Where vegan supplements actually come from, ingredient by ingredient

A cow's liver holds vitamin B12 because bacteria in its gut made it, not because the animal synthesised it itself, and a B12 tablet exists for exactly the same reason: a bacterium made it in a tank. Nothing on earth apart from bacteria and archaea can build the B12 molecule from scratch. Animals get it by hosting those bacteria, eating other animals that hosted them, or eating feed the manufacturer already fortified with the fermented product. A vegan swallowing a B12 tablet and a person eating a supplemented chicken are, at the level of the actual molecule, drawing on the same microbial factory.

That is the running fact behind every supplement in this guide: whether a nutrient counts as animal-derived depends on the manufacturing route someone chose, not on some property baked into the molecule. Dosing and whether you need any of this at all is a separate question, and the supplements guide already answers it. This one stays with the factory floor: what these things are made from, and what a shopper can actually verify on a label.

Industrial B12 is produced by fermenting Pseudomonas denitrificans or Propionibacterium shermanii in vats that can exceed 100,000 litres, running for 7 to 10 days on a feed of sugars and nitrogen sources, according to a 2024 review in Food Science & Nutrition. The bacteria excrete a B12 precursor, which is then extracted and, for the cheapest and most stable commercial form, converted into cyanocobalamin by attaching a cyanide molecule so small it poses no toxicity risk at supplement doses. Livestock feed is fortified with output from the same fermentation runs, which is why a modern B12-fortified animal product and a vegan B12 tablet trace back to the same microbial source rather than to two different biological processes.

Cyanocobalamin has to be converted by the body into the active coenzyme forms, methylcobalamin and adenosylcobalamin, before it does anything, while methylcobalamin supplements skip that step. A small 2021 trial published in PMC found methylcobalamin and cyanocobalamin performed similarly at maintaining serum B12 markers in vegan adults over months, so the practical difference for most people is smaller than supplement marketing implies. What the label should tell you is the chemical form and the dose in micrograms; the science of how much you need and how often belongs to the B12 evidence page.

Conventional D3 starts as lanolin, the waxy secretion sheep produce to waterproof their wool, which is skimmed off during processing and put through esterification and saponification to isolate 7-dehydrocholesterol. UV light then converts that compound into cholecalciferol, chemically identical to the D3 your own skin makes when it's hit by sunlight. Because the raw material is an animal secretion, lanolin-derived D3 has long been a flat no for strict vegans even though no sheep is slaughtered to make it, the same category problem as honey or beeswax.

The vegan alternative uses lichen, a symbiotic organism of fungus and algae that makes its own vitamin D3 naturally, extracted and put through the same UV conversion without ever touching an animal. Vitashine and a handful of other suppliers have made lichen D3 widely available in capsules, drops and fortified foods since the early 2010s. Before that route existed, vegan supplement makers used D2 (ergocalciferol), made by UV-treating yeast or mushrooms, because it was the only plant-derived option on the market. A 1998 dose-response study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found D3 raises blood 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels roughly 1.7 to 3 times more than an equal dose of D2, and a later study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism found D3 also holds its effect longer after dosing stops. D2 was never chosen for potency; it was chosen because it was the only vegan option available, and now that lichen D3 exists there is little reason to default to it. Lanolin's own verdict page and the D3 ingredient page cover the labelling detail; the vitamin D evidence page covers dosing.

Fish do not manufacture EPA and DHA. Marine microalgae, chiefly species in the genus Schizochytrium along with some diatoms, synthesise these fatty acids from scratch, and fish accumulate them by eating algae directly or by eating smaller fish that already had. That means fish oil has always been a downstream product of an algal process, and cultivated microalgae supplements are not a substitute standing in for fish, they're the original source with the fish step removed.

Commercial production grows Schizochytrium in closed fermentation tanks on sugars, in the dark, with no seawater or ocean harvesting involved, a process a 2023 review in Frontiers in Microbiology describes as heterotrophic fermentation rather than photosynthetic algae farming. The oil that comes out can run up to 60% combined EPA and DHA by weight once concentrated, well above the roughly 30% typical of standard fish body oil, according to industry figures from oil producer Evonik. Because the fermentation tank is a controlled system, the resulting oil also carries none of the mercury or PCB contamination risk that comes with harvesting from ocean fish. What varies between algal oil products is the EPA to DHA ratio: some strains and processing methods are bred toward higher DHA, others toward a more even split, so a label that states each figure in milligrams is doing more useful work than one that just says "omega-3 oil". Health outcomes and dosing sit with the omega-3 evidence page.

