Why We Built Momentous

A Note From Our Founder

When I was in high school, I was blessed with the rare opportunity to go inside an NFL locker room. As a competitive athlete myself, I was curious to see what the players were eating and drinking after the game. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that the sports drinks and protein shakes I was used to seeing plastered across the sidelines were nowhere to be found.

Instead, in every player’s locker I saw supplements I’d never seen before, from brands I had never heard of. According to the coach I was with, these came from one of the few brands that the teams really trusted for supplements. I was shocked. He had essentially just admitted to me that the nutritional products professional athletes endorsed were almost never the products they actually used.

I had been making every effort as an athlete to sleep, eat and train like the pros, but in this category I truly felt deceived.

Upon diving deeper, I learned that the performance nutrition category as a whole continues to be dominated by the products whose names you’re familiar with: longstanding, low quality market leaders that find their way into the background of so many sideline photos.

Unfortunately, we are not using the statement “low-quality” lightly here. According to The Clean Label Project, 70% of the top 100 protein brands on Amazon.com last year tested positive for lead.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Lead.

So why do these products continue to dominate? Because we keep trying to tell each other “all protein powder is the same.”

This is not how we treat any other category in health and fitness, and it’s certainly not how we treat anything else we put in our bodies. As health-conscious consumers, we understand that at least to some extent, you get what you pay for. Sometimes we pay up for organic produce, sometimes for grass-fed meats or pasture-raised eggs, but with supplements the belief persists that all products are essentially the same and that you should just shop for the best deal.

Trying to buy a protein powder based solely on grams of protein per dollar is like trying to buy a car based solely on horsepower per dollar. It’s not an irrelevant measure, but if you’re trying to find a safe and effective product, it shouldn’t be your top priority.

The priority should be finding a product that wouldn’t set off a metal detector at the airport. My mission for this company is therefore quite simple:
I want to kill bad supplements.

We just want to make the highest quality product on the market, period. I believe if we are successful in this pursuit then the companies producing dangerous products are faced with two options: change their formulas, or lose their business.

Either option is a win for you and me.

Passionately,
Matt Wan,
Momentous Founder