Editor's Spotlight: Startup Focus
Trust-focused startup founders: "We won’t make any friends in the multivitamin market"
Launched just last week (November 25th), the new Informed Sport certified range of supplements will offer all natural ingredients, no artificial preservatives or fillers, only organic mineral carriers, and optimum bioavailibility.
Co-founders George Kruis and Dom Day created the Fourfive brand in 2018 after becoming frustrated by the lack of transparency in the supplements market.
Kruis tells NutraIngredients: “Both Dom and I suffered set-backs due to injuries in February 2018 and we both found ourselves looking for supplements to help get us back to full fitness.”
It just so happened that it was at this time that WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) removed CBD from its banned substances list, meaning CBD would not be considered a performance-enhancing drug.
But in order for CBD to be considered legal, it must contain no more than 1mg/product of THC. This causes a major concern for elite athletes, Kruis says, because many CBD products don't offer full transparency or complete THC level clarity. Issues that can lead to contamination of THC include: unknown cultivation sources, questionable harvesting and extraction methods are questionable, no third party lab test reports to verify their purity, unclear cannabis strain, cross contamination during production, and mislabelling.
“As professional rugby players we are tested for banned substances five to six times a year. We realised there was a need for a range of CBD products certified by BSCG ‘Banned Substance Tested Range’ that professional athletes could take with complete peace of mind. So we launched a range that did just that in 2018, fourfivecbd, and it has been so popular.
“But since setting up that brand we have also been thinking a lot about the other supplements we take daily and the quality of the ingredients in those. After looking into the products currently available on the market we realised there’s a lot of products using low grade ingredients and fillers like chalk, or chemically coated tablets, and often labelled active ingredients cannot be absorbed effectively.
"What became clear is that there is sometimes a concerning gap between what people think they are taking and what they are actually getting as basic ingestion wasn’t optimised across a broad spectrum of products
“Our new range of supplements has been specially developed to deliver maximum absorption whilst using only the best ingredients.
"We won’t make any friends in the multivitamin market but our aim is to offer trustworthy and transparent products for consumers.”
Fourfive Nutrition uses a capsule format, instead of tablets, with an easy-to-digest plant based capsule shell and no chemically coated tablets, as well as organic mineral carriers which offer up to 27% better absorption compared to inorganic mineral carriers like oxides and carbonates.
The capsules are also hypoallergenic, vegan, and Informed Sports approved.
Dr Elisabeth Philipps, Clinical Neuroscientist and Nutrition Practitioner, commented: “With every Fourfive Nutrition product, we have carefully selected the bioactive forms of relevant vitamins to make sure the food supplements you take have the highest absorption rate, where and when you need it most and without the need for your body to convert it first.
"There’s no point in taking supplements on a regular basis if they’ve not been developed in a way that the body can take exactly what it needs from it. For example, the organic minerals carriers found in our range are up to 27% better absorbed compared to inorganic mineral carriers like oxides and carbonates.”
Initially launching with the Vitamin D3 product, the range will soon expand to include all the supplements that the co-founders believe are regularly consumed by elite athletes and everyday active consumers alike: Vitamin C, Female Multivitamin, Male Multivitamin, Omega 3 Fish Oil, and Biotic LGG.
