The sentence at the bottom of every COA
Every Certificate of Analysis we have ends with the same disclaimer, and one line of it does more work than the whole rest of the page:
Values reported relate only to the product tested.
That is the entire concept. A COA is a report on one batch of one product on one day. It is not a certification, not a seal, and not something a brand earns and then keeps. It expires the moment the next batch is made, and a brand with an excellent COA for a batch made in 2024 has told you nothing about the bottle in your hand.
Which is why “we have COAs” is not information. The useful questions are which lot, which tests, and against what specification — and all three are answerable in about ninety seconds once you know where to look.
The four columns
A properly built COA is a table with four columns. Learn what each one does and the document stops being intimidating.
Test — the thing being measured. “Lead.” “Total Plate Count.” “Disintegration.”
Specification — the acceptance limit. This is the column that makes a COA meaningful. < 0.5 mcg/serving is a promise the batch had to beat.
Result — what the lab found.
Method — how they found it. ICP-MS for metals. USP <2021> for microbial counts. UV-VIS or LC-MS for actives. The method matters because two methods measuring nominally the same thing can answer different questions.
A COA without a Specification column is not a test report — it’s a list of numbers. You cannot tell whether 50 cfu/g is a pass or a catastrophe unless the document also tells you what the limit was. Three of our six documents are missing that column entirely. More on that below.
The panels, and what each one is actually for
“Tested” is a word that covers wildly different amounts of work. These are the panels you’ll see, roughly in ascending order of how much they cost a manufacturer.
Microbiological
Total plate count, yeast and mould, and the pathogen list — E. coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus, sometimes Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This is the baseline. It answers “will this make you acutely ill,” and essentially every finished supplement gets it because it’s cheap and it’s the one that creates immediate liability.
A micro panel is table stakes. Its presence tells you the manufacturer did the minimum. It tells you nothing about what’s in the capsule.
Identity
Is the ingredient the species on the label? Modern identity work is chromatographic — you run the sample and compare its retention time against a known standard for that species. Our Focus Strips COA does this four separate times, once per mushroom, by LC-MS.
Identity is the panel that catches substitution, and it’s much rarer than micro.
Potency (assay)
How much active is in there, measured against the label claim. Usually expressed as a percentage: “between 90.0% and 110.0% of the label claim” is the standard window in this industry, and a result inside it means the label is honest about the dose.
This is the expensive one, and it’s the one most COAs skip.
Physical
Weight, disintegration time, moisture, appearance. Unglamorous, and more informative than it looks — a capsule that takes 45 minutes to disintegrate is delivering its contents somewhere other than where the formulator intended.
Heavy metals
Lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury. Relevant to any mushroom product for a specific biological reason, which is the subject of its own article.
Pesticides
A screen against a defined list of agricultural chemicals. The rarest panel of the set, and the one where the wording hides the most — see what a pesticide screen does and doesn’t cover.
”Complies” is a result, but it isn’t a number
You will see three kinds of Result on a COA, and they are not equally informative.
A measured value. 0.1652 mcg. The strongest form. Somebody ran the instrument and this is what came off it, and you can compare it to the spec yourself.
A bounded value. Less than 3.0 ppm against a specification of Not more than 3.0 ppm. This is a pass — but notice that the reported result is just the limit restated. It tells you the batch cleared the bar. It does not tell you whether it cleared it by a hair or by a factor of a hundred.
A word. Complies. Conforms to Standard. Pass. Absent. For a pathogen test, “Absent” is genuinely the answer — there is no useful number for Salmonella. For anything measurable, a word where a number could have been is a downgrade.
None of these are dishonest. But a document full of the third kind is a document that has told you a batch passed without letting you check.
What our six documents contain
Now the part where we point all of that at ourselves.
We have five products and six COAs — Lion’s Mane has two lots on file. Here is every panel in every document, verified by opening each PDF rather than reading a summary of them:
| Product | Lot on the document | Panels present | Panels absent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lion’s Mane Capsules | 2023-13956 | Physical · Actives (UV-VIS) · Heavy metals (ICP-MS) · Microbiological | Pesticides |
| Lion’s Mane Capsules | B24H001 | Appearance · Heavy metals · Microbiological | Potency · Pesticides |
| Mushroom Focus Strips | KJ112501 | Description · Identity (LC-MS, ×4 species) · Weight · Moisture · Disintegration · Assay (×4) · Heavy metals · Pesticides · Microbiological | — |
| Cordyceps Energy Gummies | SO103517 | Microbiological | Identity · Potency · Heavy metals · Pesticides |
| Reishi Relax Gummies | SO103516 | Microbiological | Identity · Potency · Heavy metals · Pesticides |
| Energy & Cognition Drops | LOT43521 | Microbiological | Identity · Potency · Heavy metals · Pesticides |
Read that table honestly and it says something uncomfortable: three of our five products have a Certificate of Analysis that covers nothing but microbiology. No identity check confirming the species. No assay confirming the dose. No metals. Those three documents also have no Specification column at all — just Test, Method, and Result — so even the micro results arrive without the limits they were judged against.
They also each carry a row reading Gluten with a result of N/A. A test row with no result is not a gluten result. We do not claim Gluten Free as a brand attribute, and that row is one of the reasons — a line item that was never run is not evidence, and gluten status is a per-label question you should read off the specific product’s own panel.
The three documents that do carry a full workup are our two Lion’s Mane lots and the Focus Strips. And there is an irony in that, which the potency article gets into properly: our single most thoroughly tested product is the one with the smallest mushroom dose in the lineup.
What this means for what we’re allowed to say
Because the weakest document sets the brand-level ceiling, almost nothing here is claimable across the site. We do not claim third-party tested as a brand attribute — that is FALSE for us, and why is its own article. We do not say heavy-metal tested about the range, because it is only true for two of five products. We say one thing about testing, and it is deliberately small:
Batch Certificates of Analysis are available on request. Email us with the lot number from your bottle and we’ll send that lot’s document. If the panel you care about isn’t in it, you’ll be able to see that for yourself, which is rather the point.
The mechanics of asking — and what a bad answer from any brand looks like — are in how to request a COA.
The four questions
If you remember nothing else from this page, these are the questions that turn a COA from decoration into evidence:
- Does the lot number on the document match the lot number on my bottle? If not, you have been sent a document about somebody else’s batch.
- Is there a Specification column? Without it, the results are unjudgeable.
- Which panels are actually here? Micro-only is the floor, not a badge.
- Are the results numbers or words? Both can be legitimate. Only one lets you check.
Everything else in this cluster is those four questions applied to a specific kind of document — manufacturing certificates, testing tiers, metals, potency, pesticides, and the limits of the whole exercise.
And if you’d rather start at the bottle instead of the paperwork, how to read a mushroom supplement label is the same procedure applied to the Supplement Facts panel.