One product, one panel, one record.
Garden of Life RAW Probiotics Ultimate Care (refrigerated SKU) — label audit
Thirty of the "34 probiotic strains" sit under a footnote that does not say they are in the bottle. The federal record transcribes it verbatim — "Represents strains typically found in Eastern Europe Wild Kefir Culture." The same page says "what you see on the label is what you get in the bottle."
This page is an audit of a label. It records what this product’s panel discloses, what of that could be checked against a primary record, and what could not. The score below ranks this product on that disclosure and on nothing else.
The record this page rests on
- NIH label record
- Label read on
- The most recent dated artefact behind this page. Labels change; this is how old our reading of it is.
- Cohort
- Addendum — outside the founding denominators Torn down 2026-07-31, after the founding cohort of 27 was frozen. It sits outside every D27 denominator the site publishes. This is the refrigerated SKU, UPC 6 58010 11664 0; the shelf-stable SKU that shares its name, UPC 6 58010 12333 4, is audited separately on this site.
- How deep this went
- Full forensic teardown Panel transcribed, every strain designator queried, every certification chased to its issuer’s own register, and the literature behind each marketing claim opened and read.
- What did not survive verification
- Part of this page was refuted or could not be reproduced The panel on this page is a federal transcription, not an image-verified reading. gardenoflife.com returns HTTP 403 to automation behind Akamai, and DSLD's own label PDFs and thumbnails return 403 to direct requests, so no label image for this SKU could be opened. An earlier pass in this project found two DSLD transcription errors on a product where brand images were available for comparison, so the panel details here should be read as NIH-transcribed rather than eyeballed. Two further limits travel with that. Statements on this page about what the product page does or does not disclose — notably the absent storage guidance — are scoped to the archived HTML that could be extracted, because the live page is JS-rendered. And two records with this product's name are simultaneously on-market: 297590, refrigerated on a 2012 label, and 297600, shelf-stable on a 2018 label. The UPC on the brand page points to 297590, which is what this teardown is tied to, but which carton physically ships under that URL was not confirmed.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
30.2 out of 100
Rank 122 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score.
The score measures one thing: how much of what you are buying this company tells you, and how much of that survives being checked against a source that is not the company. It does not measure whether the product works — this site holds no efficacy data of its own, and 0 of 294 organism slots in the founding cohort carry a strain with a human randomised trial for any male-specific outcome, so nobody in this category has evidence that would support a ranking by effect.
Computed over 86% of the rubric by weight — the share of the five questions below this record could answer. The remaining question is unanswered, and unanswered is not nought: it leaves the divisor rather than dragging the score down. That share travels with the number and is never dropped — this score over 86% of the weight and the same score over all of it are different claims.
| Component | Weight | What was counted, and where | Fraction | Weight × fraction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strain identity printed on the panel | 0.24 | 4 of 34 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 4 / 34 = 0.1176 | 0.028235 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 0 of 34 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 0 / 34 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
| What the CFU count is measured against | 0.22 | Potency basis "through-expiry": CFU figure printed yes, single basis stated yes, basis reaches expiry yes — 3 of 3. | 3 / 3 = 1.0000 | 0.2200 |
| Printed designators that lead to a human trial | 0.20 | 2 of 34 checked organism slots resolve to at least one human randomised trial under the designator exactly as printed. This counts whether the identity leads to a trial, never what the trial found. | 2 / 34 = 0.0588 | 0.011765 |
| Certification confirmed at the issuer’s own register | 0.14 | Every certification on this record is brand-asserted with the register unreachable, or not yet queried. An unreachable register is a fact about the verification infrastructure, not about this brand, so it may not move its position. | Not answered | — excluded from the divisor, not counted as nought |
0.2600 — the last column added up — divided by 0.86, the weight this record could answer, is 0.3023. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 30.2 above.
See this product’s row in the full ranking, alongside the other 153 scored products, or read what each of the five components asks and how to check it .
What this label discloses
Everything in this table is what the product itself states — on the printed panel, on the brand’s own page, or in the label record the manufacturer filed. Nothing in it is checked yet; checking is the next section.
| Disclosure | As recorded |
|---|---|
| CFU as printed | 100 billion CFU at expiration date under recommended storage conditions (Replenish Blend) |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | Some organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 34 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
"100 billion CFU at expiration date under recommended storage conditions" — reinforced on the label as "100 billion guaranteed!"
The panel’s own words on potency, verbatim.