Creatine monohydrate is not extracted from meat and never has been at commercial scale. It's built by reacting sodium sarcosinate with cyanamide under heat and pressure, then crystallising, centrifuging and drying the result into powder. Both starting materials are produced industrially with no animal involvement, so a tub of plain creatine monohydrate is animal-free regardless of whether the packaging carries a vegan logo. The logo is doing marketing work, not chemistry work; a shopper paying extra for a "vegan creatine" claim on an otherwise ordinary monohydrate is often paying for a label that added no new ingredient.

The one meaningful quality signal in this category is Creapure, a brand name owned by the German manufacturer AlzChem, which guarantees at least 99.9% purity and traces every batch to a dedicated single-purpose plant in Trostberg via HPLC testing. Creapure is a purity and manufacturing-provenance mark, not a vegan certification; it happens to be relevant here because cheaper creatine synthesised in less controlled facilities can carry higher levels of the reaction byproducts dicyandiamide and dihydrotriazine. What creatine actually does in the body, and who benefits from taking it, is covered on the creatine evidence page.

Collagen is a structural protein that only animals build, made of repeating glycine, proline and hydroxyproline units assembled into the triple helix that gives skin, tendon and bone their tensile strength. No plant makes it, so "plant-based collagen" as a literal claim is false on its face, and any product using that phrase is either wrong or hoping you won't ask what it means chemically. There are two honest things a bottle can actually be.

The first is precision fermentation: companies including Geltor and Modern Meadow have engineered yeast to express collagen proteins or peptides directly, with Geltor reaching commercial-scale production of its PrimaColl ingredient for food and nutrition use in 2022. This is genuine animal-free collagen, chemically real, just not remotely common yet and rarely cheap. The second, and by far the more common bottle on a supplement shelf, is a "collagen booster": a blend of vitamin C, silica, biotin and specific amino acids like glycine and proline marketed with collagen language because those cofactors support the body's own collagen synthesis. That is a legitimate formulation, but it contains no collagen at all, and a label that leans on the word without saying so plainly is using the ingredient's reputation rather than its substance. The collagen ingredient page has the full verdict on animal-sourced collagen itself.

The active ingredient is rarely the part that trips people up; the shell around it is. Traditional capsules are gelatin, made from animal collagen, usually bovine or porcine. The vegan alternatives are HPMC (hydroxypropyl methylcellulose), made from plant cellulose, and pullulan, fermented from starch by the fungus Aureobasidium pullulans, which is the only capsule material that can carry USDA Organic certification. Both perform differently from gelatin: HPMC resists moisture better, which matters for hygroscopic powders, while pullulan has a stronger oxygen barrier, which matters for oils prone to oxidation like algal DHA.

Beyond the shell, three excipients cause most of the label confusion. Magnesium stearate, used to stop powder sticking to tableting machinery, can be made from beef or pork tallow or from hydrogenated palm or cottonseed oil, and the label rarely says which unless the product is certified vegan. Glycerin, used to keep capsules pliable, can come from animal fat rendering or from vegetable oil processing, chemically indistinguishable either way; the glycerin verdict page covers how to tell. And tablet coatings occasionally use carmine, shellac or beeswax for shine or colour, all animal-derived and all things a vegan-certified product will have swapped for a plant wax or synthetic polish.

A vegan certification logo verifies the ingredient list and, depending on the scheme, requires documented cleaning protocols between production runs. It is not a food safety audit, and the international vegan standard, ISO 23662:2021, explicitly excludes food safety, which is handled separately under ISO 22000. It also is not a guarantee against all cross-contact: The Vegan Society and Vegan Action both allow shared manufacturing equipment provided it's cleaned and documented between batches, which means trace carryover on genuinely shared lines is a possibility the certification tolerates rather than eliminates.

None of this requires memorising chemistry in a shop. Each of these five checks takes a few seconds and tells you more than the word vegan printed on the front does.