Method
Published in full, because a rating you cannot audit is just an opinion with a number attached.
A protein bar and a pre-workout are not comparable on the same axes, so they are not scored on the same axes. Both produce a score out of ten.
| Protein powders, bars, snacks | Weight | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Value | 40% | Cost per gram of protein, ranked against the category |
| Formula | 35% | Protein per calorie, sugar alcohol load, spiking signals, third-party certification |
| Consensus | 25% | Buyer sentiment on taste and tolerance (not built yet) |
| Pre-workouts and canned | Weight | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Dose integrity | 45% | Share of key actives meeting clinical thresholds, minus a blend penalty |
| Value | 30% | Cost per properly dosed serving |
| Consensus | 25% | Buyer sentiment (not built yet) |
A missing component is never scored as zero. Consensus is not built, so its weight is redistributed across the components that exist rather than counted against the product. A product we know little about stays distinguishable from a product we know is bad, and the page says which.
Price divided by the total protein in the package. Nothing more sophisticated, and that is the point — it is the number that decides whether a product is good value, and almost nobody displays it.
A 12-count box at $24.99 with 21 g of protein per bar holds 252 g of protein, which is $0.099 per gram. Rankings are percentile-based within a category, so a product is measured against its actual competition rather than an arbitrary threshold.
Where a package size cannot be determined with confidence, the result is left empty rather than estimated. An empty cell is honest; a plausible wrong number is not.
Each active is measured against the dose used in published research, not against a marketing claim. The thresholds and their sources:
| Ingredient | Clinical dose | Source |
|---|---|---|
| L-Citrulline | 6,000 mg | Bailey et al., J Appl Physiol 2015 |
| Citrulline Malate 2:1 | 8,000 mg | Perez-Guisado & Jakeman, J Strength Cond Res 2010 |
| Beta-Alanine | 3,200 mg | Trexler et al., ISSN Position Stand 2015 |
| Creatine Monohydrate | 5,000 mg | Kreider et al., ISSN Position Stand 2017 |
| Betaine Anhydrous | 2,500 mg | Cholewa et al., J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2013 |
| Caffeine | 200 mg | Guest et al., ISSN Position Stand 2021 |
| L-Tyrosine | 1,000 mg | Jongkees et al., J Psychiatr Res 2015 |
| Taurine | 1,000 mg | Waldron et al., Sports Med 2018 |
| Alpha-GPC | 300 mg | Ziegenfuss et al., J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2008 |
| L-Theanine | 100 mg | Giesbrecht et al., Nutr Neurosci 2010 |
Citrulline malate and free L-citrulline are tracked separately. They are not interchangeable, and treating them as one misstates the delivered dose — which would undermine the whole exercise.
Exceeding a clinical dose does not raise a score. Meeting it is the bar; megadosing is not a virtue we reward.
An ingredient inside a proprietary blend has no disclosed dose, so it is scored as undosed rather than assumed adequate, and the product carries a fixed penalty on top. This is the single largest lever a brand controls: disclosing your doses improves your score, and there is no way to score well while hiding them.
Where free-form aminos appear high in an ingredient list, the page names what was observed and why it matters, and links the panel. It is a flagged signal with its evidence, never an accusation of fraud. Where the ingredient order cannot be established reliably, no signal is raised and the page says the check was not run — rather than reporting a clean bill of health it did not earn.
Every published number traces to a captured source. A product page renders only after its panel has been read and stored, so a rating can always be checked against the label it came from.
No rating, review count, or score is ever invented. Where evidence is thin the page says insufficient data, which is always an acceptable answer here. Star ratings are never fabricated to decorate a listing.
Reformulations are common and silently invalidate an audit, so a changed panel drops a product back to unverified until it is re-read. Ratings that have gone stale are labelled stale rather than presented as current.
Commission does not buy a rating. Some links earn us a commission and those pages say so. No brand can pay for a score, raise one, or remove one, and products are rated the same whether or not there is money attached.