Testing ยท about four minutes
You have been taking creatine. Lab tests say you might not have been.
Independent testing keeps finding creatine gummies that do not contain the creatine on the label. Not by a little. In one case, by a factor of a thousand.
What the testing found
A testing programme run by NOW Foods used HPLC, the standard lab method for measuring how much of a compound is actually present, on creatine gummies bought off the shelf.
A separate 2025 test by SuppCo took the six best-selling creatine gummies on Amazon. Two of the six contained the amount they advertised. The other four did not.
Put in the terms the package uses, reaching a 5g dose would take about 800 gummies from one brand and 2,000 from another. Nobody is eating 800 gummies. The dose on the front of the bag is, in those cases, not a dose anyone receives.
The reason is chemistry, not dishonesty
This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why the problem keeps recurring across brands rather than being one bad actor.
A gummy has to contain moisture. That is what makes it a gummy. But creatine in the presence of moisture converts over time into creatinine, which is an inert breakdown product with none of the effect you bought it for. The longer the product sits, the further that conversion goes.
So the creatine may well have been there on the day it was made. The format is what loses it. A gummy is a wet environment and creatine does not keep in one.
We are deliberately not naming brands here. The failure is structural, it recurs across the category, and a list of names would tell you less than the mechanism does. If you want to check a specific product, the question to ask its maker is simple: what did HPLC testing of a finished retail batch show, and when.
What this means when you are reading a label
A label tells you what was intended, not what survived. Those are the same number for a dry powder in a sealed sachet and they are demonstrably not the same number for a gummy.
- Ask what form the creatine is in and what it is sitting in. Water content is the variable that matters here.
- Ask whether a finished batch was tested, not whether the raw ingredient was. Raw material certificates say nothing about what is in the product after months on a shelf.
- Treat a dose printed on a format known to degrade as a claim awaiting evidence, rather than a fact.
The same question, turned on us
It would be cheap to publish this and exempt ourselves. Ours is 5g of creatine monohydrate in a dry stick, which is the format the degradation problem does not apply to, and it is dissolved in water at the moment you drink it rather than sitting wet for months.
That is a real advantage of the format and it is the only claim we will make from it. We say third-party tested, and we have not yet published a certificate. That is the same gap we are telling you to ask other people about, so ask us about it too.
Sources
Read the full label guide, six checks that work on any brand