By Jeanne Yacoubou, MS

In December 2024, The VRG received a blog comment from a reader about the CVS brand of ibuprofen. He said: “I have alpha-gal syndrome and celiac disease so I’m very careful about the products with which I come into contact. In a call and follow up emails with CVS customer service, I was advised that their ibuprofen 200mg tablets are manufactured by Perrigo and “contain beef tallow to produce the stearic acid.” I thought you might want to know.”

The VRG wanted to confirm what our reader had told us about the CVS brand of ibuprofen 200 mg tablets. We first called the general customer service line hoping to get an immediate confirmation. The representative looked it up in her system but could find no more than what was on the box label: stearic acid. She had no access to ingredient source information. So, she connected us with the CVS corporate office.

The corporate office didn’t have any more information and said they weren’t the ones to contact about an ingredient source, either. They transferred us to our local CVS pharmacy in Maryland.

The first local pharmacist gave us the phone number of what she referred to as the drug “manufacturer.” When we called the number, we discovered that the company, PL Development, was both a manufacturer and distributor of certain CVS brand products. She asked for the lot number or the NDC number of the drug. When we told her that we didn’t have either because we had not purchased it, she requested the NDC number from a photo of the product we had seen online.

When we gave it to her, she entered the number into her system. She then stated that her company does not supply CVS with that particular brand, so she had no information about its ingredients. She also suggested that CVS, as a large pharmacy chain, could use multiple manufacturers of the same product, depending on price, location, or availability.

She recommended that we ask a CVS pharmacy for a manufacturer of the product. With that information, we could contact the manufacturer directly to find out more about the ingredient. So, she transferred us back to our local CVS pharmacy.

This time, when we specified that we wanted to contact the manufacturer of the CVS brand ibuprofen, the pharmacist said he did not know how to do that. When we suggested using the NDC number, he repeated that he didn’t know how that would help.

So, we used the website contact form to try to get an answer. After submitting the question, we received an automatic reply that we’d get an answer in 1-2 days.

We not only received a response the following day. We also received a voicemail from CVS informing us that their email response had been sent earlier that day, and asking if it had answered our questions or if we had any other questions.

Here’s the email: “CVS Health Ibuprofen Pain Reliever & Fever Reducer (NSAID) 200 MG Coated Tablets is not considered vegan…It contains stearic acid, which is derived from beef tallow.”

Since The VRG had previously learned from PL Development (see above) that more than one manufacturer could supply this product to the pharmacy chain, the CVS email does not provide enough information about the vegan status of all CVS brand ibuprofen tablets. There is certainly at least one manufacturer that uses beef tallow-derived stearic acid, but we cannot assume that all do. You may wish to err on the side of caution, however, and not buy any of them.

If you’d really like to know about the CVS brand ibuprofen on the shelf in your local CVS pharmacy, we recommend you send the complete product name and its lot and NDC numbers (on the box) to CVS through its website contact form. Wait for an answer before purchase. If you get a response different from the ones we or our reader received, please let us know at [email protected].

The contents of this posting, our website and our other publications, including Vegan Journal, are not intended to provide personal medical advice. Medical advice should be obtained from a qualified health professional. We often depend on product and ingredient information from company statements. It is impossible to be 100% sure about a statement, info can change, people have different views, and mistakes can be made. Please use your best judgment about whether a product is suitable for you. To be sure, do further research or confirmation on your own.