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. For a material collected out of rock the heavy-metal document is the whole question, so the product left the range in August 2026 rather than be carried forward on paperwork we did not have.
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 — what the material is, what a form or a ratio does and does not tell you, and what to ask of anyone still selling one. The full account of what we retired, and why, is on Testing & Certification.
Three forms sit on this shelf and they are priced against each other as though their numbers could be compared. They cannot.
A resin is sold by the gram. An extract is sold by the milligram with a ratio attached. A dried powder sits somewhere in between and often on a carrier. One document separates all three and almost nobody supplies it.
What is the difference between shilajit resin, powder and extract?
Resin is the purified exudate itself, a tar-like solid dosed with a spoon or a small scoop. Powder is that material dried, sometimes spray-dried onto a carrier such as maltodextrin. Extract is the material concentrated by a stated ratio and fixed in weight, which is what allows it into a capsule at a printed milligram figure.
The consequence runs through every comparison that follows. A gram of resin and 400 mg of a 30:1 extract are not two doses of the same thing, and no arithmetic printed on either bottle converts one into the other.
What does a 30:1 extract ratio mean?
It describes the concentration step: thirty parts of raw starting material reduced to one part of finished extract. It is a process description, not a potency measurement. Two 30:1 extracts made from different raw material by different methods can differ substantially, and both ratios are accurate.
So a ratio is worth having on a label and is worth much less than it looks. It tells you the manufacturer concentrated the material and roughly by how much. It does not tell you what came out the other end, and only an assay on the finished extract does that.
Which form is better?
There is no answer that survives contact with the labels, because the forms are not measured on a common scale. Resin advocates point to the material being closer to unprocessed. Extract advocates point to a stated ratio and a repeatable weight. Both arguments are about process, and process arguments cannot be settled without a result.
Which turns the question into a different and answerable one: which product publishes a heavy-metal document? Shilajit is a mineral pitch collected from rock, so what the rock carried is the live quality question for this ingredient in a way it is not for a powder made out of milk. That is the comparison worth running, and it is the one the shelf is quietest about.
What should be on a shilajit label?
Five things, and the fifth outranks the other four. The form named in plain words. A weight figure on the same line. The extract ratio, if it is an extract. No proprietary blend anywhere near the active. And a heavy-metal document, which for a material collected from rock is the whole question.
- The form, named. Resin, powder or extract — not "shilajit complex".
- A weight figure on the same line. Grams for a resin, milligrams for an extract.
- The extract ratio, if it is an extract — with the knowledge that a ratio is a process, not a potency.
- No proprietary blend. If shilajit sits inside one combined weight with three other things, nothing can be calculated.
- A heavy-metal document. For this ingredient it outranks the other four combined.
What a panel that has done the work looks like: every active named on its own line with its own weight, the form and the ratio printed beside it, and nothing pooled into a combined figure. That is a low bar and most of this shelf does not clear it. Clearing it is a statement about the label rather than about what the capsule does, which is worth keeping straight in both directions.
What the research does not show, and where our document stops
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, and the form argument above sits on top of a literature that does not distinguish between forms at all.
Our own document was one of the weak ones, and we would rather say it than have it discovered. The certificate we held for a shilajit capsule set out composition per serving and the heavy-metal and microbiological limits the formula was built to. It named no method, no test date and no measured result. On the ingredient where a measured lead figure matters most, that is the wrong document to be missing.
Then it got worse rather than better. When we changed manufacturer we asked for a certificate of analysis on the equivalent product and there was none — not a weaker document, none at all. So the product is gone rather than carried forward on paperwork we did not have. The full account is on Testing & Certification, kept there rather than deleted with the product.
More in this cluster: what shilajit actually is, why fulvic percentages do not compare, and how to read the document that would settle it.