One product, one panel, one record.
Ritual Synbiotic+ — label audit
"Tributyrin has been clinically studied at the dose of 300mg, the same amount included in Synbiotic+." No published human clinical trial of tributyrin, or of CoreBiome, at 300 mg could be located. The only CoreBiome publication is in vitro; the only human tributyrin trial record in PubMed is an unreported protocol paper at 4 g/day.
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
- D₂₇ founding teardown One of the 27 products taken apart at label level. That cohort is frozen and dated, so the audit’s published percentages cannot silently move.
- 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.
The Label Verifiability Score for this product
66.0 out of 100
Rank 59 of the 154 products in this audit the rubric can score. This rank is shared with 6 other products — 7 products sit on 66.0 and are tied. They hold the position jointly; no tiebreaker is applied, because every tiebreaker available here would be a number the rubric deliberately refused to weigh, smuggled back in to make a list look tidier.
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 the whole rubric: this record answers all five questions below, so nothing is renormalised away and the divisor is the full 1.00. That share travels with every score on this site and is never dropped — a score over part of the rubric’s 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 | 2 of 2 organism slots carry a printed strain designator. | 2 / 2 = 1.0000 | 0.2400 |
| Per-organism amount printed | 0.20 | 0 of 2 organism slots have an amount of its own; the rest are inside a blend total. | 0 / 2 = 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 2 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 / 2 = 1.0000 | 0.2000 |
| Certification confirmed at the issuer’s own register | 0.14 | 1 claimed certification queried at the issuer’s register and not listed there. | 0 / 1 = 0.0000 | 0.0000 |
0.6600 — the last column added up — divided by 1.00, the weight this record could answer, is 0.6600. Multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal, that is the 66.0 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 | 11B CFUs (Probiotic Blend, 40 mg) |
| What that count is measured against | Through expiry |
| Strain designators | All organisms coded |
| Organism slots transcribed here | 2 — the full panel |
| Marketed as | Unisex |
At Expiration Date under recommended storage conditions
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.
Every organism on the panel carries a printed strain designator. Whether those designators lead anywhere is a separate question, answered below.
| Organism as printed | Designator as printed | Quantity as printed | What the designator resolves to | The query we ran |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lactobacillus rhamnosus (correct name: Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus) | LGG | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG" AND randomized controlled trial[pt] |
| Bifidobacterium animalis ssp. lactis | BB-12 | — not stated separately | Human RCT | "BB-12" AND randomized controlled trial[pt] |
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 299239 (opens in a new tab) captured Entered 2023-08-23, on-market, and carrying no UPC. Records the Probiotic Blend at 120 mg with the note "11 billion CFU at expiration date under recommended storage conditions" — verified verbatim.
- Dated capture of the brand’s own page — ritual-synbiotic-pdp-2026-07-30https://ritual.com/products/synbiotic-plus-for-gut-health — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits. captured Live page read in-browser: the current panel with the 40 mg blend mass, the PreforPro and tributyrin dose claims, the in vitro study section and the certification badges. Shopify record product id 7482572669022, variant 42144416890974, SKU SYNBMT0MUS, barcode 850031975248 — the barcode independently confirmed twice.
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
$1.80 a day at the dose the label itself instructs.
- Price
- $54.00 USD
- What that buys
- 30-capsule bottle (30 servings, 1 capsule per serving), monthly subscription price
- Price checked
- — the source we read it fromhttps://ritual.com/products/synbiotic-plus-for-gut-health — Address given, not linked: this site does not link out to the products it audits.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Non-GMO Project Verified | Brand-asserted, unverified | 30 July 2026 |
| Certified B Corporation | Register unreachable | 30 July 2026 |
| Clean Label Project Purity Award | Absent from register | 30 July 2026 |
| Third-party tested for microbes and heavy metals | Brand-asserted, unverified | 30 July 2026 |
Non-GMO Project Verified
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Downgraded on audit. The teardown recorded this as verified with Synbiotic+ explicitly listed among nine Ritual products, but the retained artefact behind that finding is the Non-GMO Project's own "Page not found" 404. Re-checked live: the Product Finder returns HTTP 200 but renders its list client-side, with zero occurrences of "Ritual", "Synbiotic" or any product string in the HTML and no reachable JSON route. The issuer's register could not be reached by any route, and every available corroboration is brand-side. Ritual's own journal says ten of its products are Non-GMO Project Verified, against the teardown's nine.
Certified B Corporation
The certifier’s register could not be queried at all. That is a finding about the verification infrastructure, not about the brand.
Partially confirmed. B Lab's directory returns HTTP 403 and the retained artefact is a Cloudflare challenge page. That Ritual is a Certified B Corporation certified in 2022 is corroborated from multiple independent sources; the month, the standards version and the industry classification recorded in the teardown are unverifiable. It is also a company-level certification and says nothing about this product's contents.
