Something worth sitting with: the word "natural," as used on a supplement or food label, has no formal legal definition in the United States. None. It's one of the most trusted words in the wellness aisle, and it's essentially unregulated.
"Natural flavor" specifically comes from FDA regulation 21 CFR 101.22, and the definition is broader than most people assume. A natural flavor can be an essential oil, an extract, a distillate, or the product of roasting, heating, or enzyme processing, all pulled from a plant, animal, or other natural source. That sounds reasonable on its face. It gets murkier from there: getting that flavor compound out of its original source and into a stable, usable form often requires solvents, carriers, and processing aids, and many of those are synthetic. Propylene glycol, for example, is a synthetic carrier commonly used in natural flavor systems, and it doesn't have to be listed separately on the label. According to industry sourcing groups, these processing aids and carriers can make up a significant share of what's actually in a "natural flavor" blend, even though the front label just says two words.
So a product can legitimately say "natural flavor" while containing a flavor compound that went through extensive chemical processing to get there. Natural sourcing, heavily processed result. That's not a loophole brands are exploiting, it's literally how the regulation is written.
But the bigger issue isn't really about flavor at all. It's about what flavor is being used to cover up, and why that matters more than most people realize.
Bitterness isn't decoration on your tongue, it's information. Your taste buds evolved specifically to flag bitter compounds, because in nature, bitter is one of the most reliable warning signs for something your body should be cautious of, plant toxins, spoilage, compounds it isn't ready to process. When you taste something bitter, your body starts a cephalic-phase response before you've even swallowed, priming saliva, stomach acid, and digestive enzymes to handle what's coming. That's your taste buds doing their actual job: reading a chemical signal and telling the rest of your body to get ready.
Flavor science has gotten very good at working around that signal instead of respecting it. A strong, congruent sweet aroma layered over a bitter compound doesn't remove the bitterness chemically, it suppresses how your brain perceives it, so the bitter signal gets quieted before it registers. That's a real, deliberately used technique, the same principle pharmaceutical companies use to make bitter medications easier to swallow. Applied to food and supplements, it means you can be consuming something your body would otherwise flag as "proceed with caution," and never get the memo, because the flavor system was specifically engineered to keep you from tasting it.
That's the part we take issue with. Not flavor for flavor's sake, using flavor to quietly override a signal your body relies on. When Bestie flavors something with real cacao, real citrus, real fruit, there's nothing being masked, because there's nothing that needs masking. The taste you get is the actual, accurate read on what's in the formula, exactly the way your taste buds were built to work.
This is exactly why Bestie doesn't use "natural flavors" or "artificial flavors," full stop. Every flavor across the line comes from real fruit, real spices, real cacao, actual food, with nothing hiding behind a catch-all label term that could mean almost anything. When Stacked Protein tastes like chocolate, that's real cacao and cocoa. When Not Thirsty tastes like citrus, that's real orange, lemon, and lime. No solvent-extracted flavor compound standing in for the real thing, and nothing you have to take on faith.
We call it Flavored by Nature because that's a factual description, not a marketing phrase. If it's not something your body would recognize as food, it's not going in the formula, and that includes flavor.