Who Makes NOW Foods? The Family-Owned Factory Story

Ask who makes a cheap supplement brand and the answer is usually an anonymous contract factory. NOW Foods is the exception people keep citing, which is exactly why it needs checking. This Brand File is our evidence dossier: every claim below was verified this session against FDA databases, trade press of record, court trackers, or the company's own published documents, and anything we could not verify is labeled that way.

Our method in one sentence: we verify or we say "not disclosed," and not disclosed counts against the score.

Quick facts

Who actually makes it

NOW Foods makes NOW Foods. That sentence sounds trivial until you have read enough supplement labels to know how rare it is. The company manufactures its products at its own campus in Bloomingdale, Illinois, a facility that New Hope's obituary of founder Elwood Richard records as GMP-certified since 2000. The brand on the bottle and the company running the machines are the same organization, which collapses the usual gap between marketing claims and manufacturing reality.

The paper trail supporting this is unusually good, and some of it is involuntary. When we queried the openFDA enforcement database for the firm's recall records, every entry lists NOW Health Group, Inc. of Bloomingdale, IL as the recalling firm for NOW-branded products. Recall filings are paperwork you cannot fake: they name the firm that initiated the recall and held legal responsibility for the product, and NOW's even list private-label customers recalled under its name. A manufacturing profile at Truly American Made adds that NOW produces its range at US facilities in Bloomingdale and Sparks, Nevada; we treat the Nevada site as reported by a secondary source, since NOW's own site blocks automated readers and we could not load its facilities page this session.

Here is the label check you can run on any bottle in your cabinet. Find the responsibility statement in the fine print on the back. "Manufactured BY" a company at its own address means the brand made it in a plant it operates. "Manufactured FOR" or "Distributed BY" means someone else ran the machines. We could not pull a high-resolution NOW label image from a retailer this session to quote its exact wording, so we will not claim to have read it, but the UL facility certification, the FDA recall records, and fifty years of trade press coverage all point the same direction: this is a BY company, not a FOR company.

One more structural point. Because NOW runs its own plant, it also runs its own quality laboratories on site, staffed at a scale most brands rent by the hour. That infrastructure is what makes the competitor-testing program described below possible at all. You cannot police an industry from a rented lab bench, and NOW's willingness to do it is itself evidence of where its products are made.

History and ownership

The family story checks out, and it is longer than the 1968 founding date suggests. Elwood Richard's father Paul bought Fearn Soya Foods, an early natural foods company, in 1948, and per the New Hope obituary developed what the trade considered the industry's first protein supplement product. When Paul died, Elwood, a chemist by training with graduate work in physical chemistry and biochemistry, took over around 1960. He opened his first health food store, the Health House, in suburban Chicago in 1962, and the retail chain it grew into, later renamed The Fruitful Yield, still operates stores in Chicagoland today.

NOW itself arrived in 1968, built on a conviction the company still quotes: good health should be available to everyone, not just the affluent. The plan was almost aggressively unglamorous, packaging quality vitamins and natural foods at low prices instead of premium markups. Elwood Richard ran the company for decades and died in April 2017 at age 85, by which point NOW offered more than 1,400 products, employed over 1,500 people, and sold in more than 60 countries.

Ownership never left the family. NOW Health Group describes itself as family- and employee-owned, the founder's sons Dan and David Richard remain in the business, and there is no private equity firm, no holding company, and no overseas parent anywhere in the record. Day-to-day management is professional rather than dynastic: Jim Emme joined operations in 1995 and was promoted to CEO in 2014, and an October 2025 UNPA announcement of a new COO still quotes Emme as CEO, the most recent leadership confirmation we could reach. One LinkedIn profile we found lists a different executive as CEO, which we could not confirm against any press announcement, so treat the current occupant of the corner office as unverified beyond late 2025.

The same-parent map is worth knowing because the surprises here are pleasant ones. NOW Health Group also owns Protocol for Life Balance, its practitioner-channel supplement brand, and Ellyndale Foods, its natural foods line; the Ellyndale connection is confirmed the hard way, by an FDA recall filed under NOW Health Group's name for Ellyndale Nutty Infusions nut butters. Search listings also describe Puresource, a Canadian natural products distributor, as part of the group, which we could not verify against a primary source this session. If you buy Protocol for Life Balance through a naturopath, you are buying NOW from the same Bloomingdale factory, at practitioner prices.

Testing and quality record

Start with the certifications that can be independently checked. In 2016, trade press reported NOW as one of the first supplement manufacturers to have its dietary supplement manufacturing process certified by Underwriters Laboratories, and NOW hosts the UL certificate itself, naming the UL National Brand Certification Program against 21 CFR Part 111, on its own site. Both pages sit behind bot-blocking, so we verified them through search listings rather than direct fetches, and we flag that honestly; the certificate's existence is corroborated from multiple directions.

