Six questions I ask before anything goes in my travel bag

Years ago, during my time at Vertosa, I worked with the product development team at Traditional Medicinals and spent time at their facility. Nothing we worked on together launched.

What stayed with me had nothing to do with the project. It was the standard they hold themselves to on what goes on the label.

I’m writing this because conference season is on and people keep asking what I carry. The products are the least useful part of that answer. What’s portable is the filter.

One. Does it work in the conditions I’ll actually be in?

Not whether it’s a good product. Whether it functions on a plane, in a conference room, with no refrigerator, no kitchen, and ten minutes between sessions.

Bare Bones bone broth is in my bag for one reason: hot water is the only input reliably available everywhere I go. Flight attendant has it. Hotel lobby has it. Conference coffee station has it. Rip, mix, drink.

That’s a lower bar than “is this excellent” and a much harder one to clear.

Two. Does it taste good enough that I’ll use it twice?

I spent years on the beverage formulation side at Vertosa, helping make infused drinks work at commercial scale. The lesson that cost the most to learn is that taste decides adoption. A product nobody wants to finish has an efficacy of zero.

I’m more forgiving on taste when utility is very high, and I know I’m making that trade. Naming the trade-off is the point. Pretending you don’t make it is how you end up with a drawer of things you bought once.

Three. Protein first.

On anything I’m eating rather than supplementing, protein is the first number I check. Then fats worth having. Then whether sugar was added.

Justin’s Classic almond butter packet: 6g protein, fats I want, no added sugar, survives being sat on. That’s the whole case for it.

Four. Is there a number on the label the manufacturer has to answer for?

This is the criterion I’d keep if I had to throw out the other five.

The Manuka honey I carry is graded MGO 263+. MGO is methylglyoxal, measured in milligrams per kilogram. It’s a certified, graded figure, which means there’s a specific thing the manufacturer is on the hook for and a specific thing a third party can check.

But the best example of this criterion in my bag isn’t the honey. It’s the tea, and I didn’t fully appreciate it until I went back and read the box properly this week.

Throat Coat carries a Supplement Facts panel rather than a Nutrition Facts panel. That’s a different regulatory lane than most tea companies choose, and it comes with different obligations. The panel reads:

The letters in parentheses are the part I care about. PhEur, USP, BHP and JP are the European, United States, British Herbal and Japanese pharmacopoeias. A pharmacopoeia is a country’s official guide of quality standards for ingredients used in supplements and medications, covering things like identity, purity and strength. Traditional Medicinals states that food grade herbs are accepted in herbal tea products and that they use the higher pharmacopoeial grade instead.

So on a box of tea, you’re told how many milligrams of each herb you’re getting and which published standard that herb was sourced to. There’s also USDA Organic and CCOF certification on my box.

That’s a lot of accountability on a product most people treat as a beverage.

I’ll also name where it stops. Four ingredients are broken out by weight. The other four sit inside a 1,040mg proprietary blend with no individual amounts. That’s a normal and legal thing to do, and it’s also the one place the label stops being fully measurable. A company earning credit for the first part should get the asterisk on the second.

One more thing the box does that I’d point to as evidence of the standard. It carries a warning advising you to consult a healthcare practitioner before use if you have low potassium, or if you take diuretics, corticosteroids, cardiac glycosides such as digoxin, or other potassium-depleting medications, or if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding. It isn’t recommended for children under 12.

Licorice root is the largest ingredient in the blend at 760mg. Most tea companies never have to print a sentence like that, because most tea companies aren’t making an herbal product at those quantities. Printing it is a choice.

Five. Can the company support what it says?

This is the criterion I can judge better than most people, because I’ve spent fifteen years on the testing and formulation side of consumer products. I know what a backed claim looks like and what decoration looks like.

Traditional Medicinals is my reference point for the first kind, and I’ve been in the building.

What I won’t do here is tell you what slippery elm or licorice does for you. I can tell you what slippery elm bark is: it’s high in mucilage, a polysaccharide that forms a gel in water, which is the viscosity you taste in the cup. That’s composition, and anyone can check it. The moment I start making claims about outcomes, I’m doing the exact thing this issue argues against.

For the multivitamin I carry, Metagenics PhytoMulti, the signal is the channel. It’s sold through practitioners rather than retail shelves, and I choose that channel deliberately, because the accountability structure is different when a clinician recommends a product and hears about it when something’s off. That’s a statement about the channel, not a promise about what the product does for me.

Six. Form factor.

Single-serve. Shelf-stable. Survives a bag.

Single-serve matters more than it sounds like. An opened container in a hotel room is something you have to manage. A packet is a decision you make once.

The multivitamin is the exception, and it’s the one thing here I had to solve rather than buy. PhytoMulti comes in a bottle. The bottle is the bulkiest thing in my kit and it fails this criterion outright.

So I count out the number of days I’ll be gone and put them in a small ziploc. That’s it. No pill organizer, no system. It takes thirty seconds and it turns the one item that loses on form factor into the smallest thing in the bag.

Form factor is the criterion I’m most willing to work around, because packaging is usually someone else’s decision and sometimes you can just undo it.

Where my own criteria push back on me.

Two things in my bag get caught by my own filter, and I’d rather say so than let a formulator catch it for me.

I use Thrive Market grass-fed collagen peptides, 11g per packet, in coffee between flights. Convenient, and I feel better using it. What I won’t do is count those 11 grams as protein.

Protein quality comes down to nine amino acids your body can’t manufacture. A source short on one of them caps how much of the whole thing your body can actually build with. Collagen is very high in glycine and proline and effectively absent in tryptophan, so 11g of collagen is not doing the job that 11g from meat, eggs or whey does.

Here’s the part I had to be honest about. The Bare Bones packet lists 10g of protein, and its ingredients are grass-fed beef bone broth powder and grass-fed beef collagen. Bone broth protein is collagen. That’s where it comes from. So the 10g carries the same asterisk as the 11g, and I’d been quietly treating one as protein and the other as a convenience add.

Both stay in my bag. Hot water in a conference room is a real constraint, and a hot savory drink with 10g of something beats a vending machine. I just don’t count either toward my protein for the day, and I get complete protein elsewhere.

The criteria only work if you run them against the things you already like.

The way this actually goes wrong.

Not a bad product. Forgetting the bag.

The kit only works if it’s packed before the week starts, and the failure is always the same. I get back from a trip, don’t replenish it, and leave three weeks later with an empty pouch. Then it’s day two of a conference, I’ve been talking since 7am, and I’m looking at a hotel gift shop.

The tea is where I feel it most. I drink tea at night at home. That’s a routine, and the point of carrying it is that the routine survives the trip. Conferences run on late nights and alcohol, and having one thing that’s the same as home is worth more to me than anything nutritional in the bag.

So the real system isn’t the six criteria. It’s restocking the pouch the day I get home, while I still remember what I ran out of.

Try this week.

Open whatever bag you travel with and pick up three things in it. For each one, answer two questions out loud.

Is there a number on this label that someone is accountable for? And would this still function on a plane with no fridge and ten minutes?

Anything that can’t answer both is in your bag out of habit. You don’t have to throw it out. You just have to stop believing it’s there for a reason.

The part none of this replaces.

All of it sits on top of sleep, water, and preparing before the week starts. A packet of anything will not rescue a trip where I slept four hours and ate at 10pm. The kit is for the margins, and the margins are only worth optimizing once the foundation is there.

What’s one advantage you could compound from here?

Hit reply and tell me. I read everything, and what you send shapes what I write next.

— Austin

Austin Stevenson is CRO at ACT Global Lab Services and a co-founder of Vertosa.