Safety Over Everything:
What Protein Supplement
Users Are Really Thinking

The protein supplement industry is worth more than $25 billion annually, and by most measures it is growing. But something has shifted in the consumer mindset — and it isn't brand preference, flavor innovation, or price sensitivity. It's fear.

Since Consumer Reports and independent testing labs began publishing heavy metal contamination data on popular protein products, a question has been forming among the tens of millions of Americans who consume these products regularly: Is what I'm drinking every morning actually safe?

Most coverage of protein supplement contamination has focused on the products themselves — lab results, lead levels, brand comparisons. Far less attention has been paid to the consumer side of this story: what do people actually know, what are they worried about, and how is it changing the way they shop?

To answer those questions, CleanProteinList.com deployed two independent consumer research instruments between January 23 and February 19, 2026. The first was a brand interest poll embedded across the site, capturing which brands visitors were actively researching for safety information. The second was a voluntary nine-question behavioral quiz probing usage habits, contamination awareness, budget tolerance, and primary purchase motivations. Together, the two instruments collected data from an estimated 350+ unique poll respondents and 96 quiz completions.

The findings converge on a single conclusion: safety has become the defining concern of the protein supplement consumer — and most of them don't yet have the information they're looking for.

Who Responded: A Profile of Today's Protein Consumer

Before examining what respondents think, it's worth understanding who they are. Both instruments drew from the same population: visitors to CleanProteinList.com who arrived via organic search, primarily on content covering heavy metal contamination, lead testing results, and brand safety comparisons. This self-selected audience skews toward safety-motivated consumers — an important context for interpreting findings.

Quiz Data from the protein safety quiz (n=96) paints a picture of a habitual, health-focused consumer base. 84.4% of quiz respondents use protein supplements at least "often," with 66.7% consuming them daily. This is not a market of casual browsers — these are people for whom protein supplementation is a routine part of daily life.

When asked about their primary reason for using protein supplements, respondents revealed that the category has expanded well beyond its gym-culture origins. General health was the leading use case at 35.4%, followed by weight loss (26.0%), athletic performance (19.8%), and muscle building (18.8%). The near-even split across use cases suggests that protein supplementation has become a mainstream health behavior — one that spans demographics and motivations that traditional fitness marketing never fully anticipated.

Poll The brand interest poll adds another layer to the respondent profile. Of the ~350 unique respondents, 78.2% were researching powders and 21.6% were researching ready-to-drink (RTD) products. This powder-dominant audience is consistent with the CleanProteinList.com content focus on powder safety data, and is worth noting as context when interpreting brand interest findings.

Quiz On protein source preference, the quiz found a market that is largely source-agnostic: 52.1% expressed no preference between whey and plant-based options, with 30.2% preferring whey and 17.7% preferring plant-based. The majority "any source" response echoes the primary finding — when safety is the primary filter, ingredient type becomes secondary.

Safety Has Become the Deciding Factor — Not Just a Checkbox

The most striking finding from the protein safety quiz is the degree to which safety has come to dominate the consumer decision-making process — not as one factor among many, but as the overwhelming primary concern.

Quiz n=96

The dominance of the safety concern is notable for what it cuts across. Use case didn't differentiate it — safety was the primary concern whether respondents were using protein for general health, weight loss, athletic performance, or muscle building. This is not a niche concern confined to a particular type of consumer. It spans the entire respondent base.

Also significant: only 1.0% of respondents cited experiencing symptoms as their motivating concern. The safety-driven consumer in this data set is proactive, not reactive. They haven't necessarily experienced a health event — they've heard about contamination risks and they want to act before they do. That distinction matters for how brands, journalists, and regulators communicate about this issue.

The 11.4% who selected "ready to switch" or "find the cleanest option" represent a segment that is actively in-market — not just researching, but making a decision. Combined with the dominant 87.5%, the picture is of a consumer population that has already made up its mind about what matters. The only open question for them is which brand actually delivers on it.

The Contamination Awareness Gap: Most Consumers Are Flying Blind

If the first finding is that safety is the dominant concern, the second finding complicates it significantly: most respondents don't actually know what's in their products.

Quiz When quiz respondents were asked about their awareness of heavy metal and contamination risks in protein supplements, the results revealed a market where concern is high but information is scarce.

Only 16.7% of quiz respondents were fully aware of documented contamination risks in the protein supplement category. Meanwhile, 41.7% had no new concerns — meaning they were either unaware of recent testing data or had not encountered it in any meaningful way. The third group, at 29.2%, represents perhaps the most telling segment: consumers who have "heard something" but lack complete information.

This gap has a direct behavioral dimension, which the cross-tabulation data (Section 5) makes clear. But even at the surface level, the contrast is striking: a consumer population that is overwhelmingly safety-motivated is simultaneously operating without the safety information it's seeking. That's not a gap that resolves itself. It requires better information access — which is precisely what the protein safety content on CleanProteinList.com is designed to provide.

Orgain Leads Safety Searches — but the Market Is Deeply Fragmented

The brand interest poll offers a window into which brands are drawing the most consumer scrutiny. Because the poll was embedded on safety-focused content — lead testing articles, contamination rankings, brand comparisons — the brands that appear in the data are brands that consumers are actively researching for safety reasons. This is not a popularity or market share chart. It is a safety concern index.

Orgain leads by a significant margin — nearly twice the interest of second-place Premier Protein (39 vs. 25 unique respondents). This gap is not explained by market share alone. Orgain's elevated presence in the data reflects the direct consumer response to widely-covered reporting on the brand's lead test results, including data from Consumer Reports. When media covers contamination in a specific brand, consumers search for it — and CleanProteinList.com data captures that behavior in real time.

