The biggest decision any business can make is starting- and meaning it. On this 153rd episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Doug Smith, founder of True Nutrition. In the space of dietary supplements there’s no shortage of companies, but there’s a massive difference between the companies that are in it for a quick buck and those who truly care about their customers and the products they offer.

In this episode, Doug dives into the reason why some health supplement brands crash and burn- while others thrive. True Nutrition has established itself as a brand that’s key ingredient is thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness in the ingredients they include, thoughtfulness in their clients unique needs, and thoughtfulness about who they are as a brand… if you're ready to listen in on some amazing insights, sit down and tune into this week's E-Comm Show.Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

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The Truth About the Health Supplement Industry with True Nutrition

Andrew Maff and Doug Smith

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Doug Smith

Douglas Smith is a worldwide adventurer and entrepreneur. Doug has circled the globe - from the North Pole to the South Pole - hiking, mountain climbing, skiing, surfing....even meditating with monks in South East Asia. He thrives on knowledge, especially when it comes to health and the undefined-ever changing landscape of nutrition, longevity and pushing physical limits. Doug's passion and personal experience suffering from the negative effects of poor nutrition, fueled him to create his own wellness empire.  As Co-Founder/CEO of True Nutrition - one of the only companies on the globe that allows fully customizable dietary supplement and food powders - Doug supplies high-quality, sustainable, and affordable nutrition to the masses.  He is proud to have kept the ethos of quality, transparency and validity of all his companies' products from the start of business back in 2003. The headquarters is also 100% solar powered and sustainably driven.  In 2018, Doug achieved a Guinness World Record for the world's largest container of protein powder, with proceeds going to benefit the Challenged Athletes Foundation (CAF). Doug continues to educate people on the largely untapped and immense potential of proper nutrition, physical movements and mental health. He is a frequent contributor to wellness publications including SHAPE, Men's Health, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, Elephant Journal and Reader's Digest. Doug's mission is to keep positive, as tomorrow will be his best day.

00:03

Ultimately, we always see the market as 55th half of the market is really a lot of smoke and mirrors, and unfortunately they give the whole industry a bad name. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm show as usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I'm joined by the amazing Doug Smith, who is the CEO and co founder over at True Nutrition. Doug, how you doing, buddy? Ready for good show?

01:17

I am. I appreciate the intro and great to do this.

01:23

Yeah, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Nutrition is a crazy space. It's always very interesting to talk about different brands and how they're doing what they're doing. So I do obviously want to get into that, but I always like to start off with kind of that stereotypical approach, and just kind of let you tell us a little bit about your background. You know, where you've been, where you start, where you got started with true nutrition. We'll take

01:45

it from there. Okay, yeah, so I guess the story goes in the early 2000s when Amazon only sold books, and everybody was crazy to put their credit card online, we started a company called trueprotein.com and the story goes, I literally, I was just out of college. I was completely broke, but I had this idea, so I wrote this business plan, which is 20 it's hanging on my wall right now, 22 years later, and I borrowed $29 from my cousin on his credit card to buy the URL trueprotein.com and you know, you're young. I was in my early 20s, and I basically beg, borrow and stole to get it started. So essentially, you know, I, you know, ultimately, didn't have any money, but I found two brothers on Craigslist to build a website, and they quoted me $2,600 which I laugh at, you know, you spend more than that in the day. And basically told them, like, Well, I'm not going to give you 2600 I'm going to give you, you know, 5200 and I can't pay you for six months. And they were like, Okay, sounds a good deal. And then same thing with vendors buying, like, raw materials. It was like, Well, what's your truckload price, and they're like, well, it's this. I'm like, Okay, well, I only need a pallet of it, and I'm gonna need you to give me net 90 terms. And you know, 90% of the time people laughed at me or hung up on me, but I was pretty persistent. Had nothing to lose. And eventually, I think people were just annoyed, and they were like, That's fine. Just give me the address. We'll send you a path, you know, and that's essentially how we started, and the rest is kind of history, how it's, you know, traversed and done different things over the years,

