By Andrew Felton, Co-Founder, OOST Nutrition
Andrew is one half of the two-person team behind OOST. His background is in the supply chain side of sports nutrition — which mostly means he's spent a lot of years reading labels other people were hoping nobody would read.
I want to be upfront about something: I have a chip on my shoulder about this industry, and starting OOST didn't get rid of it. If anything, formulating our own product made it worse, because it forced me to sit down with the actual cost sheets and dosing science behind the stuff sitting on shop shelves — and a lot of it doesn't hold up.
Wendel and I didn't start OOST because we spotted a gap in the market in some clever, detached, business-school way. We started it because we're in our forties, we still play sport, and we got sick of buying products that were dosed for the label, not for our joints. So before we get into what we built, I want to walk through a few things the bigger brands count on you not checking.
Myth 1: A “Proprietary Blend” Is a Selling Point
It isn't. It's a legal workaround.
A proprietary blend lets a brand list a group of ingredients and a total weight for the blend, without telling you how much of each individual ingredient is actually in there. So a label can list six or seven impressive-sounding compounds, add up to a chunky-looking total, and still be 90% of one cheap filler ingredient and a pinch of everything else — technically true, practically meaningless.
Nothing about that is illegal. It's just designed so you can't do the maths.
On our label, every ingredient has its own number, in milligrams, that you can check against the actual research. We're not hiding a blend total behind a proprietary name because there's nothing about our dosing we need to hide.
Myth 2: “Clinically Studied Ingredient” Means the Product Is Clinically Dosed
This is the one that annoys me most, because it's technically honest and completely misleading at the same time.
A brand can put “contains clinically studied curcumin” on a label if the product has curcumin in it at all — even if the actual dose is a fraction of what the study used to get its results. In the industry this gets called “fairy dusting”: adding just enough of a well-researched ingredient to legally reference the research, without adding enough to get anywhere near the effect the research found.
Piperine (black pepper extract) is a good example of why this matters. The research behind it shows it can meaningfully improve how much curcumin your body actually absorbs — but only at a real dose, alongside a real dose of curcumin. Put a token amount of both in a product and you've got a label that name-drops the science and a product that doesn't deliver it.
We dose to the research, not to the label copy. If that means our ingredient list looks shorter and blunter than a competitor's, that's the trade-off we'll take every time.
Myth 3: Pills, Powders and Liquids Are All Basically the Same
They're not, and this one is just physiology.
A tablet has to survive being swallowed, break down in your stomach, and release its contents before your body can absorb anything — and disintegration isn't guaranteed to be fast, or complete. A liquid skips that step entirely. It's already in a form your body can start absorbing immediately, which matters more than people think when you're trying to get collagen and anti-inflammatories to tendons and joints in the window right after training, not three hours later on a delayed release.
That's a genuine trade-off in the industry, not a marketing angle we invented — powders and pills are cheaper to manufacture and ship, which is a big part of why most of the market is built around them.
Myth 4: Banned-Substance Testing Is Only for Elite Athletes
This is the one that should worry recreational and club-level players more than it currently does.
Supplement manufacturing supply chains are genuinely messy. Cross-contamination between production runs is a documented, recurring problem in this industry — a facility making a pre-workout with a banned stimulant one week, then running a “clean” joint supplement through the same lines the next, without the kind of batch testing that would catch a trace carryover. Most products on the market are never tested against that risk at all.
Informed Sport batch-testing — which every OOST batch goes through — exists specifically to catch that. It's not a badge for people who might get drug tested. It's a basic quality check most of the market skips because it costs money and slows down production.
Why This Is the Whole Reason We Exist
Wendel and I are a two-person team. We don't have a marketing department bigger than our production run, and we're not trying to out-advertise brands ten times our size. What we can control is the actual formulation — full doses, transparent labelling, real testing — and let that be the argument.
You don't take a joint-care supplement to remove pain. You take it to keep being able to do the sport you actually care about. That's the bar we hold every batch to.
Take It Further.
Disclaimer: The information in this article reflects the author's professional background and views on industry practices generally. It is for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a healthcare professional before starting any new supplement regime.
