Seven Ingredients and Nothing Else: What’s Actually in GUTSY
A line-by-line walk through the label of GUTSY, a hydrolysed vegan protein from the UAE: what each of the seven ingredients is doing there, and everything we left out.
There is a particular kind of protein label that reads less like an ingredient list and more like the end credits of a film nobody asked to see, scrolling past emulsifiers, thickeners, three different sweeteners, a “proprietary blend” with a heroic name and no numbers, and a run of “natural flavours” that could mean vanilla or could mean whatever was left over at the factory on a Thursday. I spent years buying those labels, squinting at them in the gym changing room, and then pretending I had read them, which is roughly how most of us treat terms and conditions and, if I am honest, our own health.
So now that GUTSY is live and people can actually buy it, I wanted to do the thing I always wished other brands would do, which is go through the label one line at a time and explain, in plain language, what each ingredient is and why it is there. There are seven of them, which is not a marketing number so much as the number we were left with after spending a very long time taking things out.
The Short Version
Each flavour has the same five core ingredients and one botanical of its own, and here they are in full, because hiding them would rather defeat the point of this essay.
Vanilla Calm: rice and pea protein hydrolysate, coconut milk powder, natural vanilla flavouring, reishi mushroom extract, monk fruit extract, Actazin® standardised kiwi fruit powder and Himalayan pink salt.
Cacao Boost: rice and pea protein hydrolysate, natural cacao powder, coconut milk powder, maca root extract, monk fruit extract, Actazin® standardised kiwi fruit powder and Himalayan pink salt.
That is the whole list, from the first ingredient to the last, and there is no secret eighth one hiding behind a trademark.
Rice and Pea Protein Hydrolysate
This is the heavy lifter, and it is where every scoop’s 23 grams of protein comes from, along with 4 grams of BCAAs, which are the amino acids people in gyms like to say out loud as if they were a password.
Pea and rice are a famous double act in plant protein because each one fills in the gaps in the other, and together they cover all nine essential amino acids, which is why the old line about plant protein being “incomplete” deserves to be retired alongside low-rise jeans. The important word on our label, though, is “hydrolysate”. I went into this at length in Bloating Is Not a Personality Trait, so the short version is that hydrolysed protein has already been partly broken down into smaller pieces before it reaches you, which means your gut has less heavy lifting to do at seven in the morning, and it also, as a happy side effect, makes the shake taste cleaner and less like the inside of a hessian sack.
Coconut Milk Powder
This is the creamy bit, and it exists because we refused to use gums.
Most protein powders get their thick, milkshake texture from xanthan, guar or carrageenan, which are cheap, effective and, for some guts, deeply provocative, and when manufacturers offered to add them to our samples to make them feel creamier, we said no, which I described at the time as a quality standard and which was also, in fairness, expensive stubbornness. Coconut milk powder gives the shake its body without any cows and without any gums, and it is the reason the coconut sits on the allergen note alongside the pea, because if you are allergic to either, I would much rather you knew before you paid.
Natural Vanilla or Natural Cacao
These are exactly what they sound like, and I mention them mainly because “natural flavour” has become one of the most suspicious phrases in the supplement aisle, right up there with “clinically inspired”.
The vanilla is vanilla and the cacao is cacao, and in Cacao Boost the cacao is actual cacao powder, which is the difference between a shake that tastes like chocolate and a shake that tastes like the memory of chocolate filtered through a chalkboard. My husband and I tasted more versions of both than I am prepared to count again, and our tasting notes in the early days were mostly variations on “chalk”, so I am unreasonably proud that the final ones taste like food.
Reishi and Maca: One Each, No Sharing
Each flavour has one botanical of its own, and this is the part of the label I want to be the most careful about, because it is the part where the wellness industry usually starts making promises it cannot keep.
