A proprietary blend is a line on a Supplement Facts panel that gives one combined weight for a group of ingredients and no individual amount for any of them.
It is entirely legal, it is disclosed as what it is, and it removes the only calculation a buyer could have performed. All three of those are true at once, which is why the argument about it never resolves.
What is a proprietary blend on a supplement label?
It is a permitted labelling format. The rules allow a manufacturer to declare a blend by its total weight and to list the ingredients inside it in descending order by weight, without stating how much of each is present. So a panel can read Recovery Blend 1,200 mg followed by eleven names and nothing else.
Two things are disclosed by that line and they are worth naming precisely. The total, and the ranking. Everything else — every individual dose, every ratio, every comparison to another product — is withheld, and withheld lawfully.
Why do brands use proprietary blends?
The stated reason is recipe protection: a competitor who can read every dose can copy the formula. That reason is real and it is weaker than it sounds, because an analytical laboratory can reverse a formula from the finished product anyway. The practical effect is different from the stated one.
The practical effect is that under-dosing becomes undetectable. If eleven ingredients share 1,200 mg and the first two are cheap fillers, the last nine can be present in amounts too small to matter and the panel will look identical to one where they are not. The format does not prove that has happened. It makes it unprovable either way, which is the point of the criticism.
What does a blend make impossible?
Every comparison worth making. Cost per gram of the active. Dose against the amount used in the research a brand is gesturing at. Elemental arithmetic on a mineral. Stacking totals across a cabinet. All of them need one individual figure, and a blend is the decision not to print one.
| The question | With a blend |
|---|---|
| How much of the active? | not computable |
| Cost per gram of the active? | not computable |
| Elemental figure for a mineral? | not computable |
| Daily total across four products? | not computable |
| Ranking of the ingredients | disclosed |
That table is the whole argument. A blend is not a lie and it is not evidence of one. It is the removal of arithmetic, and for anyone whose method is arithmetic that is the same thing as an answer.
Are proprietary blends always a red flag?
Not automatically. A flavour system, a gum blend or a preservative package is a genuine recipe and nobody needs its arithmetic. The flag goes up when the active sits inside the blend — when the reason a person is buying the product is the ingredient whose dose has been withheld. That is a specific test rather than a general suspicion.
Which produces one line worth keeping: if the ingredient on the front of the bottle is inside the blend on the back, the front of the bottle is not a claim anyone can check. Walk, or accept that the purchase is made on trust rather than on a number.
What does TARE print?
None of the four TARE formulas contains a proprietary blend, and every figure is printed on its own line. Mineral Base is the clearest case, because it is the product where the category default is a blend: shilajit extract 30:1 (Asphaltum) 400 mg, ashwagandha root extract 30:1 100 mg, sea moss extract 20:1 100 mg, tongkat ali root extract 300:1 100 mg. Four ingredients, four figures, one capsule.
That is not a boast about generosity. It is the only version of this product where the procedure above can be run by the person holding it, and a brand that asks readers to divide has to be divisible.
What the absence of a blend does not prove
Printing every dose says nothing about whether the doses are any good. A fully disclosed panel can be fully disclosed and under-dosed, and the reader can then see that it is — which is the whole benefit and also the whole limit. Disclosure enables the judgement; it does not make it.
And it says nothing about what is in the capsule. A printed figure is a claim about composition until a document measures it. Two of our four certificates report measured results and two report specification limits and no results at all, and we name which is which at the top of every panel rather than letting one word cover four products. The full transcriptions are on Testing & Certification.
More in this cluster: the sixty-second label procedure, what a certificate of analysis reports, and the elemental arithmetic a blend makes impossible.