Premier Protein's second-place position similarly reflects media coverage of its lead testing history. Below these two, the data drops sharply, with a cluster of brands drawing 4–6 respondents each — Nurri, MyProtein, Truvani, Vital Proteins, Vega, Isopure, Ascent, Garden of Life, Ensure, and Muscle Milk. The breadth of this list underlines the market's fragmentation.

Quiz The quiz data reinforces this fragmentation picture from a different angle. When asked about their current brand, 53.1% of quiz respondents selected "other" — meaning they are not using any of the pre-listed major brands. The 43 write-in responses that followed included more than 40 distinct brand names, from GNC Lean Shake (the single most-cited write-in at 6 mentions) to Kirkland, Rule 1, Thorne, OWYN, and Amazonia. No single brand dominates this market's trust landscape.

Two geographic signals also appeared in the write-in data. Leanfit (3 mentions) and "progressive all in one" (2 mentions) are Canadian-market brands with limited U.S. availability, suggesting that safety-seeking protein consumers extend beyond the domestic market — a finding consistent with the growing international footprint of CleanProteinList.com traffic.

The Awareness Delta: How Knowledge Shapes Purchase Behavior

One of the most commercially significant findings from this research comes from a cross-tabulation of two quiz variables: contamination awareness level and willingness to pay a per-serving premium for verified clean protein. The analysis reveals a behavioral pattern that has direct implications for content strategy, brand communication, and the information gap identified in Section 3.

Quiz Respondents were divided into three awareness groups — fully aware, partially aware ("heard something"), and not aware — and their engagement with the budget question was examined. The key metric is not simply the dollar amount respondents were willing to pay, but whether they engaged with the price question at all.

The partially aware group — those who had "heard something" about contamination but lacked complete information — engaged with the price question at a rate of 61%, nearly double the rate of both the fully aware (38%) and unaware (32%) groups. Their skip rate of just 39% is the lowest of any segment.

This pattern suggests that the partially aware consumer is the most commercially active. They're in active discovery mode — researching, comparing, and weighing options including price. The fully aware consumer, by contrast, has likely already reached a conclusion about their approach; the decision feels made, so the price question feels less relevant to engage with. The unaware consumer has no framework yet for the premium.

An important caveat: the willingness-to-pay percentages within each awareness group are based on small answered subgroups (as few as 6 respondents in the fully aware group who engaged with the price question). The within-group price tolerance findings should be treated as directional, not statistically conclusive. The engagement rate finding, based on larger base sizes of 16 to 40, is more robust.

What Consumers Will Pay: Pricing as a Baseline, Not a Premium

Quiz When quiz respondents were asked what they would pay per serving for a verified-safe protein product, 61.5% skipped the question entirely. The question was explicitly marked optional — but in the context of a survey population that named safety as its primary concern at a rate of 87.5%, the skip behavior still carries meaning. For the safety-motivated consumer, acceptable price and safety are likely not variables they're trading off against each other. Safety is the requirement; price is secondary.

Among the 37 respondents who engaged with the question, 74% selected $1.50 or more per serving as an acceptable price point for a verified-safe product. That range aligns closely with what many mainstream brands — Orgain, Premier Protein, Ascent — already charge at retail. The data doesn't show consumers demanding a safety discount. It shows them willing to pay market-rate prices, provided safety is verifiable.

One interpretive limit worth noting: the question did not anchor respondents to their current per-serving spend. A response of "under $1.00" could reflect a budget constraint, a current spend already below that threshold, or something else entirely. Without a baseline spend comparison, the responses describe acceptable price range rather than direction of willingness to move. A follow-up instrument with that anchor would yield a more precise premium tolerance figure.

What the data does clearly show is that price tolerance and safety concern are not in conflict for this audience. The consumer who names safety as their primary concern is also, when they engage with the price question at all, expressing comfort with the price points that verified-clean products already occupy in the market.

What This Means: Four Takeaways from the Data

1. Safety-motivated consumers are no longer a niche.

When 87.5% of respondents — spanning health users, athletes, weight loss seekers, and muscle builders — name safety as their top concern, the category has undergone a fundamental shift. This is not a specialty concern for plant-based devotees or anxious parents. It is the mainstream consumer mindset in 2026. Brands, retailers, and media outlets that treat safety as a secondary story are misreading their audience.

2. The information gap is bigger than the contamination problem.

Only 16.7% of quiz respondents were fully informed about heavy metal contamination risks in protein supplements — yet 84.4% use these products daily or often, and 87.5% say safety is their primary concern. The majority of safety-motivated consumers don't have adequate information to act on that concern. Closing this gap is both a public health imperative and an enormous market opportunity for brands willing to be transparent and for publishers willing to go deep.

3. Brand trust is genuinely up for grabs.

With 53% of quiz respondents on unlisted or write-in brands, and more than 50 distinct brand names appearing across the poll and quiz combined, no single brand currently owns consumer trust in this category. The brand that credibly earns a clean-label reputation with an informed audience has a wide open runway — and the data suggests that audience is actively looking for somewhere to land.

4. Media coverage creates measurable consumer behavior.

Orgain's nearly 2× lead over Premier Protein in brand safety searches is not explained by market share. Orgain is not the largest protein brand. What it is, is the brand most prominently featured in consumer-facing contamination reporting over the past 12 months. The poll data captures the downstream consumer response to that coverage in real time: people read the story, then search for more information. Safety journalism has direct, measurable purchasing implications.

Research Methodology

This report draws on two independent data collection instruments deployed on CleanProteinList.com between January 23 and February 19, 2026. The instruments were designed and administered separately; findings are presented in combination where they converge, and attributed individually throughout the article.

Anonymized aggregate data is available to journalists and researchers upon request. Contact: research@cleanproteinlist.com