The panel guarantees the count through the expiration or best-by date. This is the only basis that is falsifiable by a reader holding the bottle.
Some organisms carry a printed strain designator and some are named by species only.
| Organism as printed | Designator as printed | Quantity as printed | What the designator resolves to | The query we ran |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bifidobacterium animalis lactis | BL818 | — not stated separately | Untraceable house code | BL818 · "BL-818" · "BL-818"[All Fields] OR "BL818"[All Fields] OR "Bl 818"[All Fields] |
| Lactobacillus acidophilus | SD-5221 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | SD5221 (unhyphenated, untagged) — 1 record. "SD-5221" — 0, phrase not indexed. |
| Lactobacillus paracasei | SD-5218 | — not stated separately | No records | SD5218 · "SD-5218" · "SD-5218"[All Fields] OR "SD5218"[All Fields] OR "ATCC SD 5218"[All Fields] |
| Bifidobacterium animalis lactis | SD-5220 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | SD5220 (unhyphenated, untagged) — 1 record. "SD-5220" — 0, phrase not indexed. |
| Bifidobacterium animalis lactis | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Bifidobacterium longum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus acidophilus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus brevis | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus bulgaricus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus casei | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus fermentum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus helveticus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus kefirgranum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus rhamnosus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactococcus lactis | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactococcus cremoris | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Streptococcus thermophilus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus kefir | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus parakefir | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactobacillus plantarum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis biovar diacetylactis | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Leuconostoc lactis | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Leuconostoc mesenteroides | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Leuconostoc cremoris | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Leuconostoc dextranicum | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Kluyveromyces marxianus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Brettanomyces anomalus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Debaryomyces hansenii | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Saccharomyces unisporus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Saccharomyces turicensis | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Saccharomyces cerevisiae | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Saccharomyces exiguus | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
| Torulaspora delbrueckii | — none printed | — not stated separately | No designator printed | — |
What of that is verifiable
A disclosure is verifiable when a reader can open a record that neither we nor the brand controls and see the same thing. Below is every dated artefact this page rests on. What is absent from this list is not verified, however reasonable it sounds.
- NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record — DSLD 297590 (opens in a new tab) captured On-market federal record and the source of the entire panel above. UPC cross-check passes — the product page's own sku field, 658010116640, matches this record's UPC 6 58010 11664 0, which is what ties this teardown to the refrigerated SKU rather than to its shelf-stable namesake. NIH-transcribed, not image-verified: the brand blocks automated access and DSLD's own label images 403.
- Internet Archive capture — 20260607132529 (opens in a new tab) captured The archived product page, used for price, stock status and claim copy. The live page returns HTTP 403 behind Akamai and its body is JS-rendered, so only about 6 KB of text survives archiving. The archived page carries one product image, the front of the bottle, and no Supplement Facts panel at all.
How many of its strains have a human trial for what it is sold for
Across the frozen founding cohort, 0 of 294 organism slots (0.0%) carry an organism with a human randomised controlled trial for any male-specific outcome. Not for this product — for all 27 of the founding teardowns, taken together. That is the number to hold against any men’s probiotic, including this one.
Two further founding-cohort figures for context: only 43 of 294 organism slots carry a strain with any human RCT at all under the exact code printed on the label, and only 2 of 27 products have a published human trial of the finished formula — the thing actually in the bottle. All three figures divide by the frozen cohort of 27 teardowns and 294 organism slots, never by every teardown on this site.
For this product specifically, 2 organism slots carry a strain with a human RCT under the exact designator printed on the label.
A word on what a designator has to clear before it counts here. The organism must be named with the exact strain code that appears in the trial, the trial must be in humans, and the code must return that trial when a reader searches it. A species name does not qualify: the trials in this field are of strains, and a species contains thousands of them.
What it costs per day
$1.60 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $47.99 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (30 servings, 1 capsule daily)
- Price checked
- — the source we read it from (opens in a new tab)
What certification it holds, checked at the issuer’s own register
A badge on a bottle is a claim like any other. Every row below was checked — or not checked — at the certifier’s own public register, never at the badge. Across the frozen founding cohort, 2 of 27 products hold a certification we could confirm at the issuer — a founding-cohort figure, not a count over every teardown on this site.
| Programme | Status at the issuer | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| NSF Certified Gluten-Free | Register unreachable | 31 July 2026 |
| Non-GMO Project Verified | Register unreachable | 31 July 2026 |
| Certified Carbonfund.org — "A Carbon Neutral Product" | Not checked | 31 July 2026 |
| Green-e — 100% Certified Renewable Energy | Not checked | 31 July 2026 |
NSF Certified Gluten-Free
The certifier’s register could not be queried at all. That is a finding about the verification infrastructure, not about the brand.
