Tools Writing · 31 August 2026 · By Cristian Cojocaru

AG1: what the label actually says

We scanned it and it came back 52 out of 100. The vitamin panel is real and fully disclosed. The greens blend it is famous for is a single number covering dozens of ingredients.

AG1 is the most recognised product in the greens category and one of the most expensive things in the whole supplement aisle. It is also one of the easiest labels to misread, because the half that is disclosed properly sits directly above the half that is not.

The part that is real

The vitamin and mineral section is a proper panel. Each nutrient carries its own amount and its own percentage of the reference intake, which means every one of them can be checked against what research uses.

That section is doing real work. If you took AG1 purely as a multivitamin and ignored everything else on the label, you would be getting a competent one.

This is worth saying plainly, because the usual criticism of AG1 treats the whole product as theatre. Half of it is not.

The part that is not

Underneath sits the blend the product is named and sold on, and it is a single combined weight covering a long list of ingredients.

The format is legal and it is standard across the category. It is also uninformative in a specific way: if a blend weighs a few grams and holds dozens of ingredients, the average is a few hundred milligrams each, and there is no requirement that they be spread evenly. Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight, so the first one or two are most of it and everything after that can be present in amounts too small to do anything at all.

You cannot verify a single dose in that section. Neither can anyone else.

Why the ingredient count works as marketing

A long list reads as thoroughness. On a panel it usually means the opposite: the room on the label has been spent on names rather than on amounts.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. A blend cannot contain a meaningful dose of dozens of things at once, because a meaningful dose of most of them is measured in grams and the whole scoop is around twelve.

That is not specific to AG1. It is true of every greens powder, and it is the reason a greens powder cannot replace vegetables: the fibre alone would need a scoop many times larger.

What the 52 is made of

The score is held up by the disclosed vitamin panel and pulled down by everything that cannot be checked. An ingredient with no verifiable amount cannot be credited, because crediting it would mean assuming a dose the label declines to state.

That is the same rule applied to every product we scan, and it is why a simple product with four honest numbers can outscore a complex one with forty names.

What to do

1. Read the two halves separately. The vitamin panel is checkable. The blend is not. Judge them as two different products, because that is what they are.
2. Price the half that works. If the vitamin section is the part doing the job, compare its cost against a plain multivitamin and see what the blend is costing you.
3. Count disclosed doses, not ingredients. Seventy names with twenty amounts is a twenty-ingredient product.

Related reading: do greens powders replace vegetables and do multivitamins do anything.

Verdict reads the label, not the reputation. Photograph the supplement facts panel and it pulls every dose, compares each against the amounts used in published research, and adds up your whole stack. It reports the arithmetic. It does not tell you what to take.