The black plastic tub of Frozen Bombsicle Ultimate Shred was taunting me again. I am not, by disposition, a gym-powder guy. I have spent most of my adult life mixing nothing more exotic into my water bottle than the water itself. But at my age, it\u2019s harder to get the same results from the kind of exercise I got twenty years ago. The idea of a preworkout boost sounded great.<\/p>\n
I was hoping to benefit from ingredients such as CaloriBurn, an extract from a pungent West African spice known as\u00a0grains of\u00a0paradise,\u00a0and\u00a0Oligonol, an antioxidant blend made from lychee extract\u2014both of which have been shown to help the body burn off stubborn belly fat. I was curious about the \u201cAI-powered peptides\u201d mentioned on the label, a\u00a0trademarked\u00a0blend\u00a0known as PeptiPump that promotes blood flow to keep you feeling, well, pumped.<\/p>\n
Alas, I\u2019d already had my standard two cups of coffee, and throwing down another\u00a0three hundred\u00a0milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of three\u00a0to four more cups of joe, felt like it would stress my 52-year-old heart a little too much right before a sustained period of strenuous exercise. I also felt a little intimidated. The powder\u2019s branding performs the labeling equivalent of a bouncer\u2019s job, ushering in the hardcore muscle crowd and scaring off normies like me.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the same company\u00a0sells\u00a0gentler stuff, and I loaded up on that instead\u2014an electrolyte mix, a scoop of creatine, a daily greens powder I stirred in for good measure. The maker: an Austin-based outfit called Nutrabolt.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If the name doesn\u2019t ring a bell, that\u2019s because it\u2019s a parent company better known for the brands underneath it: C4, which produces a line of energy sodas that compete with Red Bull and Monster and muscle-building powders like Ultimate Shred; Cellucor, which sells other performance supplements, including creatine and testosterone boosters; and XTEND, which offers still more tubs of powder, these with an emphasis on recovery.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still not ringing a bell? Do you even lift? As of last year, Nutrabolt is also the\u00a0majority owner\u00a0of Bloom Nutrition, a\u00a0pastel-branded\u00a0sodas-and-supplements brand aimed at young women, whose products have been impossible to miss during the past couple of years at Target or on Instagram and TikTok. Teen girls are obsessed.<\/p>\n
All told, Nutrabolt hauled in more than a billion dollars in revenue last year. To put that in perspective, consider that two of the biggest headline-grabbing triumphs of Austin\u2019s booming food-and-beverage industry\u2014the Mexican-food brand Siete and the\u00a0trendy soda company Poppi<\/a>\u2014each had about half the sales of Nutrabolt when PepsiCo spent billions acquiring them both\u00a0last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Behind Nutrabolt\u2019s rise is a clean-cut\u00a043-year-old Texas A&M grad named Doss Cunningham, who pitched in at a struggling start-up while he was still in college, took the thing over, and spent the next twenty years building it up. Today, with wellness a national religion and energy drinks crowding out everything else in the gas station beverage cooler, Nutrabolt faces an opportunity to vault from a niche player to a supermarket juggernaut.<\/p>\n The company almost failed before it ever really got started. A native of Austin, Cunningham went to A&M to be an engineer, switched to\u00a0finance, and by 2003 was nearing the end of the five-year accounting program that funnels Aggies into the Big Four accounting firms. He\u2019d interned at one of them, Deloitte, and had an offer in hand. Then, as he puts it, \u201clife changed\u201d when he met Poul Bodholt, the cofounder of a supplement retailer in the College Station area called Nutritec. Cunningham\u2019s roommate had taken a job working for Bodholt and invited the boss over for a barbecue.