Recorded on the federal label record. nsf.org returns HTTP 403 behind Cloudflare on both the certified-products page and the search API. Unverified, never "does not hold it". Scope trap — an NSF gluten-free mark certifies the absence of gluten. It says nothing about CFU count, strain identity, potency at expiry or contaminants, and this SKU carries no NSF contents certification, no USP verification and no Informed Choice mark.
Non-GMO Project Verified
The certifier’s register could not be queried at all. That is a finding about the verification infrastructure, not about the brand.
Recorded on the federal label record. nongmoproject.org returns HTTP 403 behind Cloudflare on both the product finder and the WordPress search API.
Certified Carbonfund.org — "A Carbon Neutral Product"
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
On the label beside the quality seals. This is a corporate offset purchasing claim, not a product quality claim, and its register was not queried.
Green-e — 100% Certified Renewable Energy
We have not queried this register for this product. It does not mean the product holds nothing.
On the label beside the quality seals. A corporate energy purchasing claim, not a product quality claim, and its register was not queried.
How it differs from the same brand’s women’s version
Across the fourteen same-brand men’s-versus-women’s label diffs run inside the frozen founding cohort, zero men’s or default formulas contain a probiotic strain, identified by designator, that was selected on male-specific evidence. In eight of the fourteen the sex-specific differentiator is a botanical or a mineral, and in five of the fourteen the women’s SKU is better-specified, cheaper, or both — “better-specified” meaning the panel that discloses more, never the panel with more in it. The rule behind each of those counts, and all fourteen pairs classified against it , are published in full. Diffs run on teardowns added since sit outside this fourteen, and outside the sentence above.
Every finding on this page, with the record behind it
Finding 1 thirty-of-thirty-four-strains-are-only-representative
The federal record transcribes the label's own qualifier verbatim — "Represents strains typically found in Eastern Europe Wild Kefir Culture." The label does not assert those thirty organisms are in this bottle; it asserts they are typical of the category of culture used. Thirty of the thirty-four "strains" being sold sit under that sentence. This is a construction beyond the ordinary proprietary blend: it is a footnote that declines to declare the contents at all.
The record: DSLD 297590 statements, verbatim — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 what-you-see-on-the-label-is-what-you-get-in-the-bottle
The product page says, verbatim, "Raw Probiotics is created below 40º F and 30% humidity so that what you see on the label is what you get in the bottle." It sits on the same page as a label whose thirty largest-numbered organisms are footnoted as merely representative. Those two sentences cannot both be doing what a reader thinks they are doing.
The record: Wayback 20260607132529 product description versus DSLD 297590 statements — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 eight-of-the-thirty-are-yeasts-counted-as-probiotic-strains
Kluyveromyces, Brettanomyces, Debaryomyces, Torulaspora and four Saccharomyces species. Counting them toward "34 probiotic strains" is a stretch before the "represents" problem is even reached — only one yeast in this category, S. boulardii, has a serious human evidence base, and it is not on this list.
The record: DSLD 297590 kefir-culture organism list
Finding 4 thirty-four-strains-and-thirty-plus-strains-on-the-same-page
The product description says "a record-setting 30+ probiotic strains". The buy-box bullet on the same page says "34 probiotic strains". And all 34 are counted as strains when 30 of them are bare binomials — species, not strains. The word is doing work only the four designators can support.
The record: Wayback 20260607132529, both figures on one page
Finding 5 clinically-studied-replenish-blend-decomposes-badly
Zero published studies of the blend as a blend, across four queries. Of its four strains, two return nothing in PubMed under four spellings each. The two that do appear are the failed arm of an allergic rhinitis crossover (PMID 24393277) and a supplier-authored antibiotic study whose measured result was the recovery of its own organisms in stool with no symptom difference versus placebo (PMID 25206295). Neither trial tested this blend, this dose, or this indication. "Clinically studied" is true at the level of individual ingredients and misleading at the level of the promise attached to it.
The record: PMIDs 24393277 and 25206295 read verbatim; four blend-level queries returning zero, 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 6 bl818-is-not-a-culture-collection-designator
SD-5218, SD-5220 and SD-5221 are ATCC accessions. BL818 is a supplier code with no deposit behind it that could be located and no identifiable supplier. It looks like an accession number and is not one. Brand-asserted, untraceable.
