One product, one panel, one record.
California Gold Nutrition LactoBif 30 Probiotics, 30 Billion CFU, 60 Veggie Capsules — label audit
"8 active & clinically researched probiotic strains" — and the brand's own label footnote says what the research was: "In Vitro studies conducted by probiotic raw material supplier." The claim language is the vocabulary of human trials; the disclosed evidence is a test tube, run by the company selling the ingredient.
This page is an audit of a label. It records what this product’s panel discloses, what of that could be checked against a primary record, and what could not. The score below ranks this product on that disclosure and on nothing else.
The record this page rests on
- NIH label record
- Label read on
- The most recent dated artefact behind this page. Labels change; this is how old our reading of it is.
- Cohort
- Addendum — outside the founding denominators Torn down 2026-07-31, after the founding cohort of 27 was frozen. It sits outside every D27 denominator the site publishes.
- How deep this went
- Full forensic teardown Panel transcribed, every strain designator queried, every certification chased to its issuer’s own register, and the literature behind each marketing claim opened and read.
- What did not survive verification
- Part of this page was refuted or could not be reproduced This product could not be read from the seller's own page at all: iherb.com returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching and the brand's own domain redirects into it. The panel published here is the US government's DSLD transcription, corroborated field-for-field by an independently fetched reseller page whose SKU matches the government record's UPC — two independent sources agreeing, which is why it is published as reliable. But no figure on this page was read from the brand. Price is published as null for the same reason: the iHerb figure of $22.35 exists only as a search-result snippet and is not quotable, and the one directly fetched price, $28.72 at a third-party reseller, has no preserved product URL to cite. Both figures and their arithmetic are stated in the price note instead of being published as a verified retail price.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
25.6 out of 100
Rank 125 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 5 other products — 6 products sit on 25.6 and are tied. They hold the position jointly; no tiebreaker is applied, because every tiebreaker available here would be a number the rubric deliberately refused to weigh, smuggled back in to make a list look tidier.
The score measures one thing: how much of what you are buying this company tells you, and how much of that survives being checked against a source that is not the company. It does not measure whether the product works — this site holds no efficacy data of its own, and 0 of 294 organism slots in the founding cohort carry a strain with a human randomised trial for any male-specific outcome, so nobody in this category has evidence that would support a ranking by effect.
Computed over 86% of the rubric by weight — the share of the five questions below this record could answer. The remaining question is unanswered, and unanswered is not nought: it leaves the divisor rather than dragging the score down. That share travels with the number and is never dropped — this score over 86% of the weight and the same score over all of it are different claims.
| Component | Weight | What was counted, and where | Fraction | Weight × fraction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strain identity printed on the panel | 0.24 | 0 of 8 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 0 / 8 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 0 of 8 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 0 / 8 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| What the CFU count is measured against | 0.22 | Potency basis "through-expiry": CFU figure printed yes, single basis stated yes, basis reaches expiry yes — 3 of 3. | 3 / 3 = 1.0000 | 0.2200 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 0 of 8 checked organism slots resolve to at least one human randomised trial under the designator exactly as printed. This counts whether the identity leads to a trial, never what the trial found. | 0 / 8 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| Certification confirmed at the issuer’s own register | 0.14 | Every certification on this record is brand-asserted with the register unreachable, or not yet queried. An unreachable register is a fact about the verification infrastructure, not about this brand, so it may not move its position. | Not answered | — excluded from the divisor, not counted as nought |
0.2200 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 0.2558. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 25.6 above.
See this product’s row in the full ranking, alongside the other 153 scored products, or read what each of the five components asks and how to check it .
What this label discloses
Everything in this table is what the product itself states — on the printed panel, on the brand’s own page, or in the label record the manufacturer filed. Nothing in it is checked yet; checking is the next section.
| Disclosure | As recorded |
|---|---|
| CFU as printed | 30 billion CFU (Probiotic Bacteria Blend, 136 mg) |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | None — species only |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 8 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
"Potency guaranteed until expiration date when stored in a cool, dry place at 77 degrees F (25 degrees C) or below. Refrigeration is not required, but highly recommended. Extended exposure to higher than recommended storage temperatures may cause product degradation and the reduction of live and active probiotic bacteria." A second label statement reads simply "Guaranteed potency".
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
The panel guarantees the count through the expiration or best-by date. This is the only basis that is falsifiable by a reader holding the bottle.