The sports line goes further. In March 2018, the entire NOW Sports range, over 150 products, gained Informed Sport certification, the anti-doping program run by LGC's lab that tests every batch for banned substances. NOW's VP of Quality noted at the time that most companies certify a handful of products, not a whole line. Batch-level third-party certification across an entire product line is the strongest testing commitment in this dossier, and it covers exactly the products, like creatine and protein, where contamination scandals happen.

For everything else, NOW operates a public certificate of analysis portal at cofa.nowfoods.com, where a consumer can enter the lot number from a bottle and pull the batch COA. The portal also blocks automated readers, so we confirmed how it works through search listings rather than by running a lookup ourselves, and older forum complaints suggest COAs were harder to get before the portal existed. A lot-number COA lookup open to consumers is something almost no budget brand offers, and it converts "trust us, we test" into a checkable document.

Then there is the program that made NOW famous among supplement nerds: it buys competitors' products and publishes the results. Since 2017 the company has tested more than 150 products from primarily no-name brands sold on Amazon and Walmart.com, covering CoQ10, quercetin, berberine, magnesium glycinate, curcumin, and more, with over 80 percent failing potency testing. In the December 2023 berberine round, NOW tested 33 brands by HPLC-UV with independent verification from Alkemist Labs: seven brands contained 1 percent or less of the labeled berberine, and 18 contained less than 40 percent. We could find no other manufacturer running a public program like this, and the FDA has taken notice; a May 2024 SupplySide Supplement Journal report records the agency requesting NOW's data to inform its own inspection and sampling plans.

An obvious caveat belongs here. NOW's tests routinely show NOW's own product as the one that passes, and a brand grading its competitors is marketing as well as science. The program's credibility rests on the independent lab verification and on nobody ever catching the methodology being wrong, which, across seven years of published rounds and trade press scrutiny, nobody has that we could find. NOW also turned the lens on fraud against itself, publicly reporting an Amazon seller that was distributing falsified versions of eleven NOW products along with counterfeits of other brands.

Recalls, warning letters, lawsuits

The recall record is real but modest for a company shipping over a thousand SKUs. The openFDA enforcement database holds six records for NOW Health Group, all voluntary and all terminated. Five are Class III, the lowest-risk tier, from 2021: royal jelly, bee pollen, and ginseng products that might have contained trace metronidazole from a supplier's raw material, an acidophilus bottle with foreign capsules in it, and steel cut oats bags that may have contained beet sugar. The one serious entry is a Class I recall from June 2020, when NOW Real Food Raw Macadamia Nuts tested positive for Salmonella enterica.

Before the openFDA window, the company also recalled its NOW Real Food Zesty Sprouting Mix in June 2018 over possible salmonella in an ingredient, and FDA's recall archive lists an expanded recall of Ellyndale Nutty Infusions cashew butter whose announcement page we could not load to confirm a date. Notice the pattern: the serious safety recalls are foods, nuts, seeds, and nut butters, not supplement capsules. The supplement recalls, the royal jelly, bee pollen, ginseng, and acidophilus products, were all Class III, the tier FDA uses when exposure is unlikely to cause adverse health consequences, and we found no FDA warning letter addressed to NOW Health Group in our searches this session. Search results reference a routine FDA Form 483 inspection observations document for the Bloomingdale facility, which we could not retrieve; Form 483s are common inspection paperwork, not enforcement actions, and we mention it only for completeness.

The courtroom record carries two consumer class actions worth knowing. Lau et al. v. NOW Health Group (E.D.N.Y., 17-cv-3992, filed July 2017) alleged the company deceptively marketed its Liver Detoxifier and Regenerator as able to detoxify the liver. The class action tracker we reached does not state an outcome, and we could not verify how the case ended as of August 2026.

The live one is more pointed. Stonehart v. NOW Health Group (N.D. Ill., 1:23-cv-16604, filed December 2023) alleges the Magnesium Citrate Softgels label claims 400 mg of elemental magnesium per serving while the three listed magnesium sources, at roughly 11 to 16 percent elemental magnesium each, could not deliver that amount, and that the product may contain undisclosed magnesium oxide. The case page we reached lists it as in progress, and we found no public response from NOW. These are allegations, not findings, and a filed complaint proves nothing by itself; we also saw a further consumer case, Daly v. NOW Health Group, in a court news listing with no accessible details. Still, for a company whose brand is built on potency testing, a potency lawsuit on a core SKU is the most uncomfortable item in this file, and it is why the score below is not 10.

UV Transparency Score: 9/10

Here is the rubric, applied line by line with the evidence.

Publishes COAs to consumers (+2): 2 points. A public lot-number COA lookup portal at cofa.nowfoods.com, confirmed through search listings after the portal blocked our direct fetch. Few brands at any price offer this.

