The ‘creatinification’ of everything: Pioneer eyes bold future for sport nutrition’s hottest ingredient

“It’s a game changer,” said Steve Jennings, co-founder and CEO of Jenerise.

Jennings was speaking with NutraIngredients at the recent Vitafoods in Barcelona, a city of particular significance for creatine because this was where the ingredient burst onto the scene when a creatine-fueled British Olympic team walked away from the 1992 Games with a “basket of gold medals”. Jennings’ sports nutrition company Maxim was at the center of this story after being approached by legendary creatine researchers Roger Harris and Eric Hultman.

“[Creatine] was still in the world of science [prior to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992],” he said. “The story exploded here, and it basically brought creatine from being a compound that was completely unknown, it didn’t exist in the in the world of ingredients, and Barcelona put it onto the map in in almost a nanosecond. It went from being a product that nobody had heard of to a product that was being carried in the mainstream media.”

Thirty-three years later, and the science of creatine has come a long way.

“The research that’s currently being published, and it has been for the last three, four years, is really showing the need to create new versions of creatine that are more compatible with the needs of the mainstream consumer,” Jennings said. “Focusing on form factors and products that are aligned with convenience, big box grocery, something that my mom would use every day. It isn’t going to come with scooping powder and having a kind of a stack of supplements for the mainstream consumer. It’s got to be convenient. It’s got to be here and now. It’s got to taste amazing.”

The RTD opportunity

Where’s the white space, Jennings asked himself. “We saw that ready-to-drink beverages containing creatine don’t exist,” he said.

And that is for very good reason: In liquid, creatine converts to creatinine.

“The biggest challenge, and there have been many companies that have tried to solve this, is developing a technology that enables creatine to remain stable for a 24-month period,” Jennings said. “That’s the Holy Grail.”

Working with a nutrition biotech company, Jennings shared that they have discovered a technology that will lead them to this Promised Land.

“We’re close,” he said. “We knew there had to be a solution somewhere, and it was gonna probably come from a non-obvious piece of innovation that could be reverse engineered to, maybe not to solve the problem, but to approach the problem through a fundamentally different lens, and that’s what’s happened.”

Jennings explained that the real ambition is to see the entire creatine ecosystem grow.

“Okay, so for us, it’s important that, yes, we’re going to unlock RTD, but we’re going to enable other companies to leverage our technology to grow the RTD category,” he said. “You can’t be in a category of one, right? It’s not possible. You need other companies in that category that are going to innovate with your core IP and take it to places that you can’t see.”

‘The biggest market is people that are everyday people on a health span journey’

According to Jennings, the potential demand for a creatine RTD could be larger than the current powder market, and that would have an impact on the supply chain. Where would all that creatine come from?

“We want to see creatine go from 30 million people taking creatine a day right now [and] 10x that to 300 million,” he said. “To get it across the chasm, you need products that are going to unlock the consumer group that need it the most, which are actually not elite athletes and performance, people that want to perform in the gym or weekend warriors or people playing elite team sport. The biggest market are people that are everyday people on a healthspan journey that want to feel good, that want to have that youthful vitality, that want to experience ageless vitality, healthspan for as long as possible, people like my mum, yourself, your neighbor, your wife.

“I think our ambition, when we look at the way that protein has now fully crossed the chasm, and we now talk about the proteinification of everything, we believe that creatine has the potential to follow the same trajectory into the creatinification of everything.

“And I think that would be for me personally, if I can unlock that journey, I’ll feel as if it’s kind of job done to some extent, and then it’s up to others, plus our company, to then put wind into the sails of that journey, from where it is, across the chasm, into the mainstream.”

Watch the video for the full interview.