What's in the tub, and why it's in there.
The Science
We're not going to tell you our supplements work miracles — the law says we can't, and honestly, we wouldn't anyway. What we can do is show you exactly how we formulate, what every ingredient is for, and the standards each one has to meet before it earns a place in the tub. Pour yourself a tea. This page is the long version.
The formula is the ingredient
Walk down any supplement aisle and you'll see single ingredients treated as celebrities — one herb on the label, one promise on the front. We've never worked that way. Every Hi Form formula is designed in Australia as a whole: each ingredient chosen not just for what it brings on its own, but for how it behaves alongside everything else in the scoop.
That's why a scoop of Oxydane carries more than sixty actives, and why even our most targeted formulas run to a dozen or more working parts. Nutrients don't operate solo in the horse, so they shouldn't operate solo in the tub. Vitamin E and selenium are a partnership. Calcium is nothing without phosphorus in the right ratio. Amino acids build protein as a team, and the team moves at the pace of the scarcest member. Formulating is the art of getting the whole orchestra playing - not turning one violin up to full volume.
Human-grade, and what that actually means
'Human-grade' gets used loosely in this industry. Here's what we mean by it: the ingredients in Hi Form formulas are listed with Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration — the same body that regulates ingredients for human supplements. Each one has been assessed for quality and safety at that standard, not the lower bar set for animal feed. Our working rule is simpler still: if we wouldn't consume it, our horses don't either.
Everything is blended in small batches in our SQF-certified, FeedSafe-accredited facility in Australia — a facility whose certified scope is human food manufactur, applied to every tub. Small batches aren't a romantic flourish; they're how you keep ingredients fresh and every scoop consistent from the top of the tub to the bottom.
Extracts — and why the ratios matter
This is the part of the label most brands hope you won't read, and the part we'd most like you to. When you see a botanical listed with a ratio — 10:1, 100:1, 200:1 — it tells you how concentrated the extract is. A 10:1 extract means ten kilos of the raw herb went into making one kilo of what's in the tub. Our aloe vera is a 200:1 extract: two hundred kilos of plant, concentrated into one.
Why it matters: a label can honestly say 'contains turmeric' whether it holds a spoonful of ground kitchen spice or a standardised extract. The ratio — and the standardisation — is the difference. Our turmeric is a 100:1 extract standardised to 85% curcuminoids, the compounds the turmeric conversation is actually about; EquiG carries the C3 Complex® at 95% curcuminoids. Ground turmeric root, for comparison, is typically around 3–5% curcuminoids. Same word on the label. Very different scoop.
So when you compare us on price, compare on this too. A bigger tub of diluted material isn't better value — it's mostly a bigger tub.
Minerals, the absorbable way
Minerals only count if they arrive somewhere useful. Wherever it matters, Hi Form supplies minerals in forms chosen for how readily the horse can take them up — including our signature mineral tissue salts, the finely prepared mineral forms Hi Form has built formulas around since 1990, and organic forms like L-selenomethionine for selenium. It's the difference between delivering the post to the door and leaving it somewhere in the county.
What we leave out
Half of formulating well is refusing things. There are no fillers in a Hi Form tub — every gram is an active ingredient or the minimal carrier needed to blend it. No added molasses. No artificial flavours or preservatives. And nothing that forgets the horse is a strict herbivore: you won't find glucosamine or chondroitin in our formulas, because they're derived from shellfish and animal cartilage, and we don't believe a herbivore's supplement should need a fishing fleet. The scoop sizes stay small for the same reason — when nothing is padding, 15 grams can carry a whole formula.
The ingredient library
Horses make their own vitamin C, but we include it generously across the range as a classic antioxidant nutrient — one of the body's everyday tools for maintaining normal cells in the face of normal work.
These two are the textbook example of why we formulate whole: vitamin E and selenium work as a pair in the body's normal antioxidant systems, particularly in hard-working muscle. We supply selenium as L-selenomethionine, an organic form the horse can absorb readily — and dose it conservatively, because with selenium, more is emphatically not better.