<\/p>\n About a decade older and deep into\u00a0bodybuilding culture<\/a>, Bodholt had watched his business get crushed even as the supplement industry was taking off. Walmart and various online discounters were undercutting everyone else on price. To counter that, Bodholt had launched a new company that made a supplement brand, Cellucor, that tried to justify higher prices by using premium ingredients. He was, in Cunningham\u2019s words, \u201ca big dreamer\u201d who wanted to \u201ctake over the world,\u201d but he lacked financial discipline. After Cunningham agreed to do a little freelance bookkeeping, he discovered the company would be insolvent in a matter of months\u2014and he got obsessed with trying to solve the problem.<\/p>\n Fifteen hours a week working for Bodholt became forty, then eighty. He stopped going to class, kept his degree alive on the goodwill of professors, and set about making some basic changes. Chief among them:\u00a0Salespeople would earn commissions not when sales were\u00a0booked but when the customers actually paid. That addressed much of the cash\u00a0flow issue because it incentivized the sales team to extract money from clients rather than just sign contracts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cunningham rose from weekend fixer to the\u00a0guy\u00a0running the company, and in 2007 he bought out Bodholt. About a decade later, he turned Cellucor\u2019s powders into a carbonated energy drink called C4, which vaulted the company from the shelves of GNC to grocery and gas\u00a0station coolers nationwide.<\/p>\n Energy drinks had long offered blasts of sugar and caffeine. They were basically soda on steroids. But C4 was at the forefront of a new wave of zero-sugar options\u2014alongside fast-growing rivals like Celsius\u2014that pitched active health benefits instead of just a jittery buzz. It was a shift that mirrored Austin\u2019s rapid emergence as a capital of wellness culture and better-for-you grocery products. Keurig Dr Pepper, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Frisco,\u00a0wrote an $863 million check for a 30 percent stake in Nutrabolt at the end of 2022 and plugged C4 into its sprawling delivery network, completing Cunningham\u2019s transformation of the company from a dying specialty brand into a supermarket staple.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the market expanded, a stark realization set in. Energy drink consumption had been an overwhelmingly male pastime for most of its history, but the industry was changing. Celsius, with its gender-neutral, everyday-lifestyle branding, was picking up female consumers. Then came a wave of pastel-hued, explicitly female-coded upstarts like Alani Nu that proved women wanted energy drinks too\u2014they just didn\u2019t want the aggressive, bouncer-at-the-door branding. Nutrabolt was leaving half the market on the table. \u201cThe female consumer had been woefully underrepresented,\u201d Cunningham says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t because she didn\u2019t consume caffeine or didn\u2019t have the same energy needs as men. It\u2019s because the brands didn\u2019t identify that way.\u201d<\/p>\n If Cunningham wanted more women as customers without diluting C4\u2019s appeal to men seeking high-octane gym performance, he couldn\u2019t just launch a line of pink cans. He needed a partner\u2014a brand that already possessed undeniable cred among women.\u00a0<\/p>\n LFG,\u201d it says in big yellow letters in the center of a wall of quotes exhorting effort and ambition at Nutrabolt headquarters. That\u2019s shorthand for \u201cLet\u2019s F\u2014ing Go,\u201d in case you don\u2019t spend a lot of time in locker rooms. \u201cRise & Grind.\u201d \u201cExecute.\u201d \u201cHustle.\u201d The quotes sprawl across a long wall like a start-up-culture word cloud. \u201cIf your dreams don\u2019t scare you, they\u2019re not big enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Nutrabolt\u2019s custom-built 75,000-square-foot office building, perched atop a hill in the Westlake area of\u00a0Austin, presents like a temple of hustle culture, with black glass and matte-black siding, a cluster of black SUVs in the parking lot, and a\u00a0forty-yard football field just beyond that.\u00a0Inside, a few offseason professional athletes grind through their workouts in a cavernous black weight room opposite the quote wall. There\u2019s a boxing ring, a basketball court surrounded by graffiti murals, a complex of wellness and recovery rooms offering\u00a0cold plunges, red-light therapy,\u00a0saunas, and a hyperbaric chamber.