Clean Label Project Purity Award
The register was queried and this product is not listed on it.
Checked at the certifier's own live listing, which was reachable. Clean Label Project names 15 Ritual products and the string "synbiotic" does not appear anywhere in the page HTML. The certificate itself defers to that listing: certificate numbers DSP0005-2023G-13, PNV0022-2023G-131 and PPW0012-2023G-132, entity "Natals Inc dba Ritual", effective 2023-09-07, issued 2025-10-27, covering Dietary Supplements V1, Prenatal Vitamins V11 and Protein Powder V12, and stating "Certified Products: See Certified Product Listings". This is not called false: it could be a lag in the public listing, a scope difference, or a badge applied at brand level rather than SKU level. But the badge sits under a heading reading "Your product has been independently certified", and a reader who clicks through to verify will not find it.
Third-party tested for microbes and heavy metals
The badge is displayed, but the register could not be reached to confirm it. We call this unverified, not false.
Per-lot testing for total aerobic count, yeast and mould, Salmonella, E. coli and S. aureus is claimed without a named laboratory.
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.
This brand sells no women’s counterpart to this product, so there is no diff to run.
Every finding on this page, with the record behind it
Finding 1 tributyrin-dose-claim-with-no-locatable-trial
"Tributyrin has been clinically studied at the dose of 300mg, the same amount included in Synbiotic+." Four separate searches found no published human clinical trial of tributyrin, or of CoreBiome, at 300 mg. The single CoreBiome publication is an in vitro study; the only human tributyrin trial record is an unreported protocol paper at 4 g/day. Everything else in the tributyrin literature with an outcome is livestock — dairy calves and weanling pigs.
The record: PMID 41473189 and PMID 41248397; four PubMed queries re-run 2026-07-30 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 2 clean-label-project-badge-absent-from-the-certifiers-listing
The badge appears on the Synbiotic+ product page under a heading reading "Your product has been independently certified for quality and purity." Clean Label Project's own brand listing names 15 Ritual products and Synbiotic+ is not among them; the string "synbiotic" does not appear anywhere in the page HTML. The certificate defers to that listing.
The record: cleanlabelproject.org/brand/ritual/, checked live 2026-07-30 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 3 proprietary-probiotic-blend-with-no-split
11 billion CFU for LGG and BB-12 combined, unsplit. At that total, at most one of the two can be at its typical single-strain trial dose. Which one is unknowable from the label.
The record: Live Supplement Facts panel and DSLD 299239 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 4 no-deposit-numbers-on-a-traceability-brand
LGG's deposit is ATCC 53103 and BB-12's is DSM 15954. Neither appears on the label or the product page — on a brand whose entire promise is "Made Traceable" and which publishes supplier city and country for each ingredient.
The record: Live Supplement Facts panel and DSLD 299239
Finding 5 preforpro-effect-claim-used-a-different-companion-strain
The 15 mg dose claim is exactly correct — that is the capsule used in the PHAGE trial, and Ritual gets full credit for it. The effect claim is where it slips: the only trial showing PreforPro doing anything to beneficial bacteria is PHAGE-2, which paired it with Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BL04 — not with LGG and not with BB-12 — and reported within-group rather than placebo-controlled improvements. The one trial that did test PreforPro alone against placebo was powered for safety and reported symptom improvement in the placebo arm too.
The record: PMID 30157383 and PMID 32824480 — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 6 product-level-evidence-is-in-vitro-only
There is no human randomised trial of the finished Synbiotic+ formulation. The product-level evidence is a colon-model and SHIME study run by a Belgian contract lab. Ritual labels this "in vitro" prominently and repeatedly in the section header and the explainer, which is more honest than most of this category manages — but the page headline "3-in-1 clinically-studied prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotic" reads as if the product is clinically studied.
The record: ritual.com product page, verified live 2026-07-30
Finding 7 mg-amounts-on-a-probiotic-panel-carry-almost-no-information
The 2023 government record says the Probiotic Blend is 120 mg with an 11 billion CFU note. The current label says 40 mg with the same 11 billion. A threefold reduction in mass at a constant organism count — consistent with a benign switch to a more concentrated raw material, and a demonstration that anyone comparing probiotics by "mg of probiotic blend" is comparing filler.
The record: DSLD 299239 versus the live label — open it (opens in a new tab)
Finding 8 buy-once-penalty
$61.36 plus $10.99 shipping is $72.35 for a single bottle, against $54.00 on subscription and $43.20 on the sale price at time of check — a 34% to 67% surcharge for declining a recurring order, with free shipping restored only for subscribers.
The record: ritual.com checkout options, verified live 2026-07-30
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.
