The Creatine Gummy Scandal, Explained: Every Brand That Failed Lab Testing

If you have spent any time in supplement corners of Reddit in the last two years, you have seen the phrase "creatine gummy scandal." It is not marketing hyperbole from a competitor. Independent laboratories have repeatedly bought creatine gummies off the shelf, tested them, and found that a large share contain nowhere near what the label claims. Some contained none at all.

This article lays out what was tested, what was found, and why it keeps happening. We sell creatine gummies, so read this with the appropriate scepticism — but every number below is from a published third-party source.

The short version

Across the two largest independent testing efforts, roughly half of the creatine gummies tested failed their label claim. Not by a rounding error — several contained less than one percent of the creatine advertised, and two contained zero detectable creatine.

What NOW Foods found

In early 2024, NOW Foods — a supplement manufacturer that runs its own analytical lab and periodically tests competitors' products — bought twelve creatine gummy products from Amazon and direct-to-consumer sites and ran them by HPLC.

Six of the twelve failed. The products that passed were Bear Balanced, Bod, Effective Nutra, Iron Labs Nutrition, Peach Perfect and Zhou. The six that failed were Astro Labs, Beast Bites, Create, Con-Cret, Greabby and Njord.

Some individual results:

• Con-Cret, a creatine HCl gummy, measured 28.3 mg per gummy against a 250 mg claim — about 11% of label.
• Beast Bites measured roughly 0.0087 g per gummy against a 5 g per serving claim.
• Njord had no detectable creatine at all.

What SuppCo found

In 2025, SuppCo bought six creatine gummy bestsellers from Amazon and tested them alongside five creatine powders.

Four of the six gummies failed. All five powders passed.

• EcoWise — zero detectable creatine
• Vidabotan — zero detectable creatine
• Happyummmm — 0.005 g measured against a 5 g claim, roughly one tenth of one percent of label
• DivinusLabs — roughly half a percent of label

The two that passed are worth naming, because they show it can be done: Force Factor measured 6.3 g against a 5 g claim — a deliberate overage — and Create measured 4.59 g against a 4.5 g claim. Worth noting alongside that: SuppCo reported significant creatinine levels in both of those passing products too. Meeting label claim and having degradation underway are not mutually exclusive.

Every powder tested came in at 98–101% of label with creatinine held under 50 ppm.

Why it keeps happening: the chemistry

This is the part most coverage skips, and it is the part that actually explains the pattern.

Creatine monohydrate is not stable in water. In the presence of moisture, heat and acidic pH, creatine cyclizes into creatinine — a biologically inert waste compound your kidneys filter out. Creatinine does nothing for strength, power or recovery. It is not harmful at these levels; it is simply not creatine any more.

A gummy is, by construction, all three accelerants at once:

• Moisture. Gummies are a high-water-activity product by definition.
• Heat. The depositing process runs hot, and then the finished product sits in a warehouse, then a delivery truck, then possibly a mailbox in July. (More on that in our piece on storage and shelf life.)
• Acid. Most gummies are acidified for flavour and for pectin or gelatin set.

Add sugar and you get Maillard browning reactions, which accelerate the breakdown further.

The tell is creatinine. Of NOW's six failures, three — Beast Bites, Create and Con-Cret — showed large amounts of creatinine present; the other three showed smaller amounts. Where creatinine is high, it means the creatine was there when the gummy was made and degraded afterwards, rather than never having been added. In those cases the manufacturer was not committing fraud at the mixing tank — they were shipping a product that fell apart in the jar.

That distinction matters when you are choosing a brand, because it means a certificate of analysis dated at manufacture tells you very little. What matters is potency at the end of shelf life, under real storage conditions.

The litigation

In April 2026, a class action was filed against Create Wellness in relation to its creatine monohydrate gummies. The complaint alleges the product contained 4.01 g against a 4.5 g label — a 0.49 g shortfall, about 11%.

Create disputes the claim. The company says its gummies undergo creatine potency testing on every production order through Eurofins, that they are NSF Certified for Sport, that its own testing of the plaintiff's batch met or exceeded label claim, and that it intends to defend the case.

Whatever the outcome, note the threshold: an alleged 11% shortfall was enough to draw a federal class action against the category's best-known brand. Consumer law firms have also published class-action investigations covering creatine gummies, naming Njord, Astro Labs, Beast Bites and Create. The other brands listed above appear in the record as having failed independent lab testing, which is a separate matter from being the subject of a legal action.

The uncomfortable complication: most labs cannot test gummies properly

Here is the finding that should make you cautious about all of the above, including the failures.

Katie Banaszewski, senior director of quality at NOW, said publicly that NOW was not able to identify a third-party lab that could test the gummies — and that "the fastest growing dosage form has gotten ahead of itself." Darren Candow, a scientific advisor to Create, has said that when Create launched, "very few labs could reliably measure creatine and creatinine in a gummy."

The technical problem is extraction. HPLC and UPLC methods developed for creatine powder do not reliably pull creatine out of a gelled, sugared, pectin-bound matrix. A method that under-extracts will report a failing result on a compliant product. Con-Cret's founder attacked NOW's results on exactly this basis, arguing the data was published without expert method review.

So the honest reading is: the category has a real and well-documented potency problem, and the testing infrastructure to adjudicate individual cases is still immature. Both things are true.

What this means if you are buying

1. Ask for a batch-specific COA, not a generic one. A PDF with no lot number is a marketing asset, not a test result. We wrote out the exact questions to send a brand here.
2. Look for creatinine on the COA, not just creatine. Creatinine is the degradation fingerprint. A brand that publishes it is showing you the number that would expose them.
3. Prefer end-of-shelf-life or stability data over time-of-manufacture data. Manufacture-date potency does not tell you what is in the jar you receive.
4. NSF Certified for Sport is the strongest widely-available third-party signal. Create, Lemme and Force Factor hold it.
5. Treat a deliberate overage as a good sign. Force Factor testing at 6.3 g against a 5 g claim means they dosed high on purpose to survive degradation — though as noted above, they still showed creatinine.
6. Check the dose maths yourself. No gummy contains 5 g of creatine; here is the per-gummy arithmetic across ten brands.
7. Store them like food, not like a supplement. Cool, dry, sealed, out of the car.
8. Remember powder exists. Every powder tested in both studies passed. If your only priority is grams of creatine per dollar with certainty, buy monohydrate powder — it costs roughly 17 cents a day and it does not degrade in the tub. Gummies are for people who won't take powder consistently, and that is a real and legitimate reason to choose them, but it is the only honest argument for the format.

Where we stand

We are not going to end this article by telling you our gummies are the exception. We would rather tell you what we think the standard should be: batch-code-searchable certificates of analysis, showing creatine and creatinine both, from a named laboratory, with the extraction method stated, tested near end of shelf life rather than at manufacture.

No brand in this category currently does all of that. Until one does — including us — every buyer is taking the label on trust.

Sources: NOW Foods creatine gummy testing (Nutraceuticals World, NutraIngredients, Nutritional Outlook, WholeFoods, PricePlow); SuppCo lab testing results; ConsumerLab creatine review, June 2026; class action reporting via NutraIngredients and classaction.org.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.