\u00a0Oh, and upstairs: the corporate cubicle farm and executive suite where actual business happens.\u00a0<\/p>\n For all of Nutrabolt\u2019s thundering swagger, the man who built the company\u00a0keeps\u00a0a low profile. He\u2019s all-American handsome and almost soft-spoken as he explains his ambition in measured terms. Cunningham has never once posted on Instagram and fiercely protects the privacy of his wife and young kids. \u201cNo one knows who I am,\u201d he says. \u201cI try to stay out of the headlines.\u201d When Nutrabolt crossed a billion dollars in annual sales, the company didn\u2019t throw a party. \u201cWe held a town hall, acknowledged the milestone, then just kind of got back to work. It wasn\u2019t a reason to stop moving forward. So\u00a0now we\u2019re moving the business to two billion.\u201d<\/p>\n As recently as early 2024, when Nutrabolt made its first investment in Bloom, it wasn\u2019t clear that billions would be on the horizon quite so suddenly. Bloom founders Greg LaVecchia and Mari Llewellyn, a\u00a0married couple,\u00a0had spent five years cultivating exactly the audience Cunningham needed.\u00a0Llewellyn\u00a0had built a following as a social\u00a0media influencer documenting her weight-loss and health journey, and\u00a0LaVecchia\u00a0helped turn that crowd into customers for a line of powders and supplements. But they had struggled to line up funding to expand into beverages. Cunningham offered to buy into the business and partner on drinks.<\/p>\n A quick side note here: As\u00a0documented extensively<\/a>\u00a0on his Instagram feed, LaVecchia has almost comically sculpted six-pack abs, the kind of triangular neck-to-shoulders transition that can damage a\u00a0T-shirt collar, and an easy smile. The combination\u00a0makes it seem\u00a0as if he was\u00a0specifically engineered by the algorithm to sell wellness, like\u00a0a\u00a0photoshopped embodiment of the lifestyle\u2014and a stark contrast to Cunningham, who says Nutrabolt has been sharpening its social media game thanks to Bloom\u2019s example.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nutrabolt bought 20 percent of Bloom for $50 million. Six months after the deal, Bloom\u00a0energy drinks had landed on Target shelves nationwide, lightning\u00a0fast for a national launch of an entirely new product line. Where C4 promised sports performance, Bloom leaned into everyday wellness, pairing caffeine with prebiotic fiber and apple cider vinegar to create something that felt as indebted to another Austin fizzy-drink company,\u00a0Poppi, as to the traditional energy\u00a0drink aisle. (Bloom later introduced a second line, Bloom Pop, without\u00a0caffeine that competes more directly with Poppi in the so-called better-for-you soda category.)\u00a0Almost immediately, it was clear the\u00a0brand\u00a0had struck a vein. Within roughly two years, Bloom has produced\u00a0some 500 million cans<\/a>\u00a0of its energy drink, at an average sales price of roughly\u00a0$2 per can. The success prompted Nutrabolt to buy a controlling share of Bloom.<\/p>\n As of early 2026, sales of energy drinks have catapulted past bottled-water sales to take over the number two spot among sales of nonalcoholic packaged beverages, with\u00a0nearly $25 billion<\/a>\u00a0in the preceding\u00a0year. Only traditional sodas sell more than energy drinks, about $30 billion over the same period, but sales of those have flatlined. Wall Street has noticed the growth in energy, and the larger players have been consolidating.\u00a0Celsius spent $1.8 billion acquiring rival Alani Nu last year, not long after Keurig Dr Pepper bought a majority stake in Ghost. Monster owns a whole suite of niche brands with names like Bang, Burn, Full Throttle, and Predator.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cunningham is thinking bigger than that. He talks not of building the next big energy\u00a0drink group but rather of a loftier vision: what he calls \u201cthe P&G of health and wellness,\u201d a reference to Procter & Gamble, the consumer\u00a0goods giant that owns dozens of separate, category-leading brands, from Tide to Pampers to Gillette. Cunningham sees room for Nutrabolt products centered on cognition, hydration, relaxation, coffee, and other corners of the wellness economy.