03:28

yeah, so what made you get into this space? Um,

03:33

I think for myself, first and foremost, like, you know, I was a normal kid, an active kid. I wasn't necessarily, like, big into sports or or anything like that. But I think my freshman year of Penn State, let's just say I put on the freshman 15 times two, and I realized like, oh, you diet does matter, and you need to be active, and not just, you know, partying with your friends. And you know, the very friends that I was getting trouble in and drinking too much partying, they introduced me to the gym, and that was my new drug. I fell in love with it right away, like I felt so good. And basically changed my major from business management to kinesiology, and I was just really interested in the human body and biology and whatnot. So essentially, coming out of college, I was, uh, I guess, quote, unquote, a meathead. You know, I was the guy that had the five pound jug of protein on top of my garage. And, you know, essentially, I was a protein user. And I didn't, you know, I started to get really intricate with like ingredients, and I noticed all these ingredients that I didn't like in my product, but I didn't have a choice. So the reality is, like I had to, um, I wanted to create something where I could just, you know, get the protein and just the flavor and just a sweetener, not all these other additives and whatnot. So that's where the idea of, you know, true protein.com now, truenutrition.com um, came about, um. It was essentially just to, you know, it was selfishness at first. And you know, along the way of that whole thing, I found my business partner who I knew, who I found online, and, like, a message, you know, a message board. And, um, he was kind of famous in the bodybuilding industry and in the fitness industry. And, you know, we met and we had lunch, and four or five hours later, um, we were business partners, and that's kind of how we started,

05:25

wow, so you jumped right into it after pretty much a quick conversation.

05:30

Yeah, you know, it was one of those things where it was like, Hey, we're on our path here. And, um, I remember I had, like, a an epiphynic moment, you know, I was selling car wash chemicals, funny enough. And I remember I was just like, I don't, I don't know if this is right, but I remember, like, driving down the road, and I was going to, like, one of our clients a car wash. And I remember I called my boss. It was kind of an out of body experience. I picked up the phone, I was like, Hey, I got to give me two weeks. And he was like, shocked. He's like, why? And I'm like, I just can't do this anymore. And I remember, while I'm talking to him, and he basically was like, okay, that's fine, you know, we'll have to get your stuff. I'm calling him on the phone that was given to me and the car that they provided to me. And I remember I drove home and I went and this is when we had floppy disks. And, you know, physical resumes, throwback, tore up my resume, and I remember destroying the floppy disk, and I was like, I can't work for anybody ever again. I have to at least try this, um, and that's, yeah, so it was kind of, uh, that moment, you know,

06:31

wow. So one of the things I'm super curious about, so the nutrition space is very interesting. And the nutrition space for fitness, gym type nutrition, like, you know, your pre workouts, post workouts, protein, etc, is a whole nother beast as well, just because it tends to, at least in my opinion, from what I've seen, because we've worked with a lot of these types of brands, and they it's kind of like a trend, more or less, like some of them, they just have cool packaging, and they're like, Oh, you got to use this. And then, like, a year later, they change the packaging, and now they're just a different brand yours. That's obviously not the case. You've been around forever. What? What do you see as kind of the true differentiator from your brand, true nutrition, versus these guys that are just kind of hopping on, like, cool graphics? Yeah.

07:16

Ultimately, we always see the market as 5050, half of the market is really a lot of smoke and mirrors, and unfortunately, they give the whole industry a bad name, you know, to dietary supplements, really like snake oil. You have half of it where it's people that the ethos isn't about helping people, or, you know, somebody wants to jump higher or get bigger in the gym, or warding off some type of disease or some health, you know, crisis, they're happening. It's really about making money. And the problem is, when you just try to do anything just to make money, you have these pump and dump scenarios where, you know, there's a buzzy supplement, somebody will create something that's flashy, they'll make a bunch of money for a year or two, and then they just go, you know, defunct, because the FDA shuts them down, or something else. And then the other half is essentially, there's a lot of good companies out there, and they really do care, and they're following the rules and testing their ingredients and everything. You know, we like those companies, even though they're like competition to the overall health of like, you know, let's at least say the Western world, which is suffering. We're here to help. So I think in you know, our company, you know, true nutrition, how it differs from, let's just say the good guys is the sheer fact that everything we do is customizable. So we're kind of this weird company where, you know, you don't have to just buy, hey, this is our product. You know, we have hundreds of different ingredients that you can mix and match in any percentage and package it anyway, flavor in any way, sweeten it anyway, because a lot of people, they have very specifics that are vegan, well, they can't have these things, you know, they're gluten intolerant. They can't have these certain things. So, you know, a lot of people, similar to myself, there were certain things I definitely wanted, but a lot of things I didn't want. And we're kind of that weird place to allow people to do that, not just pick something off the shelf. Yeah, you know, the one complication with that is, obviously people are always like, wow, that's a really cool idea. I can make something specific for myself. And then they come to the website and they're like, I'm not a food scientist. So we're creating, like aI right now, as well as a bunch of other things to help people along, to explain to them, Hey, what your goals are, who you are. We're even looking into like blood samples, saliva samples, DNA, a lot of wearables to see, to enter this data, to basically help people fast forward, a lot of learning of what they want. But you'd be surprised, a lot of people are like, you know, I'm really sensitive to these things. I don't want this in, you know, my product. Yeah,

