What makes a COA registry trustworthy?

Registries are only as good as their intake. A database that displays every PDF it receives is a liability dressed as transparency — it launders fabricated certificates by association. Before trusting any COA registry, including this one, apply these six criteria.

1. Source verification before display

The registry should confirm each record with the laboratory or pharmacy that issued it before the record is shown. Ask the registry directly: "Do you display records you have not confirmed with the issuer?" The answer should be no. Ours is no — it is the reason our record display is currently paused rather than padded.

2. Named, contactable laboratories

Every record should trace to a named lab with an independent real-world footprint. Records attributed to "third-party testing" with no lab identity are unverifiable by design.

3. Lot-level traceability

Records should be keyed to specific lot numbers so a person holding a product can match it to a record. Product-level "verified" badges without lot linkage verify nothing.

4. No synthetic records

The registry should be able to say how it screens for AI-generated certificates and for real documents scraped from the web and re-attached to other products. Volume is not credibility; a thousand unverified records are worth less than ten confirmed ones.

5. Disclosed methodology

The verification process should be published in enough detail to be criticized — who confirms, what counts as confirmation, what happens on failure. Undisclosed methodology is indistinguishable from no methodology.

6. Corrections and disputes

There should be a stated route for a lab or pharmacy to dispute a record bearing its name, and visible willingness to remove records that fail re-verification.

How this registry measures against its own standard

We publish our source-verification methodology, we key records to lots, we accept submissions issuer-first via the pharmacy intake, disputes reach us at [email protected], and — the uncomfortable one — we display nothing while our verification review is open. We would rather be a small registry of confirmed records than a large registry of PDFs.