I want to explain a choice we made that you might never notice unless you flip the tub over, which is exactly the point.
What a proprietary blend is
Under U.S. labeling rules, a company is allowed to group a handful of ingredients under one name, a "proprietary blend," and tell you only the total weight of the whole group. It does not have to tell you how much of each ingredient is inside. So a label can list an exciting-sounding ingredient right up top, and you have no way to know whether it is present at an amount the research would recognize or at a pinch that rounds to nothing.
Why that bothered me
I started using a GLP-1, lost around forty pounds, and read a lot of labels along the way, because I am the kind of person who checks before I buy. What I kept running into was this exact wall. I would see a good ingredient on a panel, go looking for the dose, and find it buried inside a blend where the number was legally hidden. The research is clear that dose is what determines whether an ingredient does anything. Hiding the dose hides the only thing that matters.
Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. A proprietary blend is not there to protect a secret formula. There is rarely a secret worth protecting. It is there so a company can put a famous ingredient on the front and a trace of it in the tub, and you cannot call them on it.
The choice we made
So we do not use one. Every ingredient on our label shows its own amount. Creatine at a full clinical dose reads as a full clinical dose. HMB reads as its actual number. You can take our panel, line it up against the studies, and check our work. If we ever under-dosed something, you would be able to prove it, and that accountability is the whole idea.
This costs us something. Full disclosure means a competitor can copy the formula, and it means we cannot hide behind a blend if a research-backed dose is expensive to include. We decided we would rather earn the trust of people who read labels than win the customers who do not.
What to do with this
You do not have to take my word for any of it. Take the skill instead. Flip over any supplement you are considering, ours or anyone's, and look for whether every dose is disclosed or whether the important ones are hidden in a blend. That one habit will tell you more about a brand than any claim on the front ever could. We built our label to pass that test on purpose.
If you want the guide we put together for people navigating this, it is on the Founder's List at /#founders.