What Does ISO 22000 Actually Mean?

What Does "ISO 22000" Mean?

ISO 22000 is an internationally recognised food safety management standard. It's not about one specific ingredient or claim, it's about how the whole manufacturing operation is run: hygiene protocols, hazard controls, traceability, staff training, the lot. A facility certified to ISO 22000 has had its processes independently audited against that standard, which is a meaningfully different thing from a company just saying "we're careful about hygiene" on their website.

Why We Bother Checking

Anyone can print a badge on a jar. What ISO 22000 tells us is that a third party actually went and checked, not just once, but on an ongoing basis, because certification needs to be maintained and re-audited. For a supplement you're putting into your body regularly, that's a genuinely different level of assurance compared to a brand's own marketing claims.

It also matters because manufacturing is where a lot can quietly go wrong, contamination, incorrect dosing, mislabelled batches, even when the ingredient list itself looks perfectly fine on paper. ISO 22000 is specifically aimed at catching that stuff before it reaches you.

You can read more about how ISO standards work generally on the official ISO 22000 standard page, and the UK's Food Standards Agency covers how food safety is regulated more broadly here.

How We Actually Check This

We ask brands to confirm which facility manufactures their products and whether that facility, or the brand itself, holds valid ISO 22000 certification, ideally with a certificate we can actually verify rather than just a logo on a page. Certifications lapse and change, so we're checking this is current, not something from three years ago that never got renewed. No verifiable certification, no badge on our end.

A Few Questions People Actually Ask

Is ISO 22000 the same as GMP?

They overlap but aren't identical. Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) is more focused specifically on production and quality control. ISO 22000 is a broader food safety management framework that can incorporate GMP-style principles alongside things like risk analysis and supply chain traceability. Some facilities hold both.

Does the brand need to be certified, or just the factory?

Usually it's the manufacturing facility that holds the certification, since that's where the actual production processes happen. A brand can work with multiple manufacturers, so it's worth knowing which specific facility makes the product you're looking at, not just whether "the brand" is certified in general.

Does this certification guarantee the product actually works?

No, and it's worth being clear about that. ISO 22000 is about how safely and consistently something is made, not about whether the formula itself delivers the benefits on the label. Those are two separate questions, and we treat them separately in our reviews too.

Why "ISO 22000" Matters