- Non-GMO Project Verified status
- Downgraded on audit. The teardown recorded this as verified with Synbiotic+ explicitly listed among nine Ritual products, but the retained artefact behind that finding is the Non-GMO Project's own "Page not found" 404. Re-checked live: the Product Finder returns HTTP 200 but renders its list client-side, with zero occurrences of "Ritual", "Synbiotic" or any product string in the HTML and no reachable JSON route. The issuer's register could not be reached by any route, and every available corroboration is brand-side. Ritual's own journal says ten of its products are Non-GMO Project Verified, against the teardown's nine.
- Certified B Corporation status
- Partially confirmed. B Lab's directory returns HTTP 403 and the retained artefact is a Cloudflare challenge page. That Ritual is a Certified B Corporation certified in 2022 is corroborated from multiple independent sources; the month, the standards version and the industry classification recorded in the teardown are unverifiable. It is also a company-level certification and says nothing about this product's contents.
- Third-party tested for microbes and heavy metals status
- Per-lot testing for total aerobic count, yeast and mould, Salmonella, E. coli and S. aureus is claimed without a named laboratory.
- Any human clinical trial of tributyrin or CoreBiome at 300 mg
- Not locatable. The randomised-trial query for tributyrin returns three records and none is a tributyrin supplementation trial. The CoreBiome query returns one record and it is in vitro — a gut-model study with cell co-cultures and no human subjects. The only human tributyrin randomised-trial record in PubMed is a study protocol for a pilot feasibility trial at 4 g/day in major depressive disorder: 13.3 times Ritual's dose, a different population, a different outcome, and results not yet published. The claim may rest on unpublished sponsor data, which is legal and common; it is simply not verifiable by a reader. Note also that Ritual's own product study and CoreBiome's ingredient study were produced by the same contract lab.
- The current 40 mg probiotic blend mass
- The government record says 120 mg, with the same 11 billion CFU note. The 40 mg figure was read from the live page DOM and is not independently reproducible. Published as: the 2023 government record says 120 mg; the current label reads 40 mg, read from the live DOM on 2026-07-30.
- Whether Synbiotic+ holds a Clean Label Project Purity Award
- It is absent from Clean Label Project's own certified-product listing for the brand.
- Whether the Non-GMO Project verification covers this product
- The issuer's register could not be reached by any route.
- The effective date of the blend-mass reformulation
- No dated Ritual label image could be retrieved.
- The LGG and BB-12 split within the 11 billion CFU
- Not disclosed. LGG monotherapy trials are typically dosed around 10^10 CFU/day and BB-12 trials at 10^9 to 10^10. At 11 billion combined, at most one of the two can sit at its typical single-strain trial dose, and only on a heavily lopsided split. Which one, if either, is not determinable from the label.
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.
Ritual is careful. That is worth saying first, because it makes the two things that do not hold stand out rather than blend in.
The claim discipline is the best in its batch: “occasional” gas and bloating, “designed to” reach the colon, “help support” immune health, and — unusually — the product-level evidence section is headed “In an in vitro study” and says so again in the explainer. The two probiotic strains are LGG and BB-12, genuinely among the most-trialled strains that exist, and the claim of “over 100+ publications of human clinical trials” is true and checkable: 170 and 95 randomised-trial records respectively.
The first thing that does not hold.
“Tributyrin has been clinically studied at the dose of 300mg, the same amount included in Synbiotic+.”
Searched four ways. The randomised-trial query for tributyrin returns three records, and none is a tributyrin supplementation trial — they are a GLP-1 mechanism study, an upper-GI immunonutrition trial and an enteral feed in pancreatitis. The CoreBiome query returns one record, and it is in vitro: a gut-model study with cell co-cultures and no human subjects. The only human tributyrin randomised-trial record in PubMed is a protocol paper for a pilot feasibility study at 4 g/day in major depression — 13.3 times Ritual’s dose, different population, different outcome, results not published. Everything else in the literature with an outcome is dairy calves and weanling pigs.
That claim may rest on unpublished sponsor data. That is legal and common. It is also not something a reader, a dietitian or this site can check, so it is recorded as unverified rather than false.
The second. The product page shows a Clean Label Project Purity Award badge under the heading “Your product has been independently certified for quality and purity.” Clean Label Project’s own brand listing for Ritual — which, unlike most certifier registers in this research, was reachable — names fifteen products. The string “synbiotic” does not appear anywhere in it. The certificate itself says “Certified Products: See Certified Product Listings”, so the certificate defers to the list, and the list does not include this product.
This page does not call that false. It could be a listing lag, a scope difference, or a brand-level badge on a SKU page. But a reader who clicks through to verify will not find it.
One correction runs against the original teardown, and it is about this site’s standards rather than about Ritual. The teardown graded Ritual’s Non-GMO Project verification as confirmed. The artefact behind that grade was a 404 page. A 404 is not a search result. It has been downgraded to brand-asserted and unverified — the same standard applied everywhere else in this research.