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"I Run a Strip Company": Why We Publish Our Formulation Choices in Public
Most supplement brands guard their formulas. We publish ours — including the parts that don’t look great — because the alternative is asking you to trust a label nobody checks.
If you’ve ever flipped over a supplement bottle and seen the words “Proprietary Blend” followed by a single number, you’ve seen the supplement industry’s favorite magic trick. The blend might contain six ingredients. You know the total weight. You don’t know how much of any single one is in there.
I started XYNE Health because I couldn’t find a supplement company that would show me the math. Not the marketing copy, not a “transparency” page that stops at naming the country of origin. The actual numbers: how much of each ingredient, what the lab found when they tested the batch, and what the gap looks like between what we print on the label and what clinical trials used.
This article is the manifesto I wish someone else had written first. It’s the full accounting of what we publish, why we publish it, and what it costs us when the numbers aren’t perfect.
The transparency problem is structural, not accidental
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 created a system where supplements don’t need pre-market approval. No efficacy testing before sale. No safety review. Manufacturers are required to keep batch records and hold substantiation for any structure/function claims they make, but the FDA is not permitted to review that substantiation unless they have evidence of a problem first.
In 1994, the supplement market was roughly $4 billion with about 4,000 products. Today it’s over $40 billion with somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 products on the market (FDA Commissioner statement, 2019). The FDA inspects fewer than 1 percent of registered facilities each year. In FY2023, of the 501 facilities inspected, 48 percent received a Form 483 citation (SupplySide). The most common finding? Failure to establish or meet a finished-product specification — the exact thing a Certificate of Analysis is supposed to prove.
The regulatory gap means the consumer’s only protection at the point of sale is whatever the brand decides to publish.
Most brands decide not to publish much.
What’s actually wrong with supplement labels
The problem isn’t hypothetical. The data is specific and recent.
Melatonin gummies: A 2023 JAMA research letter (Cohen et al.) tested 25 melatonin gummy products purchased online. Only 3 of 25 were within 10 percent of their labeled dose. Measured melatonin ranged from 74 percent to 347 percent of what the label said. One product contained no detectable melatonin at all — it did, however, contain 31.3 mg of unlisted CBD. A separate 2024 FDA analysis of 110 melatonin products (roughly 70 percent marketed to children) found about half met label claim within a reasonable range, but two contained zero or near-zero melatonin, and one labeled at 0.5 mg measured 3.33 mg — 667 percent of label.
Drug-tainted products: A 2018 JAMA Network Open paper (Tucker et al.) documented 776 products marketed as supplements that the FDA identified as adulterated with unapproved pharmaceutical ingredients between 2007 and 2016. More than 20 percent contained two or more hidden drugs. Fewer than half were ever recalled.
Proprietary blends: A 2023 analysis in the Journal of Nutrition (Saldanha et al., with NIH, FDA and industry-association co-authors) found that 21 percent of labels in the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database use proprietary blends. Up to 87 percent of labels contain ingredients that could legally be hidden in one. The paper puts it plainly: “the amount of a dietary ingredient in a proprietary blend is not available for calculating exposures.”
This is the industry we sell into. The question every supplement brand should have to answer is: what do you publish that proves your label is accurate?
What XYNE publishes — and what most brands don’t
Here’s the full accounting.
Every amount printed. Every XYNE product page lists every active ingredient and its per-strip amount. No proprietary blends. No “complexes” hiding doses behind a single number. If you want to check our saffron dose against the clinical literature — 10 mg per strip against trials running 15 to 30 mg — you can do that math because we printed the number.
Per-lot Certificate of Analysis data. Every product page carries a lot number and per-active assay results (percentage of labeled claim). Our Sleep formula, lot UPD2501: melatonin assayed at 101.6 percent of claim. All actives in that lot tested between 99.8 and 102.2 percent. Average strip weight: 210.16 mg against a specification of 210.00 mg. Disintegration: 30 seconds against a spec of under 60 seconds.
The defects, stated. This is the part that separates a transparency page from a marketing page. Four of our eleven certificates carry a stated qualification: one row above its stated range, one pair of figures duplicated across two certificates, one identification row naming a different organism, one malformed batch code. We print those qualifications above the results table.
Compare that to brands that publish only passing lots (“If a run fails, it never reaches a customer”), or brands that cite their testing volume without offering a lot-level lookup. Those are real practices from real companies that genuinely care about quality. The difference is publishing the imperfect result, not just the clean one.
The dose gap, printed rather than hidden. Our saffron is 10 mg. Clinical trials for mood support used 15 to 30 mg. Our L-theanine is 50 mg. Trials used 100 to 200 mg. Our Mushroom Focus is 100 mg. Studies on lion’s mane used 250 to 1,000 mg. Our collagen is 100 mg. Collagen trials used 2.5 to 10 grams. You can find all of this on our product pages, because hiding it doesn’t make it untrue — it just means you find out from someone else.
Seven things we can’t do in a strip. The strip format has a dose ceiling of roughly 25 to 150 mg of active per strip. That rules out creatine, magnesium at therapeutic doses, calcium, omega-3 fatty acids, high-dose vitamin C, fiber, and protein. We don’t sell any of those, and we won’t pretend a strip can deliver what a capsule or powder handles better. If you need those nutrients, keep the pill bottle.
Why “transparent brand” is usually marketing, not practice
The supplement industry has started to notice that consumers value transparency. A 2016 Label Insight study found 94 percent of consumers would be more loyal to a brand offering complete transparency, and 73 percent would pay more for it. The CRN Consumer Survey consistently finds about 75 percent of Americans trust the supplement industry’s safety and quality — which means roughly one in four don’t.
