Following the success of its Essential for Women line, supplement brand Ritual is expanding its consumer profile with the launch of Essential for Men 18+ and Essential for Men 50+.
 
Ritual established itself with a mission statement to be the go-to supplement company for those who experience reservations about the traceability and safety of ingredients in the marketplace. All of its ingredients adhere to clean label, non-GMO, vegan certified, gluten- and allergen-free standards, with no artificial colorants or synthetic fillers.
 
“Ritual launched nearly five years ago with the mission to reinvent everyday products with a commitment to traceability backed by the first visible supply of its kind, an evidence-based or bust mentality, and high-quality nutrients in absorbable forms,” Dr. Nima Alamdari, PhD, Ritual’s chief scientific officer, said. “This mission remains unchanged and has been a guiding principle for every product we develop—from our first clinical-backed daily multivitamin, Essential for Women, through to our newest product, Essential for Men.”
 
What Transparency Means
Ritual’s origin story began when its founder and CEO, Katerina Schneider, was pregnant. She experienced the anxieties mothers face when seeking out a prenatal supplement due to issues surrounding purity and potentially harmful compounds. The company was founded on a perception of the dietary supplements industry as a “black box,” laden with lab reports showing some supplements containing artificial colors, heavy metals, synthetic fillers, and more.
 
The company’s doctrine since founding has been to assuage these fears through a meticulous selection of ingredients and a comparatively radical dedication to transparency tracing the full extent of the company’s supply chains. 
 
For each ingredient offered in a Ritual capsule, the company offers specific information on the material’s source, clinical substantiation supporting the company’s decision to include that particular ingredient, and the names and locations of each supplier.
 
Take the company’s folate listing, for example. Ritual lists the location and name of its folate manufacturer, Gnosis, while also pointing out which clinical studies—of the tens of thousands that exist for folate—best substantiate the product form, which, in Ritual’s case, is 5MTHF glucosamine salt.
 
Ritual also provides a Q&A session with a spokesperson for its supplier company, delving into the advantages of folate in this form, which is biologically active, allowing for those genetically predisposed to absorption issues to experience the nutrient’s benefits.
 
This level of detail is consistent for each of the company’s ingredients in its online listing.
 
With the launch of Essential for Women came a university-led clinical study on the benefits of supplementation over the course of 12 weeks, in 94 adult women between the ages of 21 and 40.
 
Now, men, too, have a single product formulated with the same level of clinical substantiation backing a simple list of 10 key ingredients lacking in the average male diet, based on a number of population-based studies examining nutritional needs that men commonly experience. Studies substantiating the efficacy of Essential for Men, similar to those conducted on Essential for Women, are slated to take place in the near future.
 
“We just recently completed our university-led clinical trial on Essential for Women,” Alamdari said. “Due to the impact of Covid-19 on research and subject recruitment, we are waiting for a more appropriate time to resume our clinical research and university-based partnerships.”  
 
Essential for Men contains a bioavailable form of vitamin A, a vegan-certified vitamin D3, a vitamin E sourced from mixed tocopherols, a non-soy form of vitamin K2 as MK-7, vitamin B12 in its methylated form, methylated folate, magnesium and zinc in their chelated forms, food-form boron, and algae-sourced DHA.
 
The Necessities
Like its products for women, Ritual elected to take a pragmatic, minimal approach compared to some of the multivitamins of its competitors, which often present a list of 30-40 or more ingredients. For Ritual, less is more, and the quality of the key nutrients in its products is more important than quantity.
 
“We believe in a less is more approach,” Alamdari said, adding that the company trademarked the phrase for use in marketing. “So, while some multivitamins include excess nutrients, many people are commonly getting enough of these nutrients from their diets. The difference between our products and the traditional benchmarks is how we think about the need for nutrients; we are focused on the gaps in the average diet. When you look at the nutrient gaps for women and men across life stages, and consider their dietary intakes, specific lifestyles and dietary patterns, and take into account genetic considerations, you have a different product with more specificity to help fill gaps in that diet.”
 
Alamdari pointed to the example of vitamin C and its recommended dietary intake as one key nutritional need that is not very difficult to meet. For this reason, Ritual doesn’t include it as an ingredient, due to concerns that over-supplementation of one nutrient has adverse effects.
 
“The National Institute of Health recommends that adult women aim for 75 mg a day,” he said. “For reference, the food equivalent of 75 mg is one medium orange, one cup of broccoli (78 mg) or a half-cup of raw bell pepper (95 mg). There is also a delicate balance to the way nutrients work together in our bodies, and too much of one thing can impact another. It’s just not always necessary to supplement, and in some cases, over-supplementation can be problematic.”
 
Alamdari also went into the specifics of the “free from” movement as it applies to multivitamins, and what ingredients, declared or not, heighten his concern the most in the industry. “Some products contain unnecessary ingredients, such as PVP [a synthetic polymer used in a wide range of capsules], polyethylene glycol [widely used as an emulsifier], shellac, or forms of nutrients that some people cannot efficiently utilize,” he said.
 
The Format
Another interesting component of Ritual’s capsules are the unique look of the beadlet-in-oil technology. Alamdari shared some of the advantages of this delivery format.
 
“We designed our capsules with an innovative beadlet-in-oil technology that separates dry from liquid nutrients in two, small daily capsules,” he said. “Some capsules may be designed to break down in the stomach. Our technology was designed to be gentle on an empty stomach—with delayed-release capsules designed to bypass the stomach and dissolve later, in the less sensitive, more absorptive areas of the gut. We published an abstract in 2019 on our dissolution study that demonstrated our delayed release capsule technology.”
 
“In addition to the delayed-release technology, we selected evidence-based, bioavailable forms of nutrients,” Alamdari continued. “Folic acid is a good example. While the synthetic form of folate is widely used, it’s also not necessarily the ideal form for everybody. Up to one third of the U.S. population has a genetic variation that makes it difficult to efficiently utilize folic acid, which is why we use a bioavailable, methylated version of folate called 5-MTHF in our multivitamins. As another example, we use dimagnesium malate which is a chelated form of magnesium, with evidence of superior absorption. Other examples include using vitamin D3 instead of vitamin D2, and vitamin K2 as MK-7 over MK-4.”