In this LAB note
Question · Hypothesis · Method · Results · What Failed · What We Learned · What Changed at MOMS
Question
How many distinct ingredients does it actually take to build 201 different shakes — and inside a single shake, does using more of them make it better?
Hypothesis
We expected a large pantry. The recipe library spans 8 body types, 28 goals, 4 program weeks and 4 calorie labels, and that many combinations ought to need a wide ingredient list to fill. We also expected ingredient count to track quality. Steyn et al. (2006) scored the diets of 2,200 South African children two ways: a food variety score, which is a plain count of distinct food items eaten, and a dietary diversity score, which counts food groups. The plain item count correlated with a composite micronutrient adequacy ratio at r = 0.726, slightly ahead of the food-group count at r = 0.657. If simply counting foods predicts adequacy that well across a whole diet, we expected recipes carrying more ingredients to earn higher internal Scores.
Method
We parsed all 201 rows of the production recipe sheet and split each of the six formulation slots — Liquid, Body, Fruit & Vegetable, Protein, Functional, Flavor — into individual ingredients with their gram or millilitre weights. That yielded 1,714 ingredient placements. From those placements we counted distinct ingredient names across the whole library and within each slot, ranked every ingredient by how many of the 201 recipes it appears in, summed the gram weight each slot contributes to the average shake, and correlated per-recipe ingredient count against the internal Score, which runs 11 to 20 in this library. We then read the recipes at both ends of the ingredient-count range line by line. Externally we used Steyn et al. (2006), Public Health Nutrition, for the item-count-versus-adequacy relationship, and Vadiveloo et al. (2015), Journal of Nutrition, for the alternative approach: an index that weights variety by the proportion of healthful food groups rather than counting foods.
Results
201 recipes are built from 74 distinct ingredients. Thirty-two of them account for 80% of the 1,714 placements. Egg White appears in 98 recipes, Dates in 86, Chickpeas in 75, Agave in 71. Eighteen ingredients appear in five recipes or fewer. The list is not spread evenly across the slots. Thirty-seven of the 74 ingredients appear in the Fruit & Vegetable slot, and 15 of those 37 also appear somewhere else. The Liquid slot offers 6 options. Flavor has 8, Body 11, Functional 19, Protein 20. By weight the ratio inverts. The average shake is 595.5 g of food. Liquid contributes 229.2 g (38.5%) and Protein 223.6 g (37.6%) — 76.1% of the shake drawn from 25 distinct ingredients. Fruit & Vegetable contributes 92.3 g, 15.5%, from a 37-ingredient list. Flavor and Functional together contribute 8.8 g, 1.5%. A single shake averages 8.5 distinct ingredients, range 5 to 13. For rough scale, and acknowledging this compares a serving to a day: the children in Steyn et al. averaged a food variety score of 5.5 distinct items across an entire day of intake.
What Failed
The hypothesis did not survive. Across 201 recipes, ingredient count correlates with our internal Score at r = +0.09 — indistinguishable from nothing on a set this size. Counting only produce items, the correlation is slightly negative, r = −0.13. Split into quartiles, the fewest-ingredient quarter averages a Score of 14.36 and the most-ingredient quarter 15.28, a gap of under one point on a scale running 11 to 20 with a library mean of 14.98. The two clearest cases sit at opposite ends and score identically. WAI-W2-PROTEIN-009-V1 (Fortified Recover) uses 6 ingredients — Soy Milk 260 ml, Chicken 75 g, Mango 80 g, Broccoli 45 g, Spinach 30 g, Maple Syrup 10 g — for 305.8 kcal, 34.6 g protein, 4.2 g fiber, Score 16. EY-W3-GUT-004-V1 (Belly Balance) uses 13 — Oat Milk 97.5 ml, Soy Milk 97.5 ml, Egg 27.5 g, Egg White 150 g, Chickpeas 30 g, Adzuki Beans 15 g, Beet 25 g, Raspberry 35 g, Dates 13 g, Chia Seeds 5 g, Cashew 6.3 g, Monk Fruit 1 g, Agave 5 g — for 396.7 kcal, 30.8 g protein, 10.3 g fiber, Score 16. Same Score, more than twice the ingredients. The most crowded recipe is not the best one either. WY-W2-COOL-006-V1 (Breezy Reset) also carries 13 ingredients and scores 13, below the library mean. We should be plain about what this does and does not show. Our Score is an internal formulation metric, not a health outcome. That it ignores ingredient count is a statement about our Score, not evidence that ingredient variety is nutritionally irrelevant. What it does mean is that we cannot claim a longer ingredient list makes a MOMS shake better, because our own system does not register the difference.
What We Learned
Variety and substance live in different slots, and we had been treating them as one thing. The produce slot is where the library's breadth sits: 37 of 74 ingredients, and nearly all of the rotation a customer notices week to week. The Liquid and Protein slots are where the shake's mass, calories and protein come from, and those run on 25 ingredients that barely change. That split explains why ingredient count is a weak signal inside a single serving. Adding a third produce item moves roughly 30 g in a 595 g shake. Changing the liquid moves 230 g. Steyn's item count works because it is measured across a whole day, where adding a food usually means adding a food group as well. Inside one 16 oz serving, most added items are small and land in slots that were already occupied. Vadiveloo et al. arrived at the same place from the other direction. Their US Healthy Food Diversity index scores variety, quality and proportionality together rather than counting foods, and adults in the top tertile carried 21% lower odds of metabolic syndrome (OR 0.79, 95% CI 0.64–0.98). The proportionality term is exactly what our raw count was missing. The 74-ingredient pantry is also smaller than the personalization it supports, and that is a feature rather than a shortfall. Constraint is what makes sourcing, allergen substitution and quality control tractable across 201 recipes.
What Changed at MOMS
We stopped treating ingredient count as a formulation target. Recipes are no longer judged on how many things are in them, and we removed "add another produce item" from the default fix when a recipe reads thin. We split the metric in two instead. Breadth is now tracked at the rotation level — how many distinct produce species a customer sees across a full four-week cycle — rather than at the single-shake level, where it does not mean much. Substance is tracked in the Liquid, Body and Protein slots, which is where a change actually moves grams. We also flagged the 18 ingredients appearing in five recipes or fewer for review. Each one carries real sourcing and allergen-labeling cost, so a near-single-appearance ingredient now has to earn its place on a specific formulation ground, not on the general principle that more is better.
References
Steyn NP, Nel JH, Nantel G, Kennedy G, Labadarios D. Food variety and dietary diversity scores in children: are they good indicators of dietary adequacy? Public Health Nutrition, 9(5), 644–650, 2006 | Vadiveloo M, Parekh N, Mattei J. Greater healthful food variety as measured by the US Healthy Food Diversity index is associated with lower odds of metabolic syndrome and its components in US adults. Journal of Nutrition, 145(3), 564–571, 2015
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