If you've ever picked up a functional product and seen the words proprietary blend, you've been handed a locked box.
A proprietary blend lets a brand list ten impressive ingredients and one total weight — "Focus Blend, 800mg" — without ever telling you how that 800mg is divided. It could be 795mg of the cheap one and half a milligram each of the rest. You have no way to know. That's not an accident of formatting; it's the entire point of the format.
We don't have any. Here's everything.
Serene — for winding down
Mood balance and the slow exhale.
| Ingredient | Per bar | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Ashwagandha | 600mg | Traditional adaptogen, studied for stress response |
| Reishi | 600mg | Traditional calming mushroom |
| Alpha-GPC | 360mg | Choline source; supports acetylcholine production |
| L-Theanine | 360mg | Amino acid from tea; associated with calm alertness |
| Magnesium | 240mg | Involved in hundreds of enzymatic processes, including sleep regulation |
Straight talk: L-Theanine and Alpha-GPC are our anchors here — purified compounds at doses that stand on their own. The ashwagandha and reishi are raw powders at 600mg, which is below what most clinical studies use (those typically use concentrated extracts). We include them because they're traditional, meaningful, and additive — not because 600mg of raw powder replicates a trial.
Focus — for sustained cognitive work
The third hour of flow.
| Ingredient | Per bar | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Lion's Mane | 600mg | Studied for nerve growth factor activity |
| Reishi | 600mg | Traditional adaptogenic mushroom |
| Rhodiola | 600mg | Adaptogen associated with mental fatigue resistance |
| Cordyceps | 600mg | Traditional energy and endurance mushroom |
| Collagen | 600mg | Structural protein; included as a daily-intake contributor |
Straight talk: all five are raw powders at 600mg. These are real amounts of real ingredients, and they're below clinical extract doses. Collagen in particular is here as a contribution to your daily intake — not because we think 600mg of collagen sharpens your afternoon. We'd rather say that than let you assume otherwise.
Uplift — for caffeine-free energy
Cellular energy without the crash.
| Ingredient | Per bar | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Creatine | 1,200mg | Cellular energy; increasingly studied for cognitive effects |
| Panax Ginseng | 600mg | Traditional adaptogen for vitality |
| Cordyceps | 600mg | Traditional endurance mushroom |
| Beta-Alanine | 600mg | Precursor to carnosine; buffers muscle fatigue |
| CoQ10 | 240mg | Mitochondrial cofactor in cellular energy production |
Straight talk: CoQ10 at 240mg is a genuine anchor dose. Creatine and beta-alanine are deliberately stacking doses — designed to land on top of what you're likely already taking, not to replace it. If you take 5g of creatine daily, this adds to it. If you take none, this bar alone won't get you to a loading dose, and we're not going to imply that it will.
The chocolate itself
Not an afterthought. The base is the product.
- Ivory — cacao butter, maple sugar, milk powder. The color comes from the maple, not a dye. It's why we don't call it white chocolate.
- Milk — cacao paste, cacao butter, coconut sugar, milk powder.
- Dark — cacao paste, cacao butter, coconut sugar.
No refined white sugar. No seed oils. No emulsifier fillers. The functional ingredients get about 2.2 grams of a 62-gram bar — the other 60 grams are there to make it something you actually want to eat, and we spent as long on those 60 grams as on the 2.2.
Why publish this at all
Because the locked box only works if nobody opens it.