<\/p>\n In May, the company announced it had\u00a0hired a\u00a0veteran consumer goods\u00a0executive\u00a0with experience at\u00a0the Hershey Company and Keurig Dr Pepper as president and COO. In\u00a0late June, news leaked\u00a0to Reuters<\/a>\u00a0that Nutrabolt had hired JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America to prepare a possible initial public offering that could raise as much as $1 billion. \u201cNutrabolt does not comment on the accuracy of reports regarding potential IPO plans or other market speculation,\u201d a spokesperson told me when I asked about the report.<\/p>\n But just a few days before the news, Cunningham had been less ambiguous when I asked whether the company\u2019s future lay in an IPO. He explained that in a perfect world, he\u2019d keep the company privately held forever, but going public would give him more resources for acquiring more businesses. \u201cI could see us being a public company,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re ready to be a public company.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Okay, okay, they\u2019re printing money. But supplements are a notoriously snake\u00a0oil\u2013y industry, and no company demonstrates better than Nutrabolt how the supplements industry and beverages are colliding. Which raises the question,\u00a0Does any of the stuff work?\u00a0<\/p>\n A couple of floors down from Cunningham\u2019s office is the lab run by Nutrabolt\u2019s vice president of scientific affairs, the former editor in chief of\u00a0Muscle & Fitness\u00a0magazine with a doctorate in exercise physiology, Chris Lockwood. Inside is a wireless EMG system that reads how hard a person\u2019s muscles are firing, a DEXA scanner paired with a body-composition device that maps how much of you is water versus muscle, and a dynamometer bolted to the floor to measure force. Lockwood, who has a spiky buzz cut and wears a black polo with the word\u00a0\u201cBoom\u201d\u00a0on the breast, compares that last machine to one used by Sylvester Stallone\u2019s Russian opponent in the training sequence from\u00a0Rocky IV. \u201cRemember when Ivan Drago is doing the high-tech stuff and Rocky\u2019s out there in the snow? That\u2019s what this is.\u201d<\/p>\n All of this equipment exists to test how Nutrabolt\u2019s products affect people\u2019s exercise and results. The company also funds research at several universities, including Auburn, Iowa, Nebraska, and Tarleton State\u2014often to back up efficacy claims based on Lockwood\u2019s internal research. Lockwood is careful to note the studies go through each school\u2019s own institutional review board and that anything headed for publication gets cowritten by an outside coauthor. \u201cI get so much conflict\u00a0of\u00a0interest criticism,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Nutrabolt makes countless variations of its products, with varying strengths and combinations of ingredients, and they\u2019re frequently\u00a0updated\u2014and Lockwood admits not every one of them gets a full study. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of a dance with me and product development and the brand teams,\u201d he says. Usually\u00a0a full review\u00a0happens only if a product contains a new ingredient or involves a marketing claim the brand wants to push.<\/p>\n C4 Alpha Bomb, a powder that comes in a bomb-shaped canister, got a study before it was released last\u00a0May. Marketed as \u201cthe highest-stim pre-workout in C4 history,\u201d the product is built around an ingredient called Deura9 caffeine, which claims to provide\u00a0longer-lasting energy. The powder\u2019s caffeine load totals 336 milligrams per serving\u2014a bit shy of the FDA\u2019s 400-milligram safe daily caffeine intake recommendation.\u00a0Lockwood ran a three-week study using eighteen personal trainers and military veterans to measure Alpha Bomb\u2019s effect. My tub of Ultimate Shred got no such treatment.<\/p>\n The company likes to point out that a few of its products, including a couple of canned sodas and some powders, carry a third-party validation called\u00a0NSF Certified for Sport\u2014which sounds like a way to say they\u2019re effective but really just means they\u2019re free of substances banned from competition and adhere to certain manufacturing standards. (A can of Coke Zero\u00a0could theoretically be NSF Certified for Sport if Coca-Cola wanted to go through the administrative hassle involved.) Alas, my Ultimate Shred lacks this qualification, thanks to several stimulants it contains, such as a root-bark extract called\u00a0Rauwolfia vomitoria\u00a0(the FDA has concerns about it causing irregular heartbeat and seizures).