This category ships in four main formats — pressed tablets, single-serve powder sachets, single-serve liquid shots, and multi-serve bottles — with capsules and chews around the edges. The differences that matter to a buyer are mechanical: how finely a unit divides, how it survives a pocket or a hot mailbox, whether you can tell it has been opened, and how much printed surface the package leaves a brand to work with. This guide compares formats on those terms only — no comparison of effects of any kind, and no dosing advice.
We are a distributor and retailer. We do not blend, press, fill or bottle anything — the brands we stock choose their formats and we ship what they make. What follows comes from handling those packages and matching them to paperwork. You can see which we carry in the cat's claw collection.
The formats, briefly
Terminology here is loose, and one product line often appears in two or three of these at once. Physically, this is the shelf.
| Format | What it is | Smallest portion without tools | Typical tamper evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pressed tablet | Powder compressed into a solid unit, often scored | Half, or a quarter if cross-scored | Blister cavity, or foil and neck band |
| Capsule | Powder in a two-piece gelatin or vegetarian shell | One capsule | Blister cavity, or foil and neck band |
| Sachet or stick pack | Pre-measured powder in a heat-sealed foil pouch | One sachet | Heat seal, single-use |
| Shot | Sealed liquid bottle, commonly 10 mL to 60 mL | One bottle | Shrink band or breakaway ring |
| Multi-serve bottle | Larger liquid container, several servings | What the cup or dropper marks | Induction foil and neck band |
| Chew or gummy | Confection matrix carrying the material | One piece | Pouch seal, then a zipper |
Dosing granularity: what each format lets you divide
Granularity is the smallest portion a format hands you without improvising — the largest practical difference between these packages.
A scored tablet is the most divisible unit on the shelf: a single score is designed to break into halves, a cross score into quarters. A score is a guide, not a guarantee — halves vary in mass and crumbs are lost. A tablet with no score was not designed to be divided at all, and its fragments should not be assumed equal.
A capsule does not divide: pulling one apart destroys the unit and leaves loose powder and no measurement. A sachet is pre-measured and, in practice, equally indivisible. You could weigh part of one on a scale reading to a hundredth of a gram, but almost nobody does, and the remainder then sits in a torn pouch that cannot be resealed near its original barrier standard.
A shot does not split. There is no score, no graduation, no partial-open state. Once the seal is broken the whole container is open, and dividing it means pouring into your own measuring device and storing an opened bottle. A few brands print a fill line; most do not.
A multi-serve bottle is the opposite case — designed to be divided, with the accuracy of that division belonging entirely to the cup, dropper or cap that ships with it. Moulded cups are cheap and their graduations are approximate. A dropper marked in millilitres beats a cup marked in vague "serving" steps, and an unmarked cap is not a measuring device at all.
A gummy or chew can be cut, but whether half a piece holds half the content depends on how uniformly the batch was deposited — a manufacturing question, not a kitchen one.
Divisible is not the same as uniform
Splitting a unit divides that unit. It says nothing about variation between units in the same batch. Laboratories testing solid formats commonly composite several tablets and report an average, and an average can look excellent while individual units scatter. Content uniformity is a separate test, and far less common here than plain potency testing. Ask whether a report is a composite result or a uniformity study — a distinction we walk through in our guide to reading a Certificate of Analysis.
Portability and everyday handling
Blistered tablets travel best: each unit keeps its own barrier, a popped blister is visible, and nothing leaks. Loose tablets in a jar rattle, chip and shed powder, and the chips are lost material. Sachets are flat and genuinely pocket-sized, and foil laminate is a real moisture and light barrier until it is torn — their failure mode is mechanical, since one folded in a wallet can crack along the crease, and a cracked sachet is an open sachet.
Shots are the heaviest per unit and the only format here that can leak; glass breaks and PET deforms under pressure. Liquids are also the most exposed to the delivery chain — a package sitting in a vehicle or a metal mailbox in July sees temperatures well above anything a stability programme assumed. Multi-serve bottles are not portable at all; they are a home-storage format you decant from. Chews are the most heat-sensitive: above the melting range of the gelling system they fuse into one mass, ending any per-piece portioning.
Packaging integrity and tamper evidence
Tamper evidence lets you tell, before opening something, whether someone else already did.
- Blister cards — strongest per-unit protection. Each cavity is sealed individually and a breached cavity cannot be restored.
- Sachets — heat-sealed and single-use, so tamper-evident by construction.
- Shots — a shrink band or a breakaway ring moulded into the closure. Check the ring before you break it; a cap that turns freely is a problem.
- Bottles of tablets or capsules — induction foil plus a neck band. Good until first opening; after that the units inside have no individual protection.