The response from the industry has been a wave of “transparency” branding that often stops short of publishing the thing that matters: the test results.
A few brands are doing genuinely good work. Ritual names the supplier and final place of manufacture for every ingredient and has committed to clinical trials on their finished formulas. Momentous publishes per-batch COA results and holds NSF Certified for Sport across their catalog. Thorne cites four rounds of testing and over 100,000 tests per year in two in-house labs. These are real programs with real standards.
But traceability (knowing where an ingredient came from) is not the same as published potency (knowing what the lab found in the finished product). Testing volume (100,000 tests per year) isn’t the same as a lot-level lookup you can access yourself. And publishing only passing results isn’t the same as publishing the qualified ones.
The FTC’s 2022 Health Products Compliance Guidance set the standard that claims must rest on “competent and reliable scientific evidence,” and in 2023 sent Notice of Penalty Offenses to roughly 670 companies warning of civil penalties up to $50,120 per violation. The dose-matching problem is structural: if your label says “Proprietary Blend, 500 mg” and contains six ingredients, neither the consumer nor the regulator can confirm any single ingredient matches the dose used in the study you’re citing. The math is impossible because the numbers aren’t there.
What publishing everything actually costs
This section is the one I keep rewriting, because it’s the one that’s hardest to make sound like anything other than a marketing pitch. So I’ll state it plainly: publishing your formula publicly costs you competitive advantage, and it makes your limitations visible.
Every number we print — including the dose gaps — is information a competitor can use. They can match our formulas. They can point out that our saffron is below clinical dose. They can build a product with a higher-dose strip and market it against us.
What they can’t copy is the stance. A competitor who starts publishing their defects stops being the brand with the clean record. A competitor who prints their dose gaps stops being the brand that implies everything is “clinically dosed.” The transparency itself is the moat, because it requires admitting things most marketing teams won’t allow.
We took down our own absorption claims in 2026 when the evidence didn’t hold up to the standard we set for ourselves. That cost us traffic, organic rankings, and pages that were generating real revenue. The alternative was leaving up copy we couldn’t defend. We chose defensibility over traffic.
When to look past the label entirely
A supplement is not a substitute for medical care. No amount of label transparency changes that.
If you have symptoms — fatigue, cognitive changes, unexplained weight shifts, pain, mood disruptions — the right first step is a conversation with your doctor and bloodwork, not a product page. If your doctor identifies a deficiency, ask what form, what dose, and what route. Then evaluate supplements against that answer.
A strip is not a treatment for a gag reflex, and difficulty swallowing is a matter for a doctor rather than a supplement company.
No supplement — including ours — treats, cures, or prevents any disease. We say “supports” because that’s the boundary the evidence supports. If any brand tells you otherwise, the transparency problem starts with their claims.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Frequently asked questions
How do I verify a supplement brand’s transparency claims?
Look for three things: per-lot COA data (not just a testing policy), individual ingredient amounts (not proprietary blends), and stated limitations or qualifications. A brand that publishes only its wins isn’t being transparent — it’s curating. Check whether the COA comes from an independent third-party lab, covers the specific lot you’re purchasing, and uses appropriate test methods. The FDA has confirmed there’s no regulation preventing companies from sharing their test results, so a brand claiming they “can’t” publish results is making a choice, not citing a rule.
What is a proprietary blend and why should I care?
A proprietary blend is a list of ingredients under a single total weight, without individual amounts. Under 21 CFR 101.36(c), this is legal: the label shows the total blend weight and lists ingredients in descending order of weight. The problem is practical — you can’t confirm any single ingredient is present at its studied dose. About 21 percent of supplement labels use proprietary blends, and up to 87 percent of labels contain ingredients that could legally be hidden in one (Saldanha et al., Journal of Nutrition, 2023).
Are XYNE’s supplements tested?
Our products are tested by the manufacturer’s laboratory. Per-lot assay results — percentage of labeled claim for each active — are available on our product pages with the lot number. Heavy metals testing is performed separately by an ISO/IEC 17025 accredited laboratory using ICP-MS/MS. We publish the results, including the qualified ones.
Why does XYNE print dose gaps on its product pages?
Because hiding the gap doesn’t close it. Our saffron is 10 mg; trials used 15 to 30 mg. Our L-theanine is 50 mg; trials used 100 to 200 mg. You deserve to know the math before you buy. The strip format has a dose ceiling that limits how much active fits in a single film, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of marketing we built this brand to replace.
How do I know a Certificate of Analysis is legitimate?
ConsumerLab warns that COAs can reflect wrong tests, different formulations, or even fabricated results (“dry labbing”). Look for: an independent third-party lab name, the specific product and lot tested, an appropriate test method for the active ingredient, and accreditation (ISO/IEC 17025 is the standard). A COA without a named lab, lot number, or test method is a marketing prop, not a quality document.
The supplement industry’s transparency problem won’t be fixed by one brand publishing its numbers. It will be fixed when consumers start asking every brand to do the same — and when the brands that don’t have an answer lose the sale to the ones that do.
We publish our formulation choices because the alternative is asking you to take our word for it. In an industry where 22 out of 25 melatonin gummies can’t match their own label, taking anyone’s word for it isn’t good enough.
If you want to see the numbers for yourself, every product page carries the lot data. If you want to start with a recommendation, the quiz matches your goals to the formulas that fit. And if you want the science underneath the format, here’s the honest version.
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Every amount is on the label.
Eleven formulas, every active printed with its amount, and no proprietary blends. Read a label before you read another post.