09:47

it's really interesting. Because, like, I mean, I'm a user of, you know, protein pre workouts and all that same stuff. And every time I change, it's like a whole new process of trying to figure it out. Because, like, sometimes those pre workouts make you. Just want to die. And so, like, I It's funny that you say that, because I was thinking the same thing of, like, okay, a it sounds really cool to be able to make your own and really have an understanding of what's in the product, especially because, you know, the whole kind of, like, clean eating element is becoming a lot more important now, and a lot of people are looking at it, I should say, of knowing exactly what is in what they're ingesting. But to your point, I'm like, I have no idea what should and shouldn't be in that type of stuff. So I know, obviously you mentioned the AI capability is something you guys are working on and filling that out. But for where you're at currently, what's the process of, kind of educating the market on how to make those types of decisions? Yeah,

10:39

you know, ultimately, you know, every product we have obviously has a description and whatnot, and we do also have some pre made stuff, pre made formulas to basically, you can morph and do whatnot with. So we are helping people, you know, we have a true nutrition coach that is already in place. However, we are updating it with better AI. The problem is, with all these large language models, it is new. And just like you were saying, with nutrition, there are many ways to, quote, unquote, skin the cat. When somebody goes, well, I want to lose weight. What is the diet? I'm like, Well, I always will ask, what's the most sustainable? Because people are like, Well, I only like to eat fruits and vegetables. Well, I'm like, maybe you should be on a vegan diet. And other people are like, well, I don't like fruits and vegetables. Like, Well, maybe you should be on the carnivore diet. They all in one way or the other. Might obtain the certain goal you're looking for, but it's what is the most sustainable for yourself. So the reality is, you have to learn a little bit about yourself. You just can't go into it being like, well, I need a protein powder. And the first question should be like, Well, why do you need a protein powder? And a lot of people will know why they do. They're like, well, there's these specific reasons I heard about and whatnot. So yeah, we have things in place now to help people. But ultimately, you know, because of the free reign of what we allow people to do, they can get as, you know, scientific as they want, or if they do need help. You know, even for us, like we have a whole customer service team that are on the phone all day, every day, basically helping people, asking them questions. Well, what are your goals? You know, okay, you want to lose weight. Well, how much weight? What's your current diet? Which? What's your training looking like? What's your work and stress life? So there's a lot of things that go into it. Nutrition is one of those things. There is not a one size fits all. Unfortunately, I wish there was, but there's not, yeah,

12:32

what? Um, it's very interesting. So what? What's been like? The approach to get the business to its size? You're not a small business, you know, you're well into the eight figure size. And, you know, typically for brands that are, you know, especially in the nutrition space, there's a new one every couple hours. There's probably been three since you and I started talking. So, like, it's not that everyone starts them, they just house them, and it is what it is. So you've obviously broken through. You've gotten to a big, big size, comparatively to everyone else. What was the approach to kind of get it into the market and really start to get things moving,

