Why we exist
India's supplement market is on track to cross ₹50,000 crore by 2028. The shelf has never been more crowded — and the gap between what's printed on the front of the jar and what's actually inside has never been wider.
You can buy a "premium" whey isolate that's 60% concentrate, a "clinically dosed" pre-workout at a third of the studied dose, or a fish oil with a peroxide value that would fail a European retail audit. None of this is hidden — it's just buried in supplier specs, third-party test PDFs, and trial registries that nobody reads.
Naked Compound reads them. We translate what's there, score it consistently, and publish the result without a buy button.
The supplement aisle is the only category where buyers are asked to take the marketing claims of an unregulated product, and trust them. Our job is to make that trust unnecessary.
What we believe
Dose is everything.
"Contains ashwagandha" is not the same as "contains 600mg of KSM-66 standardised to 5% withanolides." We score and recommend based on what's actually in the serving, against what was studied.
Evidence has tiers, and labels should reflect them.
A handful of mechanistic in-vitro papers is not the same as a meta-analysis of 8,000-subject RCTs. Every claim on Naked Compound is tagged with the strength of the underlying evidence — not flattened into a misleading "studies show."
Indian context matters.
Vitamin D dosing for a Stockholm office worker doesn't apply to a Bengaluru engineer who's also indoors all day but at 13°N. Iron defaults are different when the staple grain is rice. Lactose tolerance distributions are different. Price-per-effective-dose is different. We refuse to translate Western templates one-to-one.
The scoring math should be public.
Our rubric is published, our weights are versioned, and reasonable people can reproduce our scores from the underlying data. If you can't show your work, you don't have a methodology — you have an opinion.
How we operate
Each product review starts in our internal database. Ingredients, doses, extracts, suppliers, and prices are entered from the actual label and supplier docs — never from press kits. The review writer is given that record without the brand name attached, scores it against the rubric, and only then is the entry attributed.
The full methodology page walks through every step. Short version: we treat reviews like queries against structured data, not like blog posts with a star rating tacked on.
We do not test product chemistry ourselves.
For purity claims we rely on independent third-party labs (NABL-accredited where possible) commissioned for specific investigations, and on supplier certificates of analysis verified against batch numbers. Our methodology page spells out which specific analyses are commissioned in-house vs sourced.
How we're funded
Reader memberships and a small grant from independent science-communication funders pay our bills. We do not run display advertising. We do not have affiliate links to any of the brands we review. We do not run sponsored "best of" lists. Our complete conflicts policy is versioned and publicly tracked.
The team
Naked Compound is a small operation: four full-time research staff, three rotating contributors, and an external science advisory board of three. Meet them on the authors page — every published piece carries a byline, and every byline is a real person with a real CV you can audit.