Goji, acai, maqui and five you know

There is a test you can do on any powder that claims to have fruit in it. Mix it with water and look. If the fruit is real and there is enough of it, the water changes colour, because the pigments in a berry are the very things that made people value berries in the first place. If the water stays beige, you have bought a flavouring.

There are eight berries in the scoop and they are all freeze-dried whole. Blueberry, blackberry, raspberry and strawberry you know. Acerola cherry you met in the vitamin C note. The other three travel further. Goji from China, where it has been eaten for a couple of thousand years. Acai from the Amazon, where it is a staple rather than a smoothie. And maqui, a small, almost black berry from Patagonia that the Mapuche people have eaten for as long as anyone has records.

The colour is anthocyanin, the family of pigments that makes a blueberry blue and a maqui nearly black, and maqui has among the highest anthocyanin content of any fruit ever measured. Goji brings zeaxanthin, the pigment the eye uses in its own retina. Acai brings the polyphenols the Amazon has run on for centuries. We believe the pigments are where much of the good in fruit lives, which is why we wanted the fruit itself and not a flavour, and why we freeze-dried it rather than cooked it. Freeze-drying pulls the water out at low temperature and leaves nearly everything else where it was. It is slow and it costs more, and it is the only method we would put our name to.

Together with the dates, the berries come to 1,000mg of the scoop.