The panel names species only, with no strain designator anywhere. A species name is not a claim: the trials in this field are of strains, and a species can contain thousands.
| Organism as printed | Designator as printed | Quantity as printed | What the designator resolves to | The query we ran |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lactobacillus acidophilus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus rhamnosus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus plantarum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Bifidobacterium longum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Bifidobacterium breve | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus casei | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus salivarius | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
What of that is verifiable
A disclosure is verifiable when a reader can open a record that neither we nor the brand controls and see the same thing. Below is every dated artefact this page rests on. What is absent from this list is not verified, however reasonable it sounds.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 275001 (opens in a new tab) captured UPC 8 98220 00965 7, entered 2022-10-24, on-market. The label of record for this product, because the seller's own page returns HTTP 403 to every automated fetch. Source of the panel, the at-expiry potency guarantee, the storage and degradation warning, the allergen and cGMP statements and the "In Vitro studies conducted by probiotic raw material supplier" footnote. Corroborated field-for-field by an independently fetched reseller transcription (SKU CGN-00965).
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 318840 (opens in a new tab) captured LactoBif 65 Probiotics, UPC 8 98220 01904 5, entered 2024-09-25, on-market. The comparator that shows this brand printing L. plantarum WCFS1 and L. rhamnosus GG in the same panel format — and that shows DSLD preserving designators when a label carries them.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — amazon-B01HUZTTX6-lactobif-2026-07-31https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HUZTTX6 — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured The Amazon listing, fetched HTTP 200. Source of the brand's own bullet "Exclusively using FloraFIT Probiotics by Danisco" and of the fuller cGMP wording. Amazon renders price client-side, so no price was present in the payload.
How many of its strains have a human trial for what it is sold for
Across the frozen founding cohort, 0 of 294 organism slots (0.0%) carry an organism with a human randomised controlled trial for any male-specific outcome. Not for this product — for all 27 of the founding teardowns, taken together. That is the number to hold against any men’s probiotic, including this one.
Two further founding-cohort figures for context: only 43 of 294 organism slots carry a strain with any human RCT at all under the exact code printed on the label, and only 2 of 27 products have a published human trial of the finished formula — the thing actually in the bottle. All three figures divide by the frozen cohort of 27 teardowns and 294 organism slots, never by every teardown on this site.
For this product specifically, 0 organism slots carry a strain with a human RCT under the exact designator printed on the label.
A word on what a designator has to clear before it counts here. The organism must be named with the exact strain code that appears in the trial, the trial must be in humans, and the code must return that trial when a reader searches it. A species name does not qualify: the trials in this field are of strains, and a species contains thousands of them.
What it costs per day
What certification it holds, checked at the issuer’s own register
A badge on a bottle is a claim like any other. Every row below was checked — or not checked — at the certifier’s own public register, never at the badge. Across the frozen founding cohort, 2 of 27 products hold a certification we could confirm at the issuer — a founding-cohort figure, not a count over every teardown on this site.
| Programme | Status at the issuer | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| "Produced in a third-party, audited and registered cGMP compliant facility" | Brand-asserted, unverified | 31 July 2026 |
"Produced in a third-party, audited and registered cGMP compliant facility"
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Taken from the allergen statement on the label; the Amazon listing carries the fuller wording "Produced in an FDA-registered, third-party audited, and cGMP-compliant facility". No auditor, no registrar and no certificate number is named, so there is no issuer register to query. Note the scope: this is a facility and process claim, not a contents certification. It says nothing about CFU count, strain identity or potency in this bottle. "FDA-registered" is a mandatory facility registration, not an approval or an endorsement. The label also carries a "100% Gold Guarantee… return the unused portion within 90 days for a full refund" — a refund policy, not a quality certification. No NSF mark, no USP Verified, no Informed Choice and no Non-GMO Project claim is made anywhere.
How it differs from the same brand’s women’s version
Across the fourteen same-brand men’s-versus-women’s label diffs run inside the frozen founding cohort, zero men’s or default formulas contain a probiotic strain, identified by designator, that was selected on male-specific evidence. In eight of the fourteen the sex-specific differentiator is a botanical or a mineral, and in five of the fourteen the women’s SKU is better-specified, cheaper, or both — “better-specified” meaning the panel that discloses more, never the panel with more in it. The rule behind each of those counts, and all fourteen pairs classified against it , are published in full. Diffs run on teardowns added since sit outside this fourteen, and outside the sentence above.
This brand sells no women’s counterpart to this product, so there is no diff to run.
Every finding on this page, with the record behind it
Finding 1 clinically-researched-footnoted-to-the-suppliers-own-in-vitro-work
Three label statements, all transcribed in DSLD 275001, read together. "Our LactoBif contains select probiotic strains that have been clinically studied to be extremely resistant to low pH and gastrointestinal conditions (e.g. acid, bile, pepsin and pancreatin), as well as adhere to the intestinal cell lines." "8 active & clinically researched probiotic strains / 5 lactobacilli / 3 bifidobacteria / 30 billion CFU per veggie cap", and elsewhere "8 active & clinically documented probiotic strains". And then: "In Vitro studies conducted by probiotic raw material supplier." The claim language — clinically studied, clinically researched, clinically documented — is the vocabulary of human trials. The disclosed evidence is in vitro work performed by the party selling the brand its ingredient.
