TARE no longer sells a colostrum product.
We audited our supplier and two products did not survive it. First Food, the colostrum, was one of them. The reason is a single sentence: no lot from either supplier carries a finished-product immunoglobulin assay. Not a low result and not a failed one — the test is not run and the row does not exist. The compound the product was bought for could not be measured on any document available to us, so it left the range in August 2026 rather than stay on a shelf behind a number nobody could check.
The article stays up, and every figure that described our own jar has come out of it: the serving weight, the lot code, the certificate rows and the link to the product page. What is left is the part that was never about us — how the ingredient behaves, how the label works, and what to ask of anyone still selling one. The full account of what we retired, and why, is on Testing & Certification.
Yes. Bovine colostrum contains lactose, at a lower concentration than mature milk, and it is not a lactose-free product.
That is the short answer and it is only half of what the question is usually reaching for. The other half is a different question wearing the same clothes.
Does bovine colostrum contain lactose?
It does. Colostrum is the first milk a cow produces after calving, and lactose is a milk sugar, so it is present. The concentration is lower than in the mature milk that follows, because colostrum’s composition is weighted towards protein and other solids rather than sugar. Lower is not zero and a label should not imply it is.
So a product described as low in lactose is describing something real. A product described as lactose-free is describing something else, and unless it has been enzymatically treated or filtered, that description is doing work the ingredient does not support.
Is a milk allergy the same as a lactose question?
No, and this is the distinction that matters most. Lactose is a sugar. A milk allergy is a reaction to milk protein. Colostrum is a dairy fraction unusually high in protein, so carrying less sugar than milk says nothing about the allergen. Two questions, two answers, and only one is about lactose.
A colostrum product contains milk (dairy), and it is not for anyone with a milk allergy. That sentence belongs above the product description rather than below it, and in the footer of every page that sells one, because a brand that cannot be trusted on an allergen cannot be trusted on a label.
What does a colostrum label have to declare?
In the United States, milk is one of the major food allergens, so a product containing it must say so — either in the ingredient list in plain language or in a separate contains statement. What no label is required to print is a lactose figure, which is why almost none of them do.
Which leaves a reader with an inference rather than a number, and inferences should be labelled as such. The honest position is that colostrum carries lactose, the amount is not printed, and anyone who needs that number needs it from a physician rather than from a panel. We are not going to estimate it in order to look helpful.
What else is on the panel worth reading?
The serving weight, the servings per container, and whether anything sits inside a proprietary blend. Colostrum is dosed by the gram, so a serving figure and a container weight are the two numbers that let a buyer compute cost per gram — the comparison the category is least keen on and the one most worth running.
A panel that prints milligrams per serving, servings per container and a net weight has handed over all three of the numbers that arithmetic needs. One scoop, one ingredient, nothing inside a blend is the shape worth looking for. The step from those three figures to a cost per gram is four seconds of work, and a panel that makes it impossible has usually made it impossible on purpose.
Where a colostrum document stops
A colostrum certificate confirms identity and does not measure potency. An infrared scan matches the powder against a colostrum reference; the heavy-metal and microbiological rows screen for what should not be there. Both are measured results and both are worth having. What is missing is a potency assay — on every lot either of our suppliers could offer us, the test was not run and the row did not exist. Not a low result and not a failed one.
That is worth saying on an article about what is in the powder, because it is the limit of what a document of this kind can show. An identity score is a spectral match confirming the material is colostrum. It is not a purity figure and it should not be read as one, whoever is printing it. The account of why we stopped selling colostrum is on Testing & Certification, at length.
And the ranking, said out loud while we still sold one: the colostrum was not the product with the strongest paperwork behind it, and anyone buying on documents alone should have bought that jar last. That was an odd sentence for a brand to publish about its own flagship. It was also the true one, and the flagship is the thing that went.
More in this cluster: how much colostrum a serving is worth, colostrum against whey protein, and what the first week looks like.