Names or operates its own manufacturing facility (+2): 2 points. Own plant in Bloomingdale, IL, GMP-certified since 2000, corroborated by trade press, a UL facility certificate, and FDA recall records naming NOW Health Group of Bloomingdale as the recalling firm.

Third-party certification on core SKUs (+2): 2 points. The entire NOW Sports line has carried batch-level Informed Sport certification since 2018, and the manufacturing operation itself holds UL certification dating to 2016.

Clear ownership disclosure (+1): 1 point. Family- and employee-owned with the Richard family named publicly, leadership bios published, and no hidden parent anywhere in the record.

Clean recent recall record (+1): 1 point. No recalls in FDA records since 2021 as of August 2026, all prior recalls voluntary and terminated, and the serious ones were food products rather than supplements.

Public response to testing controversies (+1): 1 point. NOW publicly reported the Amazon counterfeiting operation against its own products and engaged FDA directly on its testing findings. We note it has made no public statement we could find on the magnesium citrate lawsuit.

Ingredient sourcing disclosure (+1): 0 points. NOW does not publish per-ingredient countries of origin or supplier names for its catalog. Its own testing program proves it knows exactly what is in its raw materials; it does not show consumers where they come from.

Total: 9/10. The highest score we have issued, and the rubric explains why: NOW documents almost everything other budget brands ask you to take on faith.

The product range, mapped to our reviews

The catalog runs past 1,400 products, from vitamins and minerals to essential oils and foods, so the practical question is which corners of it we have already tested. The wide-angle view is our full NOW Foods supplements review, which grades the brand across categories, and our companion piece on NOW as a budget brand asks the sharper question this dossier keeps circling: whether the low price costs you anything in quality, and where the honest compromises sit.

Two specific product lines matter here. Our NOW Foods collagen peptides review covers a SKU where NOW competes against dedicated collagen brands charging twice as much. And because the NOW Sports line's Informed Sport certification covers its creatine monohydrate, NOW is one of the cheapest fully certified options in a category our complete guide to creatine covers in depth, including why plain certified monohydrate beats almost every premium creatine format on the evidence.

FAQ

Who owns NOW Foods?

NOW Health Group, Inc., which is family- and employee-owned. Founder Elwood Richard started the company in 1968 and his sons Dan and David Richard remain involved. There is no outside parent company, no private equity owner, and no foreign owner in the public record as of August 2026.

Where is NOW Foods made?

At the company's own manufacturing campus in Bloomingdale, Illinois, GMP-certified since 2000, with a second US facility in Sparks, Nevada reported by a third-party manufacturing profile. FDA recall records independently confirm NOW Health Group of Bloomingdale as the responsible manufacturing firm.

Does NOW Foods do third-party testing?

Partly, and better than most. The entire NOW Sports line is Informed Sport certified with every batch tested by an independent anti-doping lab, the manufacturing operation is UL certified, and consumers can look up batch COAs by lot number. Most non-sports SKUs rely on NOW's in-house labs rather than a per-bottle third-party seal like USP Verified.

Has NOW Foods been sued?

Yes. A 2017 class action over Liver Detoxifier and Regenerator marketing claims has no outcome we could verify, and a December 2023 class action alleges the Magnesium Citrate Softgels cannot contain the labeled 400 mg of elemental magnesium; it was listed as in progress on the most recent case page we reached. These are allegations, not court findings, and NOW has not admitted wrongdoing in either matter.

Has NOW Foods ever been recalled?

Six times in FDA enforcement records between 2020 and 2021, five of them low-risk Class III events, plus a 2018 sprouting mix recall. The serious recalls involved salmonella risk in food products, macadamia nuts and sprouting seeds, not supplements. All were voluntary and are terminated, with none since 2021 as of August 2026.

Why does NOW test other brands' supplements?

Since 2017 it has purchased and tested over 150 competitor products from Amazon and Walmart.com, publishing results showing most no-name brands fail potency testing, with independent verification from Alkemist Labs. It is part consumer protection, part marketing, and the FDA has requested NOW's data to inform its own inspections.

The bottom line

NOW Foods is what supplement brands claim to be and usually are not: a family-owned manufacturer that runs its own factory and labs, certifies its sports line batch by batch, lets you pull a COA with a lot number, and spends its own money proving how bad the rest of the budget shelf is. The 9/10 Transparency Score is not a grade for perfect products; it is a grade for showing your work, and nobody in the budget tier shows more.

The open question is the magnesium citrate lawsuit, which aims a potency allegation at the potency police. Until it resolves, our read stands: buy NOW when you want the cheapest bottle backed by real documentation, and watch that case. The company built its reputation on testing; it now gets to be tested.