13:04

yeah, our first approach, I mean, funny enough, we were on social media before it was called social media. We were on social media before there was a thing called, you know, MySpace, you know, it really was like message boards, AOL, chat rooms. You know, this is 20 some odd years ago, which is funny now, essentially, what we did was we showed what we had, and we always from the very beginning. Obviously, we're in business, so we're here to make a buck too. We gotta survive and eat. But ethos has never changed. Ethos has always been like, Hey, we're here to help somebody. And help is defined in different ways. Some help is the guy just wants to get jacked in the gym. The other help is like, Hey, I'm diabetes, like, type two diabetes, and I need to lose weight. So there's a whole spectrum. So as long as the ethos is like, Hey, you come at it first with helping somebody. And how you help somebody is obviously having information, but also having products that aren't garbage. There is a big expanse of good product and bad product. And the reality is, from the very beginning, you know, we're big. We have a first party lab in our facility. We also have a third we work with, like, six different third party labs. So everything that comes into our building, we test, we verify for purity, potency, identity, and then a new product that's made is obviously goes through that process again. So ultimately, you know, to have some success is ethos helps somebody, first and foremost, second, have a good product. Have something good yourself. Like, these are the obvious things. And I think over time, you know, instead of just trying to go, Hey, I need to sell 100 million dollars next month. Like, take it one by one by one, and making sure, like, you know, in business, you're always getting checked on things. You're like, oh, it's now changed, adjust those things to keep the eat those good product helping people. We've had that for, you know, almost 22 years now, and it's funny, it's been a grind. It's always a grind, and it's super competitive and kind. Throat. But I think when you have those things all of a sudden before you know it, you know, we were an early company where it was just two of us, you know, and now we have a, you know, 100 different employees. It just happens naturally, if you keep your eye on the ball of what it is. Now, granted, you can't give away stuff for free, you can't overcharge. You have to, obviously, be competitive, but there is space still in the industry, especially if you just have really good product eventually, over time, you know, if you go to like Google and search true protein or true nutrition, I mean, we have glowing reviews because of the ethos, like, we have good products. You know, somebody will get something, a flavor they don't like one time, but it's not a problem with the product. They're like, I just don't like chocolate, coconut,

15:43

yeah, yeah. What about in the places where the product is offered? Obviously, you've got the site customizable options, a lot of cool stuff being built out. But what about outside of that? Have you ventured into the marketplaces, retail, anywhere else that you're available? Yeah.

15:57

So you know, interesting enough, true protein, which merged into true nutrition, we have at the core of us, because of all the regulatory rules that change. You know, the FDA rules were very different in 2002 2003 there was no rules for dietary supplements. There were like rules for food, and then there was rules for like pharmaceuticals. So we were kind of in the middle of this weirdness. So in the process of us kind of being ahead of the curve of everything, we actually started a contract manufacturing company. So many of the products that true nutrition makes, obviously, we make them all ourself, but we also make many other products out there and many other brands. So the funny part is, a lot of the competition of true nutrition, we make their products too. So in a good note, well, if somebody wants to buy that, I guess we're still, we're still getting a part of it. But because of that, it helped us create, like an incubator of other companies. So you know, we always explore like, Hey, should we start this new brand? Because there's a hole in the market for it, and we've done that multiple times, where we've sold off the businesses and merged them into other things. So that's, that's kind of how things have evolved for us, like outside of, just like the brand of true nutrition, because the core of true nutrition is we're not just sitting in an office and having some three PL company, you know, ship products which most supplement companies. Most supplement companies don't make anything. They're just a marketing company. And we make the product. And the three PL and ships out the product. We're everything from start to finish. You know, we're a sourcing department. We source all the raw materials. We're actually doing the manufacturing. And when you do that for just one company, you see the opportunity to be able to do that for other companies, you know, your competition, or other other brands you want to start. So

17:52

how does that work? Is for the other brands that you're obviously creating their product for, are you is that partially you're getting, you know, a partial stake in their business as you're doing it. Or is it just a straight like, hey, they're just paying you to do this? Yeah,

18:06

nine times out of 10, it is usually just the relationship. They are a customer. They put their po in, we make their product, we put their label on it, we send it to them. You know, most the the unknown thing in the industry of just food in general. When you go to a grocery store and you see, like, this box of cereal and it says Kellogg's on it, they don't make it. We make it. Yeah, they're contract manufacturers, like nobody. It's very rare, I would say, less than 5% of least dietary supplements that actually make their own stuff. Even the large, big companies that have been around for 50 years. They don't actually make their stuff. They're really focused on business and marketing and branding, yeah. Um, so, yeah, that's what we've seen. And, you know, contract manufacturers, they're everywhere. I mean, because there's a lot of products out there, product needs to be found.

