@ZOO, actually I thought proprietary blends are listed to safe guard from copy cats...
This post has nothing to do with any specific company. It's just about prop blends in general. And I'm not posting anything now that I haven't posted for probably 10 years; including posting very in depth in the thread I'm going to mention below that some of the other old timers may remember haha.
I can't speak for any other company as to why they would use prop blends. But its been known for many years that the most common reason for using them is to keep product costs down. That's why in prop blends you normally always see an inexpensive ingredient at the top.
Take a pre-workout with a 5 gram prop blend - you'll commonly see things like Citrulline Malate, Taurine, and Betaine at the top. They're great ingredients but they're also cheap ingredients. So in a 5 gram prop blend, a brand could literally give you 4.99 grams of those and then less than 1 mg. on expensive things like Alpha GPC, Agmatine, etc. (the more expensive ingredients). So to the uneducated customers eyes, they still think they're getting all of those. But what the companies doing it like that are really doing is keeping costs down to increase profits.
The argument that a lot of companies used to use was that they used prop blends to keep from getting copied. I always viewed that as more of an excuse to justify the prop blends. The reason being is because its pretty widely known what the effective dosages of certain ingredients and that there are no magical secret ingredients in this industry. Raw material suppliers are in business to make money too and if they come up with something special or unique, they want to sell it to as many people as possible. Plus, its conveniently always lesser expensive ingredients at the tops of the blends and pricier ones below which means it less dosage of those if the brands are labeling products correctly and following FDA labeling guidelines.
There was a huge let's call it 'open label movement' from 4 to 7 years ago (I'm guessing, time runs together for me) that saw a lot of companies stop using prop blends because so many educated customers turned against them.
There used to be a great thread on another forum - no use looking for the thread because it got taken down because it upset a lot of companies. To this day, its still one of my all time favorite threads. The person posting had access to a lot of industry pricing. He would first break down prop blends and detail what the dosages of everything in the prop blends should be so that you would see how short many came up in terms of what they would need to be versus what they were. Then he would give a cost estimate of what the product would be based on what it would cost if the product had in it the ideal dosages of ingredients. Then, he would detail how the blend was likely made up based on label sequence and what it would cost based off of that. It gave a great insight and you could see just how much some companies were saving and misleading by using prop blends.
I'm not saying that's why all companies do prop blends; each has their own reasons and have to make the decision that they feel like is best for them and their businesses.
In our case, we focus on providing efficaciously dosed products at cost effective products and want people to know the dosages of each ingredient that they're getting since they are dosed correctly.