How We Make Money

What an affiliate link is

An affiliate link is a normal link with a tracking identifier attached. When you click it, you go to the brand's own online store. Their system records that we sent you. If you buy within their tracking window, they pay us a percentage of the sale.

The same applies to promo codes. If you copy a code from a product page and use it at checkout, the brand may credit the sale to us.

This costs you nothing. The commission comes out of the brand's margin, not your price. Affiliate links never raise a price, and using a code we publish is often cheaper than not using one.

Why we do it this way

Lab Tested Foods is bootstrapped. There is no outside funding behind this site. Affiliate commissions offset what it costs to run it: hosting and infrastructure, sourcing and transcribing lab data, building and maintaining the software, and the ordinary costs of operating the company.

We run no advertising on this site.

Longer term we intend to move toward consumer and business subscriptions as we build out more of the product, including a mobile app. When that happens, we will say so here and date the change.

What affiliate status does not affect

It does not affect which products we list. We list products where we can obtain testing data. Many listed products carry no affiliate link at all, and we treat them exactly the same way: same pages, same data, same prominence. We have never added a product because it carried a commission, and we have never dropped one because it did not.

It does not affect what data we show. What appears on a product page is what the laboratory reported. Our internal rule for entering COA data is transcribe, never judge. Whoever enters a result records what the lab document says, and nothing about a commercial relationship enters that process.

It does not affect ordering. Commission rate is not a sort key anywhere on this site.

It does not affect the source link. Every published result points back to the original Certificate of Analysis. That link is there whether or not the product carries an affiliate link, and whether or not the results are good for the brand.

Commission rates differ from brand to brand. We do not control them and we do not weight anything by them.

What we do not do

• We do not sell placement, sponsored listings, or featured slots.
• We do not accept payment from a brand in exchange for being listed or for having its testing data published.
• We do not publish sponsored posts or paid reviews.
• We do not let a brand see, approve, or edit anything before it goes live.
• We do not remove or soften a published result because a brand asked us to. If a result is wrong we correct it because it is wrong, and we say what changed.
• We do not accept free products in exchange for coverage.

The relationships we do have

We would rather name these than have you find them.

Brands can send us their Certificates of Analysis. Some do, through email forwarding or a shared folder. We also collect COAs that brands publish openly on their own sites. A brand sending us a document buys nothing. It goes through the same transcription process as one we found ourselves, it gets the same source link, and the numbers on it are published as the lab reported them. Sending us an unflattering COA does not protect a brand from what that COA says.

We participate in affiliate programs run directly by brands. We are not part of Amazon Associates or any affiliate network such as ShareASale or Impact. Every commercial link on this site is a direct arrangement with the brand selling the product.

That means the brand paying us a commission is the same brand whose test results we publish. We would rather say that plainly than leave it unsaid. It is also the reason every result links back to the original Certificate of Analysis. You are never asked to trust our opinion of a brand. You are asked to read the lab document and see for yourself.

What happens when you click

When you click an affiliate link or copy a promo code, we record which product or brand it was, where it pointed to, and when. We use that to reconcile the commissions brands report against what actually happened, because affiliate reporting is frequently wrong.

We do not record who you are. There are no visitor accounts on this site. We hold no name, no login, and no lasting identifier tied to a person. If you have accepted analytics, the record also carries a temporary session identifier so we can see the browsing path that led to the click. If you declined, we still count the click but cannot connect it to anything else.

Once you land on the brand's site you are on their property and under their privacy policy. They will see the referral and may set their own cookies. We have no visibility into what you buy, what you pay, or what else you do there. We only ever see what the brand reports back to us.

Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

How to avoid affiliate links entirely

If you would rather we did not earn anything from your purchase, that is completely fine, and it will not change what you can see here. Every page is fully readable without clicking anything. You can search the product name yourself and go to the brand's store directly. Nothing is gated, and no feature requires you to click a commercial link.

Holding us to this

If something on this site looks like it was influenced by a commercial relationship, tell us at info@labtestedfoods.com. Send the product and what looks wrong. We will check it, and if we got something wrong we will fix it and say so.

If we ever change this model, whether by taking advertising, accepting sponsored placement, or introducing any paid relationship with a brand, we will say so on this page and date the change before it takes effect. We will not bury it in a policy update.

This disclosure is made in line with the FTC's Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, 16 CFR Part 255.

Inline notice wording

For reference, this is the notice that appears next to every affiliate link and promo code on the site, visible before you click:

Lab Tested Foods may earn a commission if you buy through this link. It costs you nothing, and it changes nothing in the lab results above. Disclosure