What Is a Proprietary Blend?
If you’ve ever turned a supplement bottle around and seen a long list of ingredients grouped under one bolded name with a single total weight, you’ve already encountered a proprietary blend. They’re common, often confusing, and they tend to raise more questions than answers. Understanding what they actually represent makes supplement labels feel far less mysterious.
What a Proprietary Blend Actually Is
A proprietary blend is simply a collection of ingredients listed together under one shared weight. Instead of showing how much of each individual ingredient is present, the label only reveals the total amount of the entire mixture. Manufacturers use blends for different reasons: to protect a unique formula, to simplify a crowded panel, or in some cases because the individual amounts may be modest.
Why Companies Use Proprietary Blends
Supplement companies often spend time developing combinations of ingredients they believe work well together, and they may not want competitors replicating those ratios. Listing them under a single blend name makes the formula more difficult to reverse engineer. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but it does reduce transparency, which is where much of the consumer confusion begins.
How Ingredient Order Works Inside a Blend
Most misunderstandings come from assuming every ingredient inside a blend appears in meaningful amounts. In reality, the order still matters: ingredients must appear from highest to lowest weight. But without individual numbers, there’s no way to know whether the first ingredient accounts for most of the blend, or whether several ingredients are present only in trace amounts. This is how blends can look impressive without necessarily delivering strong doses.
What Blend Names and Total Weight Can Tell You
On labels, blends often appear under names like “Performance Matrix”, “Neuro Complex”, or “Wellness Fusion”. They’re followed by the included ingredients and a single total weight such as “1,500 mg Proprietary Blend”.
In smaller blends like this, ingredients commonly associated with larger serving sizes such as Citrulline Malate or creatine monohydrate are unlikely to appear in amounts consumers might expect. That doesn’t make the blend useless; it simply means expectations should be aligned with the available space.
How to Think About Proprietary Blends
A useful way to interpret proprietary blends is this: they tell you what’s in the formula, but not how much each ingredient contributes. Some brands use blends responsibly, building balanced mixtures around realistic serving sizes. Others rely on blends to add popular ingredient names without dedicating much room to them. Knowing this range helps you read a label without guessing.
FAQ: Proprietary Blends
Why do supplement companies use proprietary blends?
Proprietary blends may be used to protect a company’s ingredient ratios or to simplify a crowded label. They aren’t inherently negative, they just limit how much detail the consumer can see.
Can a proprietary blend still be well-formulated?
Yes. Some blends are thoughtfully designed with realistic serving sizes. The challenge is that you can’t verify the exact amounts of each ingredient, so evaluation requires looking at the total weight and overall context.
Are proprietary blends always underdosed?
Not always. Some are balanced and sensible. Others include long lists of trending ingredients inside small total weights, which limits what each ingredient can meaningfully contribute.
How can I evaluate a proprietary blend on a label?
Start with the blend’s total weight and the types of ingredients inside it. If certain ingredients are commonly associated with larger serving sizes, a very small blend often suggests modest amounts.