About us and our method
How The Fine Print scores a supplement
Who we are, how we test, how the numbers are built and exactly how we get paid.
In short
The Fine Print is an independent review desk. We buy products with our own money, take them for at least six weeks, score them on eight fixed criteria that are averaged with no hand weighting, and publish the low marks alongside the high ones. We earn commissions on purchase links, and no brand has ever had a say in a verdict.
Who we are
The Fine Print is a review publication owned by Sable Ridge Publishing, LLC and based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We started in 2019 for a dull reason: one of us went looking for the milligram amounts in a supplement they had been taking for a year and could not find them anywhere, on the bottle or on the website. Reading labels closely turned out to be the most useful thing we could do for readers, and it is still the centre of what we publish.
We cover dietary supplements sold direct to consumers, mostly in the brain, metabolic and joint categories, where marketing tends to outrun evidence and where products are hardest to compare because they are not on a shelf you can walk up to and turn around.
Who does the reviewing
Corinne Hale, MS, CNS is our lead reviewer and runs the hands on testing programme. She holds a master's degree in nutrition science and the Certified Nutrition Specialist credential, and she has spent eleven years reading supplement labels professionally, first in retail category management and since 2019 here. She writes the testing notes, signs the scores, and is the person whose name sits on every verdict.
Research, statistics and fact checking are handled by the wider Fine Print desk. Where a page carries both a writer and a reviewer credit, that means the desk drafted it and Corinne checked and approved the claims, the scores and the safety language before it went live.
We want to be precise about what we are and are not. We are experienced readers of labels and literature who use the products ourselves. We are not a laboratory, we do not run assays, we do not conduct clinical trials, and nothing we publish is medical advice or medical supervision. When a question needs a clinician, we say so and send you to one.
How we test
- We buy it. Full retail price, our own card, the same checkout you would use. We do not accept free samples, review units or press kits, because a free bottle is a small debt.
- We read the label before we read the marketing. Actives, forms, amounts, any proprietary blend wording, serving size against bottle size, and anything that only appears in small print.
- We check each active against the literature. Government sources and reviews first, then individual trials, with attention to the doses used. An ingredient with good research behind it at four grams tells you nothing about that ingredient at forty milligrams.
- We take it for at least six weeks, daily, at the label dose, with a written log. Six weeks is the floor because most of these products are slow, and a two week test measures placebo and nothing else.
- We collect buyer reports from reader submissions and public buyer feedback, then tally ratings, themes and timelines into the statistics you see on a review.
- We test the support and refund path where that can be done honestly, and we ask readers who requested refunds what actually happened.
Our statistics are an editorial tally, not an audited data set, and we label them that way on every page that carries them. They describe the shape of the response we found among the people who wrote to us. They are not a clinical outcome and should not be read as one.
How the score is built
Every product gets the same eight criteria, each marked out of five. The final score is the plain arithmetic mean, rounded to one decimal place. There is no weighting, no adjustment and no editorial override, which means a product cannot recover a bad transparency mark with good packaging.
| Criterion | What it measures | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Effectiveness | Did anything change during our test period, and how consistent are buyer reports | 1 of 8 |
| Value for money | Cost per day against comparable products and against the actives supplied | 1 of 8 |
| Ease of use | Servings a day, form, taste, swallowability, how easy the habit is to keep | 1 of 8 |
| Onset speed | How long until a first noticeable change, both ours and readers' | 1 of 8 |
| Tolerability | Rate and severity of reported side effects | 1 of 8 |
| Label transparency | Are all actives named with amounts, or hidden inside a blend | 1 of 8 |
| Guarantee and refunds | Length of the window, the conditions attached, whether it is honoured | 1 of 8 |
| Customer support | Response times, clarity, and whether problems actually get resolved | 1 of 8 |
A note on the transparency criterion, because it is the one brands complain about. A formula that names every active but withholds the amounts loses roughly half a point to a point; one that hides the ingredients themselves inside a proprietary blend loses far more, and no quantity of good research on the named ingredients pulls it back, because research applies to doses. MemoHoney names all six of its actives and prints none of the amounts, which puts it at 4.3 and is the only reason its overall mark is 4.8 rather than 4.9.
The community rating shown on a review is a separate number. It is the average of the buyer reports we collected, and the two often differ, which we think is useful information rather than a problem to be smoothed over.
Editorial independence and how we get paid
The Fine Print earns money from affiliate commissions. When a review links to a manufacturer's website and a reader buys something, the seller pays us a percentage. That is the entire business model, and it is disclosed in a banner at the top of every page that carries such a link, beside every button, and in the footer of every page on the site.
The rules we hold ourselves to:
- No brand sees a review before publication, and no brand can get a change afterwards except to correct a factual error, which we then correct in public.
- Commission rates never influence a score. We have published low marks on high paying programmes and we will keep doing it.
- We do not publish sponsored posts, paid placements or advertorials of any kind.
- We do not take money for a link, a mention or a position in a list.
- If a product has no affiliate programme at all and it is the better product, we say so.
The long version of all this, including the FTC framework it sits under, is on our affiliate disclosure page. If you want to know whether one specific link earns us money, ask and we will tell you.
Currently under review on this site: MemoHoney, scored 4.8 out of 5 in July 2026, with the full reader breakdown on our reader reviews page.
Corrections and contact
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and note the change. Email the desk at editor@memohoneyreport.com. That address reaches an editor, and we answer factual challenges from brands and readers on exactly the same terms.
We are not the manufacturer of anything we review. We cannot look up your order, we cannot process a refund, and we cannot change what a seller charges you. For any of that you need the company you bought from.