA recall and warning letter searches came back empty for all three corporate names as of August 2026. This is the one line where Nutricost simply passes.

Public response to testing controversies (+1): denied, 0 points. We found no statement, press release, or site notice addressing the magnesium litigation. The label changed; the company said nothing we could find.

Ingredient sourcing disclosure (+1): denied, 0 points. "Globally sourced ingredients" is the entire disclosure, with no origins or suppliers named, Creapure aside. One trademarked raw material does not make a sourcing policy.

Total: 1 out of 10. That is the lowest score we have handed out in this series so far, and it is worth stressing what it measures. It is not a purity score or a safety score. It measures how much the company lets you verify, and here the answer is almost nothing.

The product range, mapped to our reviews

Nutricost sells a sprawling catalog, but a handful of SKUs drive most of its volume, and we have covered the important ones. The magnesium line is the headline case: the Magnesium+ blend discussed above sits next to a separate glycinate product, and our budget glycinate comparison shows how it stacks against rivals once you price per milligram of elemental magnesium. Creatine monohydrate is probably the brand's best value, and it comes up as the boring-but-correct alternative in our look at creatine gummies and their alternatives, where powder beats candy on both cost and dosing certainty. For most single-ingredient basics, Nutricost's prices are genuinely hard to beat, which is why several of its products anchor our budget supplement stack. For the brand-wide picture, product by product, start with the full Nutricost supplements review.

FAQ

Who owns Nutricost?
The website's legal pages name Advantage Nutraceuticals, LLC as the company behind nutricost.com, while lawsuits from 2022 to 2025 name eSupplements, LLC dba Nutricost, whose disclosed corporate parent is MAK Holdings, LLC. The ultimate owners are not publicly disclosed, and no founders or executives are named anywhere on the brand's site.

Where is Nutricost made?
The company operates from Vineyard, Utah, and labels say products are made in the USA from globally sourced ingredients. But the labels read "Manufactured for" Nutricost, meaning unnamed contract factories produce the supplements, and the company does not identify them.

Is Nutricost FDA approved?
No supplement is FDA approved; the agency does not approve dietary supplements before sale. Nutricost says its products are made in an FDA-registered facility, which is a mandatory listing rather than an endorsement. As of August 2026 the brand has no FDA recalls or warning letters in the public databases we searched.

Does Nutricost publish certificates of analysis?
No. We found no COAs on the site and no mention of them in the FAQ. The brand says an independent accredited lab tests its products but never names the lab. If you need documented potency, this brand cannot currently show it to you.

What happened with the Nutricost magnesium lawsuit?
A proposed class action filed in 2023 alleges the 420 mg Magnesium Glycinate label was physically impossible and that the product was later renamed Magnesium+ with magnesium oxide added. The rename and the oxide disclosure are verifiable on the current label; the deception claims are unproven allegations. The case was still active on the docket as of mid 2026, and no court has ruled on the merits.

Is Nutricost legit?
Legit in the sense of real products, real company, clean FDA record: yes. Legit in the sense of verifiable quality: not really. You are trading transparency for price, and whether that trade makes sense depends on the ingredient and the stakes.

The bottom line

Nutricost is what happens when a discount retailer becomes a brand: sharp prices, sensible formulas, and a supply chain you are asked to take on faith. The FDA record is clean, and for commodity ingredients like creatine monohydrate that may be all the assurance you need at these prices. But the company publishes no COAs, names no factories and no labs, hides its ownership behind three LLCs, and relabeled its magnesium product mid-lawsuit without a word of public explanation. We keep using Nutricost for cheap basics, and we keep our expectations exactly that low. If verified potency matters for your use case, spend the extra few dollars on a brand that shows its paperwork.