On April 27, 2017, one year after the project was announced, the Supplement OWL (Online Wellness Library) is now live.
The Supplement OWL (Online Wellness Library) is an industry-wide dietary supplement product registry whose mission is to help create a more accurate and complete picture of the supplement marketplace for regulators, retailers, and industry. The Supplement OWL will serve as an online resource for a variety of stakeholders to identify products, their ingredients and the companies who market them, and permit registry users to examine and evaluate labels and other product information. The OWL has been launched by the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), a Washington, D.C.-based trade association for the dietary supplement industry.
OWL promises to be an important resource for industry stakeholders, regulators, retailers and consumers as it will provide information to research and identify supplement products, their ingredients and the companies who market them.
How OWL works:
The Supplement OWL offers two tiers of information. Participation in Tier 1 includes an image of the product, a complete product label and other fields of information, obtained principally from the label itself. There is no charge to participate in Tier 1. Tier 2 allows companies to upload additional supporting information and documentation about their products and to choose who will have access to that information. Once a label is uploaded to Tier 1, companies can participate in Tier 2 for a nominal charge.
Getting started with uploading labels involves a three-step process, beginning with outreach to UL, the global independent safety science company who is developing and administering the technology that drives the Supplement OWL, to learn what product and label information will need to be submitted. Then, companies can choose from four options to determine the best method to submit their labels: 1) electronic transfer from an existing IT system; 2) conversion from the ODS label database; 3) manual data entry; or 4) a third-party upload service.
In a recent OWL press release, Steve Mister, president & CEO, Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), says, “Last month, during Expo West, it was heartening to witness the high level of awareness about the Supplement OWL and exhilarating to be surrounded by the industry buzz. This has been a unique opportunity for our industry: working together on a self-regulatory initiative for the greater good. We credit those thought leaders who recognized the importance of an industry-wide registry that would fill a gap for regulators, and we commend those companies who wanted to be—and are—part of the first wave of labels available in the product registry. Together, we gained consensus around a dietary supplement registry, we built it, and now we’re ready to make it grow.”
Thus far, the American Botanical Council, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association and the Natural Products Association have announced their support of OWL.
For more information, visit, www.supplementOWL.org.
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