What Is a “Proprietary Blend,” and Why Doesn't It List Amounts?

If you've read the Cognizil label, you've noticed something: outside of chromium, none of the other 19 named ingredients come with their own milligram amount. They're all folded into one line: “Proprietary Blend — 15.47 mg.” Here's what that actually means.

What a proprietary blend is

US supplement labeling law allows a manufacturer to list a group of ingredients under one combined weight instead of dosing each one individually, as long as the ingredients are listed in descending order by amount. It's a completely legal label format, used across a large share of the supplement industry — not something unique to Cognizil.

What it means for you

The practical effect is that we can tell you Cognizil contains ginseng, guarana, green tea leaf extract, GABA, L-tyrosine and roughly a dozen other named ingredients — but not how many milligrams of any single one of them, since they share that 15.47 mg total. Some of those nineteen ingredients could be present in clinically studied amounts; others could be present in trace amounts mostly for the label. There's no way to tell from the outside.

The one ingredient with a real number

Chromium (as chromium picolinate) is the exception: it's dosed on its own, at 7 mcg per serving, which the label states is 20% of the Daily Value.

The honest takeaway

A proprietary blend isn't a red flag on its own — it's simply less specific than a fully dosed label. If precise per-ingredient dosing matters to you, that's a fair reason to look for it explicitly before you buy, from Cognizil or any other supplement.