Three lots.
And the four we retired.
The Lot Mark counts how many of four questions a certificate answers with a measured result — identity, metals, microbiology, potency — and prints the count with its denominator on it. It is our own arithmetic on our own documents, every operand is printed beside every operation, and its best score does not go to the product this site is built around — that one carries the softest chain of evidence we hold. Below the three is the record of four lot codes that are gone, and why.
This box does nothing today, and it is rendered switched off rather than left to fail or quietly removed. The three marks below are the answer it would give, and the two paragraphs under it are the reason it cannot give a better one yet.
Why it is off. We publish every certificate we hold, and we hold three. Two of them name a lot — 121125450 and CM20251225A. We do not know which lot is currently shipping, because TARE is fulfilled by a contract manufacturer, we never take possession of inventory, and three things are open with them: whether a certificate is generated for every production run, whether we can be told which lot ships, and whether we are told when a document is superseded. All three are on the open list at /testing.
So a working box would answer NOT HELD to nearly every code typed off a tub — not “failed”, not “untested”, and not silence, but still a no. A lookup that can only say no is a lookup pretending to be a service, and we would rather ship the empty state with the reason attached than the theatre of a search field. What switches it on: written confirmation that a certificate is issued per production run and delivered to us. On that day this box gets wired, and NOT HELD becomes the exception rather than the rule.
Until then, the manual version works and a person does it: email support@taketare.com with the code printed on your tub and we will ask our manufacturer for that lot specifically. A person answers, within one business day, and if the answer is that no document exists for it, that is what you will be told.
Three documents,
three marks.
One row per lot: the mark, who ran the tests, and the page carrying the four axis states with the arithmetic under them.
| Formula | Lot | Lot Mark | Who ran the tests | The mark in full |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base Work — creatine | CM20251225A | 4 / 4 | An outside laboratory | /lot/cm20251225a |
| Under Load — collagen | 121125450 | 3 / 4 | The company that makes it | /lot/121125450 |
| Night Work — magnesium | MGL260212 raw material | 1 / 4 | An outside laboratory, for the ingredient supplier | /lot/night-work |
Ordered by mark. The row under the top one is the hero product — the one this site is built around, the one with the protocol and the film — and reordering the table to move it up would be the one edit here that would cost us the most. Night Work’s cell now carries a code, and it is marked raw material because that is what MGL260212 is: a lot of powder the ingredient supplier had tested before anything was encapsulated. It is not a TARE fill lot and the qualifier travels with it everywhere it is printed.
The magnesium mark fell from three to one, and here is why
Until 5 September 2026 this table showed Night Work at 3 / 4. That score was counted on a document our manufacturer replaced on 2 September — a November 2025 certificate for a different magnesium product, carrying a potency figure that could not have come from a bisglycinate. We scored what we had. It was the wrong document.
The replacement is the right ingredient and a much thinner test. Magnesium glycinate, lot MGL260212, and microbiology only: seven organisms, all pass, method Petrifilm/qPCR. Identity is not on it. Potency is not on it — no assay, no label claim profile, serving size printed N/A. Heavy metals are printed as a table with “Not Tested” in every result cell. One axis of four, so 1 / 4, and the number went down the day we read the new file rather than the day someone noticed. The whole document is published on its page.
Under Load also misses identity, and its three is not the same kind of three. The collagen’s certificate was run by the company that manufactures the powder — on the lot our own tub was filled from, which is the only document we hold that does that. The magnesium’s was run by an outside laboratory that had nothing to do with making it, and was commissioned by and issued to the ingredient supplier, against a bag of raw powder rather than a finished bottle. The mark cannot see that difference, because it counts what a document measured rather than weighing who measured it — so the column beside it does, on this page and on every page these marks appear on. The long version is on the collagen’s page.
The best mark is not on the product we lead with
Base Work is the only 4 / 4 we have, and it is not the product this site is built around. The hero — the one with the protocol and the film — scores three and has the softest chain of the three. We publish the ranking in that order anyway, on the product page as well as here: if you are buying one tub this month on documents alone, buy the creatine.
A four is also not a verdict that our creatine is better than anybody else’s. It says four questions were asked of one lot and four came back with a figure. The three tiers of the word tested.
Take the four questions to any other tub
Is it the substance the label names. How far under the metals ceiling did it come in. Is it clean against a stated limit. How much of the constituent is in it. Ask the tub you already own for the same four states, on the lot printed on its own certificate. That takes about ten seconds and it costs nothing, and if it sends you back to what is already in your cupboard, the ten seconds still paid.
We are not going to tell you what you will find. We have not read anybody else’s paperwork and we are not going to guess at it. How to read one, in three minutes.
Four codes came off
this list. Here is
where they went.
We audited our supplier and two products did not survive it. A third survived in half, and the fourth code belongs to a bottle we no longer fill. The four pages are kept rather than deleted: each one now carries the reason instead of a certificate.
| Lot | What it was | Why the page is gone | The page |
|---|---|---|---|
| R506064 | First Food — colostrum | Product retired — no lot from either supplier carries the assay its headline number needed | /lot/r506064 |
| 5120130 | Training Water — creatine and electrolytes | Retired as constituted — no certified electrolyte product is available to us; the creatine half survives as Base Work | /lot/5120130 |
| 6010323 | Mineral Base — shilajit | Product retired — no certificate of analysis exists for it at our current manufacturer | /lot/6010323 |
| MGL250923 | Night Work — the previous bottle | Lot superseded — the product continues, that bottle does not. The document held for the current bottle names a different code, MGL260212, and it is a raw-material lot rather than a fill lot | /lot/mgl250923 |
Two of these four documents reported no measured result on any axis and both scored nought when they were live. Every product that scored nought is gone. That is what the count was for, and it is the only test of a scoring system that matters — whether it is allowed to cost you something.
Why those four addresses answer 410 rather than 404
A 404 means we cannot find it. A 410 means it is gone and we know it. These four pages published certificates. If one of those addresses is in somebody’s notes, in a search result or in a link we sent, the useful answer is not a missing-page message — it is the document’s own obituary: what it was, why the product is no longer sold, and where the account lives.
So each page returns 410 with an explanation on it, and search engines are told to drop the URL rather than keep re-checking a soft 404. None of the four pages reprints a figure from its old certificate. Those figures described products we no longer sell; carrying them forward as history is how a retired number ends up quoted as a current one. The full account of all four is on /testing.
What this page
cannot tell you.
Publishing a document is undone by overstating it. Four things this page does not do, written out rather than left for you to notice.
- The underlying file is now published, and that changed on 5 September 2026. Certificates in this trade routinely carry a clause requiring the issuer’s written approval before reproduction. We asked. Our manufacturer granted publication in writing on 17 August 2026 — he advised against it, and then said yes — so the document is reproduced whole and unaltered, which is what its own footer requires. The sentence that used to sit here, saying we had not confirmed we may reproduce it, was true when it was written and stopped being true three weeks later. Where that stands across all three documents.
- One of our three certificates was run by the company that makes the powder. It is the collagen, it is the hero product, and it is named in the table above and at the top of its own panel. A mark counts what a document measured; it does not weigh who measured it, so the two columns have to be read together.
- These are the lots on the documents. They are not the lot in your jar. TARE is fulfilled by a contract manufacturer and never takes possession of inventory, so we cannot connect a published lot to the tub in your hands. We do not offer per-lot traceability and we do not claim it. The day that sentence stops being true it is deleted, and not one day sooner — and the box at the top of this page comes on in the same edit.
- A certificate verifies contents. It does not verify effects. Nothing on this page is a claim about what any of this does for anyone.