The record: DSLD 275001 label statements, read 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 the-brand-discloses-designators-on-a-sibling-sku-and-not-here
LactoBif 65 Probiotics 65 Billion CFU — DSLD 318840, UPC 8 98220 01904 5, entered 2024-09-25, on-market — lists Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1 and Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG inside the same brand's same panel format. Same brand, same product line, same database, designators present. That also disposes of the obvious objection that the transcription simply drops designators: it demonstrably preserves them when the label carries them. The absence here is a property of this label, not of the database. The brand discloses designators on exactly one SKU in the line — the 100 Billion sibling (DSLD 318839) is species-only too.
The record: DSLD 318840 against DSLD 275001, both read 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 supplier-named-strains-not
The Amazon listing for this product (ASIN B01HUZTTX6) states in its own bullets, verbatim, "Exclusively using FloraFIT Probiotics by Danisco". The brand identifies its raw-material supplier and product line and then discloses no strain designator on the panel. FloraFIT is a commercial probiotic ingredient line whose constituents are sold under designators. The buyer is told whose strains these are and never which strains these are — traceability implied, not delivered. Product searches confirm the dead end: "FloraFIT"[tiab] → 1 (PMID 25752235), "LactoBif"[All Fields] → 0.
The record: Amazon ASIN B01HUZTTX6 bullets, fetched 2026-07-31; PubMed E-utilities same date
Finding 4 zero-strain-designators-across-eight-organisms
No organism in this bottle can be matched to any human trial, because no designator is printed for any of them. Not a search failure — structurally unanswerable from the label. McFarland LV et al., Front Med 2018;5:124, across 228 trials: "the efficacy of probiotics is both strain-specific and disease-specific."
The record: PMID 29868585; DSLD 275001 panel, corroborated field-for-field by an independent reseller transcription
Finding 5 species-called-strains-on-the-panel-footnote
The footnote under the blend reads "30 billion CFU composed of the following strains" and then lists eight species names.
The record: DSLD 275001, read 2026-07-31
Finding 6 blend-level-cfu-only
136 mg and 30 billion CFU for eight organisms, with no per-organism split. This is what limits the otherwise-strong at-expiry guarantee: the guarantee is on the blend total, so any single organism could be at a token dose at expiry without breaking it.
The record: DSLD 275001, read 2026-07-31
Finding 7 facility-scope-claims-with-no-auditor-named
"Third-party, audited and registered cGMP compliant facility" names no auditor and no registrar, and cGMP is a process claim rather than a contents certification. "FDA-registered" is a mandatory filing under US law, not an approval.
The record: DSLD 275001 allergen statement and Amazon ASIN B01HUZTTX6 bullets, 2026-07-31
Finding 8 the-sellers-own-page-is-unreadable-to-any-automated-agent
iherb.com returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching and the brand's own domain redirects into it. The consumer-facing price and panel are machine-unreadable to a screen reader, a price-comparison tool, an allergy-checking crawler or a shopping assistant. This product had to be reconstructed from a government database plus a third-party reseller.
The record: HTTP 403 on iherb.com and californiagoldnutrition.com, both tested 2026-07-31
Finding 9 pre-2020-nomenclature
Lactobacillus rhamnosus, plantarum, casei and salivarius are named under their pre-Zheng-2020 genus. Legal, and it dates the panel.
The record: DSLD 275001; PMID 32293557
What we could not verify
Every gap below is published rather than deleted. Most are derived automatically from the empty fields in this page’s own record, so a gap cannot be hidden by leaving a box blank.
- "Produced in a third-party, audited and registered cGMP compliant facility" status
- Taken from the allergen statement on the label; the Amazon listing carries the fuller wording "Produced in an FDA-registered, third-party audited, and cGMP-compliant facility". No auditor, no registrar and no certificate number is named, so there is no issuer register to query. Note the scope: this is a facility and process claim, not a contents certification. It says nothing about CFU count, strain identity or potency in this bottle. "FDA-registered" is a mandatory facility registration, not an approval or an endorsement. The label also carries a "100% Gold Guarantee… return the unused portion within 90 days for a full refund" — a refund policy, not a quality certification. No NSF mark, no USP Verified, no Informed Choice and no Non-GMO Project claim is made anywhere.