B1, B6, folic acid, niacin, pantothenic acid and friends — the family of vitamins involved in the normal conversion of feed into usable energy. A horse making its own B vitamins in a healthy hindgut still benefits from a topped-up supply when work, travel or a changing routine asks more of it.
Biotin is the famous hoof nutrient, and it's in our daily formulas at meaningful levels. But hoof horn isn't built from biotin alone, which is why it always travels with methionine, zinc and silica in a Hi Form tub — the full bricklaying crew, not just the foreman.
Zinc contributes to the maintenance of normal skin, coat and hoof horn; copper works alongside it, including in normal coat pigmentation. The two compete for absorption, so the ratio between them matters as much as the amounts — another quiet piece of whole-formula thinking.
Involved in normal muscle and nerve function and hundreds of routine processes besides. We include it across the range — from the daily formulas to EquiMetaBalance, where magnesium phosphate is a named part of the composition.
A trace element involved in the body's normal macronutrient metabolism. It's included in the composition of EquiMetaBalance as part of that formula's support for normal metabolism within a balanced ration.
Bone health is less about calcium alone than about calcium and phosphorus arriving in the right proportion — which is exactly how our daily formulas deliver them, with magnesium in support.
Protein is built from amino acids as a team, and lysine is the member most often in short supply in a forage-based diet — nutritionists call it the 'first limiting' amino acid, because without enough of it the rest of the team waits. It's a fixture in our daily formulas.
A sulphur-containing amino acid that's part of the normal construction of hoof horn and coat. It partners biotin and zinc in the hoof line-up across the range.
An amino acid the body uses as a routine building block in its normal regulatory systems. Declared on the EquiMetaBalance label at 1,500 mg/kg — like everything we make, it's on the label because it's in the tub.
Turmeric has centuries of traditional use behind it and one modern problem: most of what's sold barely resembles the root's active profile. Ours is a 100:1 extract standardised to 85% curcuminoids — and in EquiG, the C3 Complex® at 95%. We'd rather explain that difference than shout about it.
One of the oldest plants in any herbal tradition’s book, with a very long history of use in digestivevcare. In our formulas it goes in as the dried leaf — the form UK feed law recognises, and the form tradition kept it in anyway.
One of the most established herbs in traditional practice, used across centuries as a general tonic herb. It leads the botanical line-up in EquiMetaBalance as a 10:1 extract.
Two herbs with long histories of traditional use in times of demand — ashwagandha in Ayurvedic practice, rhodiola in northern herbal traditions. Both appear in EquiMetaBalance as 10:1 extracts, part of that formula's whole-team design.
Ginger's traditional use in digestive comfort spans most of the world's herbal traditions; fenugreek brings its naturally occurring galactomannans — fibres of the kind associated with normal hindgut fermentation — plus a smell horses genuinely like. Both feature as concentrated extracts.
Rosehip is one of nature's classic vitamin-C-bearing fruits with a long tradition in everyday vitality; Siberian ginseng has an equally long record as a traditional tonic herb. Both sit in Oxydane as 10:1 extracts — small inclusions doing steady work.
Centuries of traditional use in skin and coat care, which is why they anchor the coat-support side of LeisureVit alongside zinc, biotin and the omegas. Formulated with the show ring in mind; enjoyed by field ornaments everywhere.
A horse lives by its hindgut: a fermentation vat that turns forage into fuel via billions of microbes. BioEquus is our live-culture formula (Saccharomyces cerevisiae, declared on-label) designed to support a normal, well-populated gut microbiome — and it's built into Oxydane and LeisureVit, so the daily scoop feeds the horse and the microbes.
A traditional, palatable source of naturally occurring B vitamins and a long-standing fixture in good feed rooms. It appears in our daily formulas for exactly those old-fashioned reasons.
Full-fat, debittered soy flour — oral-grade, the kind used in human health foods, farmed in Australia and GM-free. It's a palatable, quality protein source and emphatically not the soybean by-product meal found in many feeds. In our tubs it's an ingredient, never a filler.
The British feed room's oldest coat conditioner, and still one of the best natural sources of omega 3 fatty acids. Ours is 100% natural and cold-pressed — nothing added, nothing heated out.
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