Proprietary blends and why some labels hide the detail

A proprietary blend appears on a label as a single total — say, 900mg — followed by a list of ingredients in descending order of quantity. What it does not tell you is the split. That 900mg could be 850mg of the cheapest ingredient and trace amounts of everything else.

The stated reason and the real one

The stated reason is competitive protection: a brand does not want rivals copying a formula it invested in developing. That argument has some force for genuinely novel formulations, though ingredient lists are public and reverse-engineering a blend is not especially hard.

The more common reason is that full disclosure would show small amounts of the ingredients that sell the product. If a formula contains 400mg of an ingredient that research uses at 250mg, brands tend to print that number proudly.

How to handle a blend

• Check the order. Ingredients are listed by weight, so the first one dominates. If the cheapest filler is first, that is informative.
• Do the arithmetic. If the blend totals 900mg across nine ingredients, no single one can be at a research-level amount unless the others are negligible.
• Look for partial disclosure. Some brands disclose their flagship ingredient and blend the rest. That is a reasonable middle ground.
• Weigh it against everything else. A blend is one signal. A brand that blends but publishes batch testing may still be a better buy than one that discloses amounts and tests nothing.

Our position

We label products with limited transparency where amounts are not disclosed, and we say so on the product page. We do not rank them lower for it, because transparency is a property of the label rather than of the product, and some well-liked formulas use blends.

What we will not do is describe a blended product as though the individual amounts were known.