- A US retail price, and therefore the cost per day
- No verifiable US retail price could be published under a source URL this site can resolve. The brand has no independent storefront — californiagoldnutrition.com product URLs redirect into iherb.com, which hard-blocks automated fetching (HTTP 403, Cloudflare) on both curl and WebFetch, so neither the panel nor the price could be read from the seller of record. The iHerb figure of $22.35 comes from a search-result snippet only and is recorded as unverified — that would be $0.37 a day. One price was directly fetched and verified: $28.72 at Spectrum Supplements, SKU CGN-00965, on 2026-07-31, which is $0.48 a day at the label's own 1-capsule serving. That is a third-party reseller rather than the seller of record, and the teardown did not preserve its exact product URL, so it is stated here with its provenance rather than published as a price with a URL that cannot be resolved. On either figure this is the cheapest product in its batch by a wide margin — roughly one fifth to one seventh of the most expensive.
- The seller's own page, at all
- iherb.com hard-blocks automated fetching (HTTP 403, Cloudflare) on both curl and WebFetch, and californiagoldnutrition.com product URLs redirect into iherb.com and inherit the same 403. Neither the panel nor the price is readable from the seller of record by any automated agent. This product's formulation could only be reconstructed from the US government's label database plus an independent reseller's transcription.
- The iHerb retail price
- $22.35 comes from a search-result snippet only; the page itself returns 403. The only directly fetched price is $28.72 at a third-party reseller.
- The per-organism CFU of any of the eight organisms
- One 136 mg figure and one 30 billion CFU figure cover all eight. This also limits the at-expiry guarantee, which covers the blend total only: with no per-organism split, any one of the eight could be present at a token dose at expiry and the guarantee would still hold.
- Which strains are in the bottle
- Not one ATCC, DSM, CNCM, NCIMB, CECT or trade designator appears on the panel — confirmed identically in DSLD 275001 and in an independent reseller's transcription. No organism here can be matched to any published trial. Product-level searches return nothing either: "LactoBif"[All Fields] → 0.
- Who audits the facility
- No auditor, registrar or certificate number is named, so there is no register to check.
How to check every line of this page yourself
Nothing on this page requires trusting us. Every claim above resolves to a record you can open:
- Open the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record linked at the top of this page. It is the label the manufacturer filed, not our transcription of it.
- Compare the CFU line and the suggested-use line against the disclosure table above. If they disagree with us, we are wrong and we want to know.
- Take any strain designator from the panel and run the query printed beside it. The query is published precisely so you can get a different answer than we did.
- Divide the price by the number of days the label’s own dose instructions make the container last. That arithmetic is the whole of the cost-per-day row.
- Search the certifier’s own register for this product, not for the brand. A company can participate in a programme without this product being on its list.
The cheapest product in its batch makes the single most consumer-protective disclosure in it.
Verbatim from the label: “Potency guaranteed until expiration date when stored in a cool, dry place at 77 degrees F (25 degrees C) or below.” And then, unusually, the failure mode too: “Extended exposure to higher than recommended storage temperatures may cause product degradation and the reduction of live and active probiotic bacteria.” Most of this category will not tell you when its CFU number is measured. This one tells you, and tells you what breaks it.
Then it tells you nothing about what is in the capsule.
Eight organisms share one line — “Probiotic Bacteria Blend — 136 mg” — footnoted “30 billion CFU composed of the following strains”, followed by eight species names and not one designator. No ATCC, no DSM, no CNCM, no trade code. Which means the at-expiry guarantee, real as it is, covers the blend total only: any one of the eight could be present at a token dose on the day it expires and the guarantee would still hold.
Two details make that silence look like a decision rather than an oversight.
First, the supplier is named and the strains are not. The brand’s own Amazon bullets read “Exclusively using FloraFIT Probiotics by Danisco.” FloraFIT is a commercial ingredient line whose constituents are sold under designators. You are told whose strains these are, and never which.
Second, this brand prints designators on a sibling. LactoBif 65 lists L. plantarum WCFS1 and L. rhamnosus GG — same brand, same line, same panel format, same government database. Which also settles an objection worth settling for the whole site: the database does not strip designators. It preserves them when the label carries them. A species-only record is evidence about the label.
The claim language is where it gets interesting. The label says “8 active & clinically researched probiotic strains”, and elsewhere “clinically studied” and “clinically documented”. Then, in its own footnote: “In Vitro studies conducted by probiotic raw material supplier.”
Give the brand its due here, because it earned some. The specific claim being footnoted — acid and bile resistance, adhesion to intestinal cell lines — genuinely is an in vitro endpoint, and California Gold Nutrition disclosed that rather than burying it. Most brands in this position simply do not write the footnote. The problem is placement: “8 active & clinically researched probiotic strains” runs in the front-of-pack hierarchy with no qualifier attached, and nobody reading it there concludes “in a test tube, by the company that sold us the powder.”
One structural note that belongs to the category rather than the brand. The seller’s own page could not be read at all — iHerb returns 403 to automated access, and californiagoldnutrition.com just redirects into it. Every number on this page was reconstructed from the US government’s label database and an independent reseller. A shopper using a screen reader, a comparison tool or a shopping assistant is in the same position this teardown was: locked out of the label by the store.