TARE no longer sells a shilajit product.
We audited our supplier and two products did not survive it. Mineral Base, the shilajit capsule, was one of them. The reason is a single sentence: no certificate of analysis is available for the equivalent product from our manufacturer. Not a weaker document — none. This article argues that a percentage without a method behind it is not a measurement; a product with no document behind it at all fails the same test, and ours did, so it left the range in August 2026.
The article stays up, and every figure that described our own capsule has come out of it: the panel figures, the lot code and the link to the product page. What is left is the part that was never about us — why fulvic percentages do not compare, and what to ask of anyone still printing one. The full account of what we retired, and why, is on Testing & Certification.
One jar says 60% fulvic acid. The next says 75%. A third says "rich in fulvic acid" and prints nothing.
Only one of those three is doing anything useful, and it is not the highest number. The reason is that fulvic acid is not a single molecule, and a percentage of a category is only as good as the instrument that drew the boundary.
What is fulvic acid, and how much is in shilajit?
Fulvic acid is not one compound. It is a class of related humic substances defined partly by how the material behaves in a particular assay. Shilajit carries a fulvic fraction along with humic substances, a mineral fraction and a group of compounds called dibenzo-alpha-pyrones. The proportions vary with where the material was collected and how it was purified.
So the honest answer to the headline is a shape rather than a number. There is a fulvic fraction, it varies by source, and a single figure without a method attached is not a measurement anyone can act on.
Why do fulvic acid percentages not compare across brands?
Because the assays in common use do not agree with one another. Run two accepted methods on the same sample and both can return honest numbers that are meaningfully different, because each method draws the line around the fulvic class in a slightly different place. Neither result is wrong. They are answers to slightly different questions.
Which means a 60% figure on one jar and a 75% figure on another may be describing the same material through two instruments. Comparing them as though they were comparable is the single most common error in this category, and brands are in no hurry to correct it.
What makes a fulvic percentage readable?
A named method printed beside the figure, and a statement of whether the number is a measured result or a specification the formula was built to. With both, the percentage becomes a fact about a sample. With neither, it is a marketing figure that happens to have a decimal point in it.
The rule that survives everything else in this article: a fulvic percentage is worth reading when the method is named beside it, and worth very little when it is not. That is a one-line test and it eliminates most of the shelf.
What about the 84 trace minerals?
Nearly every jar says so and almost none publish a document showing it. The figure has become category furniture, repeated because it is repeated. Shilajit does carry a mineral fraction, but a specific count is a testable claim, and a testable claim with no test behind it is a phrase rather than a fact.
We never printed a trace-mineral count on our own shilajit capsule, and would not have until there was a document under it. That is not a criticism of the number, which may well be defensible. It is a statement about what can be shown, which is the only standard this brand runs on.
What did TARE print instead?
We printed the actives, each named on its own line with its own weight and ratio and nothing pooled into a combined figure — and no fulvic percentage and no mineral count, because we held no assay for either. A number that cannot be shown is a number that does not go on a label. That rule is also why there is no shilajit product now: no certificate of analysis exists for the equivalent product at our manufacturer, so the product went rather than the rule.
Against a shelf of ten-in-one stacks printing one combined weight, individual figures are worth something. They are worth less than a document, and the document is the harder thing to get — on this ingredient more than on any other.
What the research does not show
Shilajit was the thinnest evidence base of anything TARE ever sold. The human work is small in scale, uneven in quality, and several of the more frequently pointed-to trials were funded by the companies supplying the ingredient. Nothing in it is replicated well enough to hang a claim on.
The fulvic percentage is not an efficacy figure in any case. Even a well-measured number with a named method beside it describes composition. Treating a composition figure as a potency figure is a second error stacked on the comparability one, and the category makes both at once.
And our own document was one of the weak ones. The certificate we held for a shilajit capsule reported specification limits and no measured results at all — no method, no test date, no figure. For a material collected out of rock that is the wrong document to be missing, and we said we would pay for the testing ourselves if the manufacturer did not. Then the same question went to a second manufacturer and there was no certificate at all, which is where the product ended. The full account is on Testing & Certification.
More in this cluster: what shilajit actually is, the three forms and what separates them, and how to read the document that would settle it.