18:53

Yeah, yeah. What? Uh, what's the thought on what's next? You started off with protein. You've now gotten into, like, kind of a full suite of dietary supplements, where, and I know, obviously you mentioned the customization aspect of it, but is there anything else on where you're taking true nutrition? Yeah, I

19:08

think with true nutrition, we're, we're really progressive as it comes to, like, changing the dynamic of what it currently is. You know, the funny part is, we started e commerce, when nobody bought supplements online, I think, you know, I look at my original business plan, it was like 1.5% of purchase supplements, um, were online, and the rest were with stores and mail order and whatnot. And, you know, we kind of rode the wave of E commerce, blowing up and exploding in a weird way. Now, e Commerce has somewhat hesitated, if not gone down, except one company, Amazon, you know, Amazon or Tiktok shops. That is what has made ecommerce as a whole explode. So it's been interesting to see, like a lot of products now, at least with dietary supplements, are sold on Amazon. You know, the one issue for us. Is all of our products are our custom so it's tough to do that through, you know, a platform like Amazon. So for us, you know, we're sticking to our guns of what we're doing. You know, we're on Amazon as well, because there's some products you can't customize, like, let's just say, you know, 500 grams of creatine bond hybrid or something like that. So we do, we are on Amazon. But I think what we're our real focus is now our biggest hole that we've had, you know, 20 plus years, is there isn't many people that are like, that's just not a good idea. They love the fact they can mix, if they're a dietary supplement user, and you can mix something for your own stacks. They love that. The complicated part is, hey, I'm not a food scientist or a dietary supplement scientist, how do I get this done? So we're really putting a lot of time and energy into AI, you know, and also input that you can put into our system and app, and then, you know, output that comes from, like I said, you know, wearables to, if you have, you know, 23 of me data to be able to enter that indoor system to better focus people into what they want, and have, like, a, you know, a questionnaire of, well, what are your goals? Because a lot of people's goals are different. There's dietary goals change on what you're trying to do. If you're like, Hey, I'm trying to run my first marathon, it's going to change your goals. Then I'm just trying to lose weight. They're similar,

21:20

yeah. Yeah. What about from an operational aspect? I mean, if you're taking in all the customization of it like it's kind of a little bit more difficult to judge what's going to get used more often, obviously, you know, map out trends and stuff. But I would imagine that that's probably not easy to maintain from an operational perspective. I'll

21:39

say this is complicated. You know, it's taking over two decades to basically everything we do internally, like, when you see our website, people are like, Oh, your website's very pretty. I'm like, you're only seeing 1% of it. The 99% is the stuff you don't see. All the databases that are working together to be like, FDA compliant, you know, to then have it easily order processed and then our actual processing, you know, outside of the website, component, the technology that's involved with all the equipment and machines, because when we mix something, there can't be any cross contamination between materials, and when you have hundreds of different materials, it becomes complicated. So for us, everything we've done, we've never had to pick some type of equipment or machinery or software off the shelf. We always have to buy something and then hack it and then beat it and change it to what our needs are. So that has been complicated. But I will say this from a scalability standpoint, our system that we have in place, although every month year, it does evolve to become more efficient. It's pretty much set and it works. And it's, you know, if we were going to, like, 2x or 5x it's very clear on what we'd have to do internally. To do that, it means bigger buildings. We just purchased a building across the street. So we are growing and expanding. And every time we grow and expand, we're always like, wow, we're never going to use this. And then six months later, we're like, we're running out of stuff, but it's a good

23:09

problem. Yeah? Awesome. Doug, super appreciate. If I don't want to take up too much your time, I know you're super busy. I'd love to give you the opportunity here let everyone know they can find out more about you, and of course, more about true nutrition. Yeah,

23:21

so I mean, on all the socials, you can find true nutrition everywhere. Myself, I'm the Doug Smith on on Instagram. However,

23:32

I'm easy to find.

23:33

I go on it maybe once a week. I'm not too socially, kind of, for some weird reason, I've grown out of it, however, business wise, we have a whole team of people that do a ton of stuff every day. So yeah, I

23:47

bet awesome. Doug, appreciate you having on the show. Everyone who tuned in, of course, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff, whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes, but as usual, thank you all for joining us. See you all next time.

24:08

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