The record: DSLD 297590 panel row; four PubMed spellings returning zero, 2026-07-31
Finding 7 label-says-best-if-refrigerated-and-the-page-does-not
The potency guarantee is "at expiration date under recommended storage conditions", and the recommended condition for this SKU is refrigeration. The archived product page does not say so anywhere a shopper reads before buying. For a product mailed to your door, that omission is load-bearing.
The record: DSLD 297590 storage statement versus the extracted text of Wayback 20260607132529
Finding 9 fourteen-year-old-panel-still-on-market
The label carries a 2012 copyright line and remains an on-market federal record.
The record: DSLD 297590 label copyright field
Finding 10 every-certification-register-was-unreachable
NSF, Non-GMO Project and B Lab all returned HTTP 403 to automation in this pass, as they have in every recent pass. Every certification on this label is therefore brand-asserted and unverified — never verified, never refuted. Two of the four seals on the label, Green-e and Carbonfund, are corporate energy and offset purchasing claims sitting beside the quality seals, which certify nothing about the capsule.
The record: nsf.org, nongmoproject.org and bcorporation.net all 403 to automation, 2026-07-31
Finding 11 the-mens-sku-in-this-line-names-no-strain-at-all
Diffed against RAW Probiotics Men, DSLD 321381, at the same $47.99 and the same $1.60 a day. This unisex SKU prints four strain designators; the men's SKU prints zero. CFU is 100 billion at expiration date here against 85 billion at end of Best Use Date there, at 1 capsule a day here against 3 there. The men's SKU adds 17 vitamins and minerals all "from culture of Lactobacillus bulgaricus", a dairy-digesting enzyme blend at 56 mg and a 207 mg fruit and vegetable blend against 45 mg here, and its kefir culture lists 22 organisms against 30. Neither discloses per-organism CFU and both build their organism count on the same kefir construction. If a man wanted the most identifiable product this line sells, it is the one without "Men" on the front. Ultimate Care itself carries no male-specific ingredient, no prostate ingredient, no androgen-related ingredient and no male-specific organism — while the product page describes the line it belongs to as "age- and gender-specific", which this SKU is not.
The record: DSLD 297590 versus DSLD 321381, both read 2026-07-31 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 12 unlike-isolated-strains-positions-identification-as-the-weakness
The page says "Unlike isolated strains of probiotics, Raw Probiotics offers all the benefits of a true 'food' probiotic" — framing strain identification as the inferior approach, on the one SKU in this line that does any strain identification at all. No claim on this page crosses into disease territory; everything is structure/function-worded and disclaimered. The problems here are substantiation and counting, not legality.
The record: Wayback 20260607132529 product description, verbatim
What we could not verify
Every gap below is published rather than deleted. Most are derived automatically from the empty fields in this page’s own record, so a gap cannot be hidden by leaving a box blank.
- NSF Certified Gluten-Free status
- Recorded on the federal label record. nsf.org returns HTTP 403 behind Cloudflare on both the certified-products page and the search API. Unverified, never "does not hold it". Scope trap — an NSF gluten-free mark certifies the absence of gluten. It says nothing about CFU count, strain identity, potency at expiry or contaminants, and this SKU carries no NSF contents certification, no USP verification and no Informed Choice mark.
- Non-GMO Project Verified status
- Recorded on the federal label record. nongmoproject.org returns HTTP 403 behind Cloudflare on both the product finder and the WordPress search API.
- Certified Carbonfund.org — "A Carbon Neutral Product" status
- On the label beside the quality seals. This is a corporate offset purchasing claim, not a product quality claim, and its register was not queried.
- Green-e — 100% Certified Renewable Energy status
- On the label beside the quality seals. A corporate energy purchasing claim, not a product quality claim, and its register was not queried.
- A men’s-versus-women’s label diff
- The same brand’s women’s SKU has not been compared against this panel.
- The panel as an image
- gardenoflife.com returns HTTP 403 behind Akamai, and DSLD's own label PDFs and thumbnails sit behind S3 URLs that return 403 to direct requests. The panel above is NIH's structured transcription, not an image-verified reading. A prior pass in this project found two DSLD transcription errors when brand images were available for comparison, so this panel should be treated as federally transcribed rather than eyeballed.