Vanilla Calm has 300mg of reishi mushroom extract, and Cacao Boost has 375mg of maca root extract. Both have long histories of use and a lot of enthusiastic people on the internet, and neither of them, as far as I am concerned, is something I am going to claim will fix your life, your sleep or your stress, because the research doesn’t let me say that with a straight face and I would rather lose a sale than make something up. What I can do is show you the exact amount and let you decide, rather than wrap them in a sentence about ancient wisdom. The one firm thing worth saying is that research on reishi and maca in pregnancy is limited, so if you are pregnant, please talk to your doctor before drinking either flavour.
If you have got this far and want to see the label, the full nutrition panel or the two flavours for yourself, everything is on alwaysgutsy.com, with Vanilla Calm and Cacao Boost on their own pages. I will wait. The rest of the label is still here when you come back.
Monk Fruit Extract
This is where the sweetness comes from, and it is the reason there is no added sugar in either flavour and less than a gram of sugar per serving.
Monk fruit is a small gourd whose extract is intensely sweet without bringing calories along with it. A lot of protein powders stack two or three sweeteners on top of each other to cover up the taste of the protein underneath, which is a bit like spraying perfume in a room instead of opening a window. Because the hydrolysed protein already tastes cleaner, we didn’t need to shout over it, and one sweetener was enough.
Actazin® Kiwi Fruit Powder
This is the ingredient I would put on a billboard if I could afford a billboard, and it is in both flavours at 600mg a scoop.
Actazin® is a standardised powder made from New Zealand green kiwifruit, and green kiwifruit naturally contains an enzyme called actinidin, which helps break down protein. I find something quite satisfying about that, in the sense that it is an ingredient sitting in a protein shake whose actual job is to help with the protein, rather than an ingredient sitting on the label to look expensive. Kiwifruit also supports regularity, which is a polite word for a subject nobody wants to discuss over breakfast and everybody quietly cares about, and Actazin® has been studied for digestion specifically, which is more than I can say for most of what I used to buy. It is not magic, because nothing in a pouch is magic, but it is doing a job.
Himalayan Pink Salt
The last ingredient on the list is salt, and it is there for the same reason it is in a good brownie, which is that it rounds out the flavour and stops everything else from tasting flat.
I know pink salt has a certain reputation, somewhere between kitchen staple and crystal shop, so I want to be clear that we are not claiming it does anything for you beyond making the shake taste better. It is a seasoning, and it sits on the label in plain sight like everything else.
Everything We Left Out
What is not on a label is often more interesting than what is, and this is the list I am proudest of, because every line on it represents an argument with a manufacturer who thought we were being difficult.
There are no gums, no dairy, no soy, no added sugar and no gluten, and it is fully vegan. There is no proprietary blend, which means every active ingredient comes with a number next to it, so you can see that it is 600mg of kiwi extract and not a sprinkling waved over the vat for legal purposes. There are no filler amino acids added to make the protein number look bigger than it is, which is a practice called amino spiking that I wrote about in What I Learned Spending Eight Months Building a Gut Health Product, and which made me furious enough at the time that I am still slightly furious now.
None of that means anything, of course, unless someone checks. GUTSY is made in a GMP-certified facility, and every batch is checked by an independent, ISO-accredited lab before it ships, including for heavy metals, pathogens and sugar, because “trust me” is not a quality system, however warmly you say it.
Why Bother Explaining Any of This
I could have put the seven ingredients on the back of the pouch and left it there, and most people would never have noticed the difference, but I spent too long being the person in the changing room squinting at a label she didn’t understand to be comfortable doing that to anyone else.
The reason most labels are confusing is not that the people reading them are lazy, it is that confusion is quite profitable, and a list you can’t read is a list nobody can argue with. I would much rather you read ours, argued with it, and then decided for yourself, which is a slightly odd thing for a founder to say about her own product, but it is also the only version of this company I wanted to build. Everything on the label is everything in the pouch, and now you know what all of it is doing there.
This is my experience and my product, not medical advice. If you have IBS, an allergy, a medical condition or you are pregnant, talk to someone who knows your history before you add anything new to your routine.
GUTSY is live and delivers across the UAE. Find both flavours at alwaysgutsy.com.