When there’s nothing growing and multiplying in a product (like most capsules), there’s likely no reason to keep it cold. Freeze-drying doesn’t necessarily kill the cultures. Sometimes it just makes them dormant. But dormant isn’t growing, and it isn’t multiplying.
But dormant is dormant.
Nothing in there is feeding. Nothing is growing. Nothing is thriving. It's waiting.
Most probiotics arrive asleep. Freeze-dried, waiting to wake up.
Most probiotics are processed into an inactive state and have to come back to life before they can do anything.
Ours spend their whole life before you in cold pressed organic juice, feeding on it and growing in it. It’s a juice shot with 15 strains of living cultures in it. Cultures that are still growing have to be kept cold, which is why the bottle ships the way it does.
Refrigeration isn't the better way to deliver probiotics. For a shelf stable product there's no reason for it at all. It's the only way to deliver LIVING ones.
Freeze-dried
- State in the bottle
- Dormant
- Where it wakes up
- Your stomach
- Needs cold
- No
- What it travels in
- Dry powder or capsule
Living, in juice
- State in the bottle
- Awake and feeding
- Where it wakes up
- Weeks before you drink it
- Needs cold
- Yes
- What it travels in
- Pressed fruit and vegetable juice
Real fruit and vegetable juices. No shortcuts, no dormancy.
Cold shipping costs us five times more.
We could stop tomorrow. The product would still be legal, still be made with probiotics, still sit happily on a shelf. It just wouldn't be alive when it reached you.
Your health is priceless and that is not a corner we will cut. Subscribe and we cover the cold shipping for you. Free, every time.
Cold is also just better. Nobody wants warm juice. Two ounces straight out of the fridge, just the right amount of sweet and a little tart, no aftertaste.
Store refrigerated. Ships cold to your door.
We tested whether the cold was buying anything.
So we took our own blend, made a dry version of it, and put both into a simulated stomach acid environment at body temperature. An accredited lab counted what was still alive at zero, thirty and sixty minutes.
| In our juice | The same blend, dried | |
|---|---|---|
| On contact | 3,200,000 | 64,000 |
| 30 minutes | 25,900 | 7 |
| 60 minutes | 5,100 | 2.33 |
Same dose in. 50x more still culturable the moment acid hit, and 74x better survival from there.
What's in every bottle
Gut Health
Over 27 billion CFUs per serving (at the time of manufacture)
Women's Health
15 billion CFUs per serving (at the time of manufacture)
Fifteen strains of live cultures in both.
Questions
Do probiotics need to be refrigerated?
It depends entirely on what's in the bottle. Freeze-dried cultures are dormant and don't require cold. Living cultures do. Check the label, and if it says refrigerate, believe it.
Are shelf-stable probiotics still alive?
Technically, yes. Freeze-drying suspends a culture rather than killing it, and the count on the label is real. The question was never whether they're alive on a shelf. It's what condition they're in when they finally have to wake up, and where that happens.
Why does this cost more than a bottle of capsules?
It's important to remember that we are an organic juice shot with living probiotic cultures, which falls under the category of food. Capsules are a completely different class of product, typically dietary supplements.
That is not a packaging preference. A synbiotic is live cultures plus a substrate they can feed on, and there are two kinds. The common kind puts dry cultures and dry fiber in one shell, where they never meet. A capsule can claim the second kind. What it cannot do is show it, because nothing dry is feeding on anything. Formulating it as a food is what lets us show it, and ours have been living in their juice since the day we bottled them.
That format carries costs a dry product does not. Cold storage, insulated packaging, refrigerant packs, and a cold-chain fulfillment center. Shipping alone runs several times what a shelf-stable product costs to send, and more in summer. On subscription, we absorb it.
My order arrived warm. Is it still good?
Your order ships cold, with ice packs, to keep it at its best in transit. If it arrives feeling less than cold, that's normal for shipping. Just refrigerate it when it arrives. We recommend keeping Doctor's Biome refrigerated.