- Storage guidance anywhere a shopper would see it
- The label for this SKU says "Best if refrigerated. Store in a dry place at 71 °F (22 °C) or below." The archived product page never mentions refrigeration — the extracted text was scanned for "refriger", "Store", "storage" and "cool, dry", and the only Store hits are a cookie warning and the buy-box bullets. The page is JS-rendered, so a collapsed tab could carry it; the description, the buy-box bullets and the meta description — everything a shopper reads before adding to cart — do not.
- Which of the two on-market "Ultimate Care" labels the brand currently ships under this URL
- Two records are simultaneously on-market. 297590, this one, is refrigerated on a 2012-copyright label. 297600 is shelf-stable on a 2018 label with an added B Corporation seal. The UPC on the product page points to this refrigerated record, which is what ties this teardown to it, but the page does not disambiguate the two for a shopper and the question of what is physically in the box is open.
- Per-organism CFU across any of the 34
- The 100 billion is a single blend total. There is no way to know whether L. paracasei SD-5218 is 25 billion or 25 thousand, and no way to know what fraction of the 100 billion is kefir culture rather than the four named strains.
- Any published study of the "Replenish Blend" as a blend
- Four queries, four zeros — "Replenish Blend" AND probiotic, Replenish Blend probiotic randomized, "Raw Probiotics Ultimate Care", and "Ultimate Care" Garden of Life probiotic. Diagnostics captured.
How to check every line of this page yourself
Nothing on this page requires trusting us. Every claim above resolves to a record you can open:
- Open the NIH Dietary Supplement Label Database record linked at the top of this page. It is the label the manufacturer filed, not our transcription of it.
- Compare the CFU line and the suggested-use line against the disclosure table above. If they disagree with us, we are wrong and we want to know.
- Take any strain designator from the panel and run the query printed beside it. The query is published precisely so you can get a different answer than we did.
- Divide the price by the number of days the label’s own dose instructions make the container last. That arithmetic is the whole of the cost-per-day row.
- Search the certifier’s own register for this product, not for the brand. A company can participate in a programme without this product being on its list.
Give this label the credit it has genuinely earned before taking it apart.
The CFU is guaranteed at the expiration date. Not at manufacture, not vaguely — “100 billion CFU at expiration date under recommended storage conditions”, and the front-of-pack number is the guaranteed one. That is the honest form of this claim and most of this category will not make it. Four real strain designators, two of which are genuine ATCC accessions traceable to published human trials — more strain identification than the brand’s own men’s SKU in the same line, which prints none. The per-serving price on the page is arithmetically correct. The allergen line, “Contains: Milk”, is explicit and right given the yogurt concentrate.
Now the footnote.
The product is sold as “34 probiotic strains”. Four of them are named. The other thirty arrive inside “Eastern European Wild Kefir Culture”, and the federal record transcribes the label’s own qualifier verbatim:
“Represents strains typically found in Eastern Europe Wild Kefir Culture.”
Read that again. The label does not say those thirty organisms are in the bottle. It says they are typical of the kind of culture used. Most labels this project has opened hide the amounts or hide the strains; a few disclose both. This one adds a third move that none of them makes: a footnote that declines to declare the contents. Eight of the thirty are yeasts. All thirty are bare binomials — species, not strains. And the same page says, in the brand’s own words, “what you see on the label is what you get in the bottle.”
Then look at what “clinically studied Replenish Blend” is standing on. The blend itself has zero published studies, across four queries. Of its four strains, two return nothing in PubMed under four spellings each — and BL818 is not even a culture-collection designator, just a supplier code with no deposit behind it. The two that do appear are worse than nothing for the marketing:
- SD-5221 appears in an allergic-rhinitis crossover — as the arm that did not work. The paper’s own words are that the benefit came from a Nestlé strain not in this product, “in contrast to treatment with the blend of L. acidophilus and B. lactis.”
- SD-5220 appears in a trial authored entirely by employees of the strain’s supplier, whose verbatim conclusion is that taking the probiotic “mainly leads to an increase in the faecal levels of the species included in the preparation” — and that symptoms “did not differ between the treatment groups.”
You got more of what you swallowed, and nothing else changed. That is the closest published trial to this product’s core promise of restoring bacteria lost to medication.
One last practical thing, because it is the kind of detail that decides whether any of the above matters. This SKU’s label says “Best if refrigerated.” The product page — the description, the bullets, the meta description, everything a shopper reads before clicking buy — never mentions refrigeration. The potency guarantee is conditioned on “recommended storage conditions”. The product ships to your door in a box.