Thirty Years of Test Boosters

I’ve been in the supplement industry for nearly 30 years and have operated a retail supplement store since 2003.

Over that time, I’ve sold a lot of testosterone boosters.

While products and ingredients have changed dramatically over the years, the reasons men buy them have remained the same-no changes.

One group is looking to support libido and sexual performance. The other is looking for more energy and drive. The last group wants to  build strength, training intensity, recovery, and MUSCLE. It’s always been this way.

Now, I’ve watched the category evolve from the beginning and I remember a time when Tribulus terrestris dominated the conversation. If it came from Bulgaria, it was considered the “good” stuff. Then came the prohormone era, when ingredients like androstenedione and androstenediol changed the category almost overnight. During that period, Tribulus went from being the industry’s favorite testosterone booster to being scorned and mocked.

When prohormones eventually were legislated out of the market, interestingly enough, tribulus made a comeback. Then came a wave of new ingredients, each promising to support testosterone through different mechanisms. Some were better than others but none could define the category.

One of the more important developments was the introduction of Testofen® by Saanroo (Gencor at the time), which helped bring credibility back to a category that had lost direction.

But in my opinion, the next major leap forward came a few years later. Around 2025, Saanroo introduced Tesnor®.

As someone who has spent decades evaluating ingredients, what immediately caught my attention wasn’t the marketing—it was the population studied.

Tesnor® is a patented blend derived from cocoa bean and pomegranate peel that was evaluated in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study involving healthy men between the ages of 21 and 35. That matters.

Most testosterone ingredients are either studied in older populations or rely heavily on traditional use and theoretical mechanisms. Tesnor® was evaluated in healthy young men—the same demographic that comes in my stores everyday to buy testosterone boosters.

For me, that was a significant distinction. So, when we began developing M-TEST™, I made a decision that I was not going to build another formula around a collection of ingredients simply because they were popular. I wanted clinically studied ingredients, meaningful dosages, and a formula we could stand behind with confidence.

Working alongside myrproduct development team in the US, we kept coming back to the same conclusion: there needs to be a hero ingredient in the formula and it has to be Tesnor®.

That doesn’t mean Tesnor® stands alone. AshwaMind® was included because stress and elevated cortisol levels can work against recovery, performance, and hormonal balance. BioPepper95® was added to help support absorption and ingredient utilization.

But Tesnor® became the foundation. Not because it was trendy and not because it had the loudest marketing. But because after nearly three decades of watching testosterone ingredients come and go, it was one of the few ingredients that made us stop and pay attention. This is the story behind how M-TEST™ was born.

M-TEST™ was built to perform in and out of the gym! It’s the result of decades of watching this category evolve and making a conscious decision to build a formula around an ingredient  (TESNOR®) that the younger demographic can reliably depend upon along with ingredients we believe deserve a place in it.

Explore M-TEST™ here:

M-TEST ™ by MAD SUPPS