Special Issue: QA Ritual

🥑 This company is turning your guac waste into plastic

🏃🏻‍♀️ Heard of the Barkley Marathon? Well, this is the first woman to EVER finish it

🥐 A parisienne’s fav closet staple

With the release of their new Stress Relief Supplement, we sat down with fan-fave supplement brand Ritual’s Chief Impact Officer, Lindsay Dahl, to talk about the dos, donts, and musts on all things supplements.

The supplement industry has exploded from just 4,000 products on the market in the early ‘90s (the last time Congress passed laws overseeing supplement safety) to 95,000 products today. With this growth, the number of products mislabeled, marketed with unsubstantiated health claims, and contaminated with contaminants like heavy metals, has also grown. 

When shopping for supplements, consumers want to know if their products are safe and if they work. Ritual’s traceability promise—knowing where your nutrients come from and why they are there—is Ritual’s core way of answering those safety and efficacy questions.  

The easiest way to ensure you are purchasing high-quality supplements is to prioritize brands that are third-party testing and leverage clinically studied ingredients and/or human clinical studies on the whole product (not an industry standard) […] Look for certifications like USP Verification and Clean Label Project. 

We also recommend that people zoom in when they see “clinically studied.” When people see “clinically studied” they often interpret it to mean the whole formula has been clinically studied, which can be misleading.

It’s also common practice (and now consumer expectation) to see a long list of nutrients packed into the traditional multivitamin. As it turns out, more is not always better. Overdosing on one nutrient may impact the intake or absorption of another.

We’ve continued to invest in building an industry-leading sustainability program, applying the same level of scientific rigor as we do to the efficacy of our formulas. We’ve built key programs including sustainable packaging, ingredient traceability, climate action, human rights and advocacy.

We were the first supplement company (and still only) to disclose the carbon footprint of each of our products, a signal to consumers that we are not just setting climate goals, we are actually measuring, sharing and reducing the carbon impacts of our products.  We are on track to hit our goal to have sustainable packaging by 2025 (defined as packaging that is recyclable, recycled content or refillable).  And we are steadfast to maintain our goal to have 100% of our ingredients made traceable on our website, showing the supplier name and final place of manufacturing. 

We encourage all the sustainability nerds out there to take a deep dive into our annual Impact Report!