- Resealable pouches — weakest. A zipper tells you nothing about whether the pouch was opened before it reached you.
Three checks are worth thirty seconds on arrival, whatever the format. The outer seal should be intact. The lot code and date on the unit should match the outer carton. And no label should sit over another label — relabelling, where a sticker covers printed text, is common here and always worth a question to whoever sold it to you. If something arrives from us failing any of those, tell us; how to do that is in the store FAQ.
Shelf life and storage
Dry formats keep longer than wet ones, and the reason is water. Liquids carry the water activity that supports chemical degradation and microbial growth, which is why shots and bottles carry preservative systems and why many say "refrigerate after opening." Dry tablets, capsules and sachets are more stable but hygroscopic — they pull moisture from the air, and a powder that has clumped has already taken some on.
Two dates matter and most labels print only one. Unopened shelf life is the date on the package. In-use shelf life is how long the product stays what it says after the seal is broken. Single-serve formats sidestep the second problem entirely: a sachet or a shot is opened once and finished, with no headspace and no in-use period to manage. A multi-serve bottle holding a month of servings and printing no post-opening guidance has left a real gap, and that gap belongs to the brand.
Worth knowing, too: unlike a drug product, a supplement's expiration date is assigned by the manufacturer and is not required to be backed by published stability data. Some companies run real stability programmes; others pick two years.
How format changes what a label can tell you
Printed surface constrains information. A 15 mL shot bottle has a wrap label a few centimetres tall; a sachet has one printed face; a carton has five usable panels. When surface runs out, information moves — to an outer box, a peel-back label, or a QR code — and each move costs the buyer something.
- Per-unit versus per-serving figures. Single-serve formats collapse the distinction: one shot or one sachet is one serving and one article. Multi-serve packages do not. "2 servings per container" means every number on the panel is half of what is in the bottle — the most common misreading in the category, and one we worked through in our note on serving sizes and labels.
- Lot code and date on the unit itself. If the batch number appears only on the outer carton, you lose the ability to match your unit to a report the moment you recycle the box.
- Where the QR code lands. A code that opens a batch-specific record is useful. A code that opens a marketing page, or a folder of PDFs with no lot matching, is decoration. Ours are organised by batch on the COA page.
Per-unit figures took on new weight in 2026. The DEA notice covering 7-hydroxymitragynine, published in the Federal Register on 6 July 2026 as FR Doc 2026-13580, is written as both a concentration limit and a per-article limit: 0.050% w/w, or 1.00 milligram per article. "Per article" means per unit as sold, so what counts as an article depends on the format — one tablet, one sachet, one shot bottle. The companion notice, FR Doc 2026-13581, covering mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15 and MGM-16, carries no threshold at all. Both take effect on or after 5 August 2026, on the date the order publishes, with no grace period and no sell-through. We covered the mechanics in what changes on August 5; the notices themselves are at federalregister.gov.
Format and the certificate
Format changes how a batch is sampled. A liquid batch is a tank: it is mixed, and a drawn sample is broadly representative. A solid batch is a blend compressed or filled into thousands of discrete units, so representativeness depends on how well that blend was mixed and how consistently the press ran. Neither is inherently better tested; they fail differently.
What format does not change is the analyte list. A certificate reports what the laboratory looked for and nothing else. The certificates supplied for the products we carry report non-detect for 7-hydroxymitragynine, mitragynine, speciociliatine, speciogynine, paynantheine, corynantheidine and mitraphylline. Those panels do not include mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15, MGM-16 or corynoxine B. So we do not say those compounds are absent from anything we stock, in any format — not because we think they are present, but because nobody looked, and a claim with no test behind it is just a sentence. That is why we wrote a whole post on the phrase "non-detect".
Frequently Asked Questions
Is half a scored tablet really half a tablet?
Approximately, and only if it is scored. A score guides a clean break, but the halves will not be identical in mass and some material is lost as dust. An unscored tablet was not designed to be divided. If precision matters, a pre-measured format removes the question rather than answering it.
Do shots need to be refrigerated?
Follow the label. Many liquids call for refrigeration after opening, and a single-serve shot is normally finished once opened, so the instruction is often moot. Unopened, liquids do better in a cupboard than in a car. A liquid with no storage guidance at all is worth asking the brand about.
Does the format change what a Certificate of Analysis covers?
It changes how the sample was drawn, not what was measured. The analyte list is set by the method the laboratory ran, and it is the same for a tablet and a shot from one brand if the same panel was ordered. Read the analyte list, not the format.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. For adults 21+. Legality depends on the specific formulation and applicable state law — check the rules where you live. Nothing here is legal advice.