A Certificate of Analysis (COA) is an official document issued by an analytical laboratory that certifies the composition, purity, identity, potency, and safety profile of a product or raw material. COAs are used across the pharmaceutical, supplement, peptide, cosmetic, food, environmental, and industrial-materials industries as the primary evidence of product quality.
The key word is analytical — a COA is only meaningful if it comes from an independent laboratory that physically tested the product using validated analytical methods. A COA prepared by the same company that made or sold the product is not a third-party COA and offers no independent verification.
A standard COA from Gold Standard Analytics includes the following sections:
One of the most common sources of confusion in the supplement and peptide market is the difference between a third-party COA and an in-house COA.
The company that manufactures or sells the product also produces the COA. There is no independent verification. Results can be fabricated, cherry-picked, or based on non-validated methods. These provide no meaningful quality assurance.
An independent laboratory — with no financial interest in the result — physically tests the product and reports findings. An ISO 17025-aligned operating model and GLP standards ensure the lab’s processes are validated and traceable. This is the only type of COA that customers can genuinely trust.
Fabricated COAs are a well-known problem in the peptide industry. The only way to verify a COA is legitimate is to check it directly against the issuing laboratory’s database.
Gold Standard Analytics issues every COA with a unique accession number that resolves through our public lookup tool at goldstandardanalytics.com/coa-lookup. Most COAs are public: enter the accession number and the result loads immediately, no login required. A subset are private — the client chose, at intake time, to keep that result off the public index. Private COAs are still verifiable through the same lookup, but they require a one-time verification key the client receives in their portal alongside the accession number. If neither path resolves, the document is not from our laboratory.