Why I Started Shake
I was in corporate. A single mom. Juggling everything, surviving, most days.
And I was standing in a shopping aisle holding a packet, reading the back of it, and I had no cooking clue what I was looking at.
It read like Klingon. Twenty-something ingredients, half of them words I couldn’t pronounce, and I stood there thinking: this is food that Mr Spock replicated out of synthetic material on the Enterprise space ship. And honestly? Half of it tasted that way too.
That’s when I paused.
The question that wouldn’t go away
I needed to know what I was eating.
What I was putting on my skin, my hair, my teeth, my nails. What I was feeding my child. What I was giving my furry fluffs.
And the more I looked, the louder it got. Eat this, don’t eat that. Eat at this time, not that one. Every influencer, every doctor, every podcaster with a microphone, each of them certain, each of them shouting a little louder than the last. All of them had “done the research.”
I already knew a few things from my own body. Certain ingredients made me physically ill, quickly and reliably. My daughter had allergies that showed up the same way. So I knew, at minimum, that what’s on a label matters — because I’d felt it.
But knowing that isn’t the same as knowing what.
So I decided to do the research myself.
What I found
I found a list. Ingredients I now won’t buy, for me or for my family — some because the evidence is settled, some because the evidence is contested and nobody has finished the work.
And when I mentioned any of it to people, I got the same sentence back, almost word for word:
“Surely if it was that bad, they wouldn’t be allowed to sell it to us.”
I understood the instinct. It’s a reasonable thing to assume. There are agencies. There are rules. Somebody must be checking.
Here’s what I actually found.
In the United States, there’s a category called GRAS — Generally Recognized as Safe. There are two ways an ingredient can get there. A company can submit its data to the FDA and receive a letter back. Or a company can convene its own panel of experts, review the safety data itself, reach its own conclusion, and simply start using the ingredient. It isn’t required to tell the FDA. It isn’t required to tell anyone.
There is no public database of ingredients approved that way, because the pathway was never designed to produce one. An investigation by the Environmental Working Group in March 2026 identified at least 111 food chemicals that had entered the food supply this way without the FDA being notified at all.
In August 2026 the FDA proposed a rule to start closing that gap. That’s genuinely good news. It also tells you the gap has been open the entire time you’ve been shopping.
So the answer to “surely they wouldn’t be allowed to” is: in many cases, nobody ever asked permission. And nobody was required to.
And when someone does know
Sometimes it isn’t a gap. Sometimes the information exists and simply doesn’t reach you.
Johnson & Johnson sold talc-based baby powder for more than a century. Court records showed that lab tests detected asbestos in its products from 1971 through the early 2000s, and that those findings were not reported to the FDA. The company stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the US in 2020, and worldwide in 2023. In July 2026 it agreed to a $5.5 billion settlement covering roughly 69,000 claims. It has consistently maintained its products are safe.
I’m not telling you that story to frighten you. I’m telling you because of the timeline. Between what was known and what was on the shelf, decades passed. Parents kept buying it. Not because they were careless — because they had no way to know.
That’s the gap Shake exists to close. Not fear. Just information, arriving earlier.
What I’m actually asking for
I want to be careful here, because this is where a lot of wellness writing goes off a cliff.
I’m not saying every brand is lying. I’m not saying regulators are useless. I’m not saying natural is automatically safe — plenty of natural things will hurt you, and dose matters more than origin nearly every time.
What I’m saying is narrower, and I think harder to argue with:
You should be able to find out. Without a chemistry degree. Without an afternoon of searching. Without having to take anyone’s word for it, including mine.
Right now, a label can say “fragrance” and legally tell you nothing else. A product can be marketed as clean while carrying an ingredient that Europe restricted years ago. None of that is illegal. Most of it isn’t even unusual.
I’m not asking brands to be perfect. I’m asking them to tell us what’s in the bottle, so we can decide for ourselves.
So we built the thing I wanted
Shake takes a product label and researches every ingredient on it.
I do this work with Claude — Anthropic’s AI — and I’ll be honest about how that goes, because I think the honesty is the point. It isn’t a case of asking a question and accepting the answer. We argue. I ask it to make the strongest case for an ingredient, then the strongest case against. We check where something is sourced, whether a mineral is coated in something that undoes the reason you’d want it, whether a certification means what the packaging implies. We interrogate the word “natural” almost daily, because it has no fixed legal meaning in most contexts.
I’ve had to teach it to be sceptical of the same marketing language I’m sceptical of. It’s caught things I missed. I’ve caught things it got wrong. That’s the arrangement.
Out of that came a scoring engine.
Every product is scored against four pillars, with a percentage score of how good that product is for each pillar. We ask the question: is it good for People, Animals, Gaia, Frequency? Each starts at 100. Well-evidenced concerns subtract. Independently verified virtues add. The four average into a single number, with a band attached: Deeply Aligned, Aligned, Worth a Pause, Reconsider, Not Aligned.
Three rules keep it honest. We never assign a concern without a source we can name. We never let a certificate cancel out a well-evidenced problem. And no commercial relationship has ever moved a score, or ever will. Every score is published with its reasoning, so you can check our working and disagree with it.
Where the evidence is contested, we say so. “We haven’t finished testing this” is a different sentence from “this is safe,” and we don’t blur the two.
Where this goes
Eventually this becomes the ShakeUP app. You’ll scan a label, and get a score.
You won’t need to memorise a list of hundreds of ingredients. You won’t need to know what a formaldehyde-releaser is, or which UV filters crossed into blood plasma in the FDA’s own trials. That’s our job.
Yours is the part no app can do: knowing your own body. Using your own judgement. That instinct you get sometimes, reading a label, that something doesn’t add up — trust it. Ours is a tool, not an authority.
The simple version
Consumers decide what gets made. That’s not idealism, it’s just how it works — every purchase is a vote, and most of us have been voting blind.
Brands that genuinely care about what they put in their products deserve to be found. Right now they’re competing against marketing budgets, not on merit, and losing.
Shake brings conscious buyers to brands that care. That’s the whole idea.
That’s why Shake exists.
— Roshell
