Ritual Founder Calls Out “Pixie Dusting” and What to Look For in Your Vitamins
Inside the supplement industry’s “pixie dusting” problem and why vitamin traceability is becoming the new standard for knowing exactly what you’re putting in your body.
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Almost everyone has a supplement graveyard somewhere at home. A half-used tub of protein powder. A bottle of vitamins with a 2023 expiration date. A magnesium capsule rattling around at the bottom of a bag. Kat Schneider, founder of supplement brand Ritual, not only knows this cycle.... she built a company around fixing it. On a recent episode of the ‘Live & Well’ podcast, host Melissa Magsaysay sat down with Schneider to talk about the thing the wellness industry has been quietly avoiding: where, exactly, your supplements actually come from.
According to Schneider, the supplement market has ballooned from 4,000 products to over 100,000 in the last three decades. Although regulation has struggled to keep up. That gap puts a lot of pressure on the person standing in the vitamin aisle trying to make a smart choice. “It’s unfair to ask a customer to become a federal agent,” Schneider says. “Asking themselves: Is this safe? Is it going to hurt me? Does it work?”
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Her answer to that frustration is traceability. Documenting exactly where every ingredient comes from, down to the specific farm or supplier. For Ritual, that means knowing whether the peas in a protein blend were grown regeneratively in North America or whether the hyaluronic acid was sourced from a lab in Japan. One reason the sourcing actually matters is heavy metals. Because many supplements are derived from plants grown in soil, they can, according to Schneider, absorb lead, arsenic, and cadmium along the way. Yes, that is scary, and recent testing by Consumer Reports on popular protein powders suggests it probably should be...at least a little.
“Everything we know has heavy metals in the air and water,” Schneider explains. “But it’s really the amounts that matter.” A brand that knows exactly where its ingredients are grown can actively choose lower-risk regions and publish the data to back it up, Schnieder explains. “A brand that can’t tell you where its ingredients came from can’t do any of that.”
Traceability isn’t only about geography. It’s about who the science was actually done on. For decades, clinical research leaned heavily on one demographic....white men. Women’s bodies, Schneider points out, respond differently.
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That shapes how she thinks about ingredient claims. It’s no longer enough for a label to say something is “clinically studied.” Studied on whom? At what dose? Does the amount in the capsule actually match what was used in the research, or is it a trace amount added purely for marketing? That last practice, Schneider explains, known in the industry as “pixie dusting,” is more common than most brands would like to admit.
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And so if you’re ready to audit your own supplement cabinet, Schneider points to a few markers worth trusting. Third-party certifications like USP or NSF confirm that what’s on the label is genuinely in the bottle. Schneider notes that fewer than one percent of multivitamins carry the USP certification.
The Clean Label Project, she adds, tests for over 500 environmental contaminants. And brands that publish their clinical results in peer-reviewed journals, rather than just on their own websites, are worth paying attention to. The goal, she says, is moving wellness from “faith-based” to “fact-based.” Brands that are willing to show their work are, at this point, the exception. But Schneider thinks that’s changing...and that consumers asking harder questions is exactly what’s driving it.
Click here to learn more about Ritual.
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