Why Fireblood tastes bad (and why we will not fix it)

The most common piece of feedback we get is about the taste. Not a close second. Not “one of” the top comments. The taste. By a distance.

One customer described it as “what I’d imagine a camel vomiting on dogshit would taste like.” He gave us 5 stars. Bought the 90-day subscription.

That’s not a contradiction. It’s actually the point.

The decision we made

When we formulated Fireblood, we had two options. Make it taste like a berry smoothie, or make it work.

Berry smoothie supplements taste good because they’re designed around flavour. The formula starts with what makes the drink palatable: sucralose, stevia, natural flavours, citric acid, maltodextrin. The active ingredients get fitted around whatever space is left. That’s how you end up with products that taste great and contain 47 ingredients at doses too small to measure with a kitchen scale.

We went the other direction. We started with 39 ingredients at their effective doses. Then we tried to make it drinkable. Not enjoyable. Drinkable.

The formula includes 500mg of ascorbic acid (vitamin C), which is sour. 500mg of OptiMSM, which is bitter. 100mg of magnesium as D-magnesium malate and bisglycinate, which is tart. 992mg of L-leucine, which is genuinely unpleasant. And 11mg of zinc bisglycinate, which adds a metallic edge that no amount of flavouring can fully mask.

Every one of those ingredients is there for a specific reason. Removing any of them would improve the taste. It would also remove the reason you bought it.

What most brands do instead

The supplement industry has optimised for taste because taste drives repeat purchases. Not outcomes. Taste.

Proprietary blends exist partly for this reason. When you don’t have to disclose individual doses, you can include 40 ingredients at decorative amounts and leave plenty of room for the flavour system. The label looks impressive. The drink tastes like mango. Nobody checks the maths because nobody can.

Sweeteners like sucralose are in almost every powder supplement on the market. Sucralose makes anything tolerable. Some researchers have raised questions about its effects on gut bacteria at high doses, but the main issue is simpler than that: it signals that the product was designed to be pleasant first and effective second.

Natural flavours are another tool. “Natural flavour” on a supplement label tells you nothing about what’s actually in the product. It’s a catch-all category that covers hundreds of compounds. It makes the drink taste like something it isn’t.

We use none of these. No sucralose. No stevia. No natural flavours. No artificial sweeteners. The only flavouring in Fireblood is cocoa powder.

The tradeoff we accepted

The taste costs us customers. That’s a fact. Some people try one scoop and never come back. Some people email us to ask if the batch was off. It wasn’t off. It tastes like 39 active ingredients in water because that’s what it is.

The tradeoff was simple. We could sell more tubs by making it taste better, or we could make a formula we’d actually take ourselves without cutting a single ingredient or hiding a single dose.

We chose the formula.

The customers who stay (and most do) stay because they read the label, checked the doses, and decided that what goes into their body matters more than what it tastes like for 10 seconds. Those are our customers. We’d rather have fewer of the right ones than more of the wrong ones.

The reviews are honest about this. “Tastes like battery acid mixed with dirt. Best supplement I’ve ever taken.” “Not going to lie, the first sip was a shock. Two weeks in and my energy is different.” “If it tasted good, I’d wonder what they were hiding.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth

If your daily supplement tastes good, ask what they removed to get it there. Ask how many of those 40 ingredients are at doses that would show up in a blood test. Ask why the label uses proprietary blends instead of listing every ingredient with its dose in milligrams.

Fireblood tastes bad because it contains what it says it contains at the doses it says it contains. Thirty-nine ingredients. Zero proprietary blends. Zero sweeteners. One scoop.

We sell powder in a tub. We know how that sounds. But that powder covers more nutritional ground than the 8 bottles it replaces, and it does it without hiding behind flavour systems designed to make you forget what you’re actually swallowing.

The taste is temporary. What it does isn’t.

If you can handle 10 seconds of bad taste for 24 hours of actual coverage, Fireblood might be for you. See what’s in it.