Every natural health product sold legally in Canada needs a product licence, and Health Canada publishes each one in its Licensed Natural Health Products Database (LNHPD), with the date it was issued and the medicinal ingredients it lists. Counting those licences by year and by ingredient shows which ingredients companies are bringing to the Canadian market, and which they have stopped bringing. We read every non-homeopathic licence in the database, 139,982 of them, one product at a time on October 17, 2026.
A disclosure first: Signal State Labs is a pre-launch Canadian supplement company. We hold no product licence and sell nothing yet, and our concept formula contains some of the ingredients below. This page names no company or product, and it says nothing about whether any ingredient works. Each row links to that ingredient's evidence profile, which is where that question is answered.
The short version
- Creatine had its biggest year on record in 2025: 211 new licences, up from 35 in 2019. By October 17, 2026 there were already 190.
- Lion's mane went from 11 new licences in 2015 to 164 in 2021, peaked at 165 in 2023, and has eased since: 130 in 2025 and 70 so far in 2026.
- Three smaller ingredients took off from almost nothing: PQQ (22 in 2023, 70 in 2025), ergothioneine (3 in 2023, 82 in 2024) and citicoline (13 in 2023, 27 in 2025).
- Ginkgo fell from 431 new licences in 2015 to 63 in 2025. American ginseng, vitamin E and selenium show the same long decline.
- The market as a whole is not growing much. Between about 6,100 and 9,000 non-homeopathic products have been licensed each year since 2012. The exception is 2020, when 4,402 of that year's 10,573 licences listed ethyl or isopropyl alcohol, the active ingredient in hand sanitizer.
Rising: new licences per year
| Ingredient | 2015 | 2018 | 2021 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026to Oct 17 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creatine | 116 | 61 | 57 | 83 | 119 | 211 | 190 |
| Lion's Mane | 11 | 42 | 164 | 165 | 160 | 130 | 70 |
| Ashwagandha | 172 | 152 | 220 | 222 | 207 | 212 | 138 |
| Vitamin K2 (all forms) | 87 | 104 | 163 | 162 | 138 | 192 | 198 |
| PQQ | 12 | 5 | 15 | 22 | 46 | 70 | 57 |
| Ergothioneine | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 82 | 76 | 77 |
| Citicoline | 5 | 3 | 9 | 13 | 26 | 27 | 16 |
| All non-homeopathic products | 9,040 | 7,416 | 7,933 | 6,143 | 7,100 | 7,718 | 4,850 |
Creatine is the clearest growth story: new licences more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, and 2026 is close to passing 2025 with more than two months left. Vitamin K2, counted in all its forms rather than MK-7 alone, has already passed its 2025 total. Ashwagandha is high but flat, at roughly 200 to 220 new licences a year since 2021. Ergothioneine went from a handful of licences to about 80 a year in 2024, and has stayed there. We have not established why.
Falling: new licences per year
| Ingredient | 2015 | 2018 | 2021 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026to Oct 17 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ginkgo Biloba | 431 | 173 | 110 | 76 | 77 | 63 | 31 |
| American Ginseng | 117 | 63 | 71 | 49 | 25 | 36 | 17 |
| Rhodiola Rosea | 140 | 95 | 71 | 88 | 79 | 62 | 44 |
| Melatonin | 99 | 107 | 118 | 117 | 102 | 87 | 61 |
| 5-HTP | 65 | 54 | 50 | 36 | 43 | 22 | 22 |
| Vitamin E | 663 | 485 | 451 | 430 | 326 | 315 | 254 |
| Selenium | 424 | 323 | 338 | 275 | 235 | 224 | 190 |
| All non-homeopathic products | 9,040 | 7,416 | 7,933 | 6,143 | 7,100 | 7,718 | 4,850 |
Ginkgo is the steepest decline among the ingredients we profile: 2025's total was about a seventh of 2015's. Melatonin peaked more recently, at 130 new licences in 2022, and has fallen each year since. Vitamin E and selenium are still licensed in large numbers, almost always as one ingredient among several, but fewer each year.
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How to read these numbers
- A licence is not a product on a shelf. Health Canada licenses products before they are sold, and a licensed product may never reach a shelf or may later be discontinued. The counts measure licensing activity, not sales.
- The year is when the licence was issued, as recorded in the LNHPD, not when a product launched.
- Every licence counts, whatever its status today, so a product licensed in 2015 and discontinued in 2020 still counts in 2015. Counting only licences that are still active would make older years look smaller than they were. The download includes the active-only count too.
- A product that lists several ingredients counts once under each of them. A product that lists one ingredient under two names counts once.
- More licences is not more evidence. Companies license what they expect to sell. Whether an ingredient does anything is a separate question, which each ingredient's profile answers against The Evidence Standard.
- A licence also says little about dose: a product can be licensed at the bottom of a permitted range whatever the trials used. Our guide to what an NPN does and doesn't tell you about dose shows how to check.
How we counted
We downloaded Health Canada's full product licence table, kept one record per product, and dropped homeopathic submissions, which list the same plant names as herbal products but are often diluted to the point of containing little or none of the plant. That left 139,982 products. We then read each product's medicinal ingredients from the LNHPD one product at a time, because the database's paged ingredient listing changes order while it is being read and silently skips rows. Every product was read; a single failure would have stopped the count.
Ingredients are matched on the exact names Health Canada uses, and many substances are filed under more than one. Since at least 2014, nearly every creatine licence has listed it under its systematic chemical name, N-(aminoiminomethyl)-N-methylglycine monohydrate, rather than as creatine. Melatonin is mostly filed as N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine. Counting only the common name would find almost no creatine licences at all. We checked each ingredient's names against the products named after it, and the download lists every name we matched.
- Left out: vitamin D3, because newer licences list vitamin D without saying whether it is D2 or D3; and specific magnesium forms such as glycinate and L-threonate, because licences list elemental magnesium and record the form elsewhere.
- Vitamin K2 is counted in all its forms. Licences name the ingredient vitamin K2 and record whether it is MK-4 or MK-7 in a separate field that we did not read, so the K2 row is labelled all forms.
- Different species and salts are kept apart: Roman chamomile is not counted as German chamomile, Rhodiola crenulata is not counted as Rhodiola rosea, and creatine hydrochloride is not counted as creatine monohydrate.
- The 2026 column runs to October 17, 2026, the date of the scan. It is a partial year.
Download and reuse
The full table covers 40 ingredients and every year from 2004 to 2026, with all-status and active-only counts and the yearly total. It is free to reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: please credit The Signal by Signal State Labs and link to this page. If you find an error, or a name we missed, we would like to know at hello@signalstatelabs.com.
Sources
- Health Canada, Licensed Natural Health Products Database (LNHPD), product licence records and medicinal ingredient panels, read through the LNHPD API on October 17, 2026: health-products.canada.ca/lnhpd-bdpsnh/
- Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
