Dr. Mark Hyman, family physician and founder of Function Health, is among those doctors specializing in wellness who have helped shape the content and direction of SuppCo’s supplement tracker, which measures 29 attributes of brands. Beyond Hyman, other experts, including Dr. Robin Berzin, CEO of Parsley Health and Dr. Darshan Shah, founder of Next Health, helped create protocols in areas including longevity, cognition and gut health to recommend to users.
Currently in beta, SuppCo has already evaluated over 500 supplement brands. Notably, the company reportedly relies on its team of experts and does not use AI to make the ranking assessments.
“There are many things in our day-to-day routine around health and nutrition that we can change proactively to support our health,” said company COO Nick Michlewicz. “People want to take charge of their health before something happens to them, and supplements are one of the tools for doing that. The supplement space was so primed for someone to create a system for users to approach it more holistically and effectively in a way that wasn’t available even five years ago, certainly not 10 years ago.”
Origins
Steve Martocci, SuppCo’s co-founder, had previous business success building GroupMe, a mobile group messaging app later sold to Microsoft.
Martocci’s idea for the SuppCo’s tracker was a more personal one, emerging from his own health journey. He was once over 300 pounds and struggled with his weight as a child.
In his late 20s, Martocci started to transform his health with the help of a functional medicine doctor. He built what he called a “serious supplement stack” and started using peptides and some medications. He was able to transform his health through a preventative approach, including supplements.
However, Martocci and Michlewicz were often frustrated trying to navigate and organize supplement information.
“I’ve been sharing my own supplement stack through super rigorous, detailed spreadsheets and word docs and all kinds of formats with friends over the years,” Michlewicz said. “And there’s constantly this moment, every time I did it, that I was like, ‘There’s got to be a better way than this.’”
Martocci and Michlewicz set out to fix their cumbersome processes of ranking supplements.
“It was part of my personal motivation for building SuppCo to make it easier for my friends, my family, users out there to tell quality apart from a lot of the kind of marketing claims and social media misinformation in the industry,” Michlewicz said.
Late last year, SuppCo secured $5.5 million in funding led by Union Square Ventures and True Ventures, to advance development of its supplement tracker.
How it works
Dr. Jordan Glenn, the company’s head of science, said the tracker asks health goals of users and what medications they are taking. Next, users scan the bar code of a supplement they want to take.
“Am I even taking the right product for my goal? The tracker is going to help me really optimize my whole process,” Dr. Glenn said. “I may be taking a product that doesn’t have the right cGMP or the third-party CoA.”
He added that the app gives users educational autonomy to understand exactly where they are and then can make decisions on how to optimize health goals. The highest rank a supplement can receive is a trust score of 10 and should be certified by organizations like NSF, Dr. Glenn said.
Michlewicz noted that SuppCo is interested in exposing consumers not to a specific supplement brand but to the right nutrients and protocols.
“Our goal is to help you find any nutrient, any product that fulfills that nutrient recommendation,” he said.
SuppCo’s leadership also prides itself in having one of the largest dosing databases, which it uses to make supplement recommendations, Dr. Glenn added.
The company’s database is compiled cross-referencing dosing information from sources like the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health, then comparing it with the dosing instructions found on supplement labels.
“Our platform will continue to evolve depending on how the science does and the field evolves,” Dr. Glenn said.
