We graded 103 protein products. Four are real food.
103 products·54 brands·704 ingredients graded
Tier A means every ingredient is whole food, nothing isolated, nothing artificial. Only four products in the entire study clear that bar. The other 99 are processed to some degree.
So who is actually clean? Almost no one.
of brands market themselves as clean or natural
34 of 54 brands
of the products those brands sell are actually real food
11 of their 61 products
Even among the brands whose entire pitch is “clean,” 82% of what they sell isn’t.
The supplement industry has an unspoken problem.
Clean-washing.
/kliːn ˈwɒʃɪŋ/·noun
A brand that markets itself as clean, natural or “real food”, yet still contains artificial ingredients.
This problem goes beyond the supplement industry. It is a global ungoverned food problem.
get gut symptoms from their shake. Bloating, gas and cramping.
Riedl et al., 2024. Clinical study of 352 protein supplement users.
It is not the protein. It is the additives brands use to build a clean-looking shake: synthetic emulsifiers, sweeteners and gums. Switching from whey to pea does not fix it, because the additives remain.
Every product with a Tier 3 emulsifier or thickener is Tier D, and xanthan gum alone appears in 17 of them.
Three tiers of ingredient. Four grades of product.
Every ingredient is scored Tier 1 to Tier 3 by how far it has travelled from real food. A product is then graded by how those tiered ingredients make up its recipe.
Dried, ground or pressed, but otherwise intact. Whole egg, bone broth, raw cacao, dates, sea salt.
From real food, but heavily isolated or standardised with solvents. Whey isolate, pea isolate, stevia, “natural flavours”, any “extract”.
Manufactured, not grown. Sucralose, xanthan gum, cellulose gum, synthetic vitamins.
Real food.
Every ingredient is Tier 1. Nothing artificial, anywhere.
Mostly real food.
A Tier 1 protein, and no synthetic anywhere.
Real food elements.
A Tier 2 protein, no Tier 3 in the core.
Ultra-processed.
One Tier 3 ingredient in a core category is enough.
Read the tiers, not the marketing.
Every ingredient is graded by how far it is from real food. Here are four products that call themselves clean, colour-coded by what is actually inside.
No synthetics at all, but the protein is isolated (Tier 2), which caps it below real food.
The promise holds, nothing Tier 3. But every ingredient is isolated. Cleaner than most, still not real food.
Four Tier 3 ingredients hiding behind “natural”: a gum, a sugar alcohol, a colour and a synthetic vitamin stack.
Certified and traceable, but a lab sweetener and a synthetic gum are still in the shake. Either one alone is Tier D.
Two fall just short, two fail outright. The badges miss all of it. NSF, Informed Sport and USP test for contaminants, not processing. That is the gap the Real Food Scale closes.
Most of the market failed.
And the bigger the brand, the worse it gets.
47.6% of the 103 products graded Tier D. But weigh it by what people actually buy and it is worse still: the best-selling brands, the ones on every shelf and in every gym bag, do not have a single clean product between them.
100%
of the best-selling brands are Tier D
8 brands · 21 products · zero clean
World’s #1
Largest online
Meal-shake giant
US meal shake
UK D2C giant
LSE-listed
UK sports brand
Protein specialist
The 8 best-selling brands, sized by market share
WholeFuel is tier A.
Every ingredient is Tier 1. No isolates, no gums, no artificial sweeteners or vitamins. Real Food Only.
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SCALE
Read the full whitepaper
The page gives you the headline. The whitepaper gives you the full research and findings, the scientific evidence, the methodology and the citations.
Citations and methodology
Riedl et al. (2024), digestive symptom prevalence. Hall et al. (2019), ultra-processed food and caloric intake. Monteiro, NOVA classification. Ségurel & Bon (2017), lactase persistence. Koo & Stein (2024), whole egg DIAAS. Market sizing: Grand View Research, $6.51B, 7.59% CAGR.
103 products from 54 brands were selected by market prominence across the UK, US and Australia and assessed individually, product by product, rather than at brand level. A product’s grade is set by the most processed ingredient in its core categories (protein, sweetener, flavour, emulsifier). WholeFuel was included and assessed on identical terms.