<\/p>\n The independent science on such heavy stimulant formulations is more cautious than corporate marketing departments like to admit. Experts generally agree that caffeine is an effective performance booster\u2014but slamming massive doses of it right before a workout introduces genuine cardiac risk. Dr. John Higgins, a sports cardiologist at\u00a0UTHealth\u2019s McGovern Medical School, in Houston, who also works with the Houston Rockets and Rice University Athletics, has spent years researching energy drinks. When it comes to the cocktail of secondary ingredients floating alongside the caffeine, he is skeptical. \u201cEvidence to substantiate claims that ingredients other than caffeine contribute to performance enhancement is minimal,\u201d notes\u00a0a study Higgins led<\/a>\u00a0for the American College of Sports Medicine. Isolating the impacts of those extra stimulants is a source of frustration for independent labs, largely because the products combine so many different ingredients in different ways and, especially in the case of canned drinks, provide little to no dosing information on their labels.\u00a0<\/p>\n At Nutrabolt, the formulations themselves are the work of Frank DiLorenzo, the VP of product development, a nutritionist and former high school power lifter whose lab, just upstairs from Lockwood\u2019s, is a clutter of jars of ingredients ranging from peptide solutions to flavorings. On this day, he\u2019s been busy ensuring that a new batch of rose-hued Bloom gummies comes out a more consistent color. Much of his work centers on \u201csensory\u201d elements, the most obvious being taste. And one thing to know about the taste of most of these products:\u00a0They\u2019re\u00a0extremely sweet. Caffeine alone is bitter, and amino acids can carry a sour or salty edge, so a big sweet flavor is largely there to cover what\u2019s underneath it, DiLorenzo explains. Also, sweet stuff sells.<\/p>\n Appealing to mass-market tastes is, of course, a constant balancing act with maximizing shred for the muscle crowd. Canned C4 was reformulated this year, for instance, after the company concluded that too many first-time users were freaked out by its signature side effect: a pins\u00a0and\u00a0needles tingle across the skin and scalp caused by the amino acid beta-alanine. The tingle, known as paresthesia, is harmless, but Cunningham told me that the people who try C4 and don\u2019t come back because of the tingle outnumber those who value the beta-alanine, which is meant to reduce the muscle-burn feeling after a workout. The amount of beta-alanine per can, widely reported to be 1.6 grams, is being dropped by more than half\u2014enough of a cut that the new dose is\u00a0likely too small to do much of anything. C4 powders, meanwhile, still carry several grams of the stuff. Those products are more geared to the hardcore users anyway.<\/p>\n The new drink formulation is more consistent with how the product is actually being used, it turns out. Cunningham told me roughly 70 percent of canned C4 sales happen at convenience stores, clustered around two times of day: early morning and around four or five in the afternoon, when tradespeople are grabbing a can on the way to or from a shift. It\u2019s less a gym product than a commuter one\u2014a replacement for coffee or a Big Gulp.<\/p>\n From Cunningham\u2019s desk, he can see the mansion-studded hills of Westlake, Italianate villas and white modern boxes that keep the best views for the few and fortunate. It\u2019s not the Austin he grew up in. Nor is the crowd at the C4 Performance Center gym, where the non\u2013staff members are an invite-only crew of elite athletes and friends of the owner.<\/p>\n![\"Nutrabolt](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/nutrabolt-doss-cunningham.jpg\")
Nutrabolt CEO Doss Cunningham.Courtesy of Nutrabolt<\/p>\n![\"Nutrabolt](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/nutrabolt-gym.jpg\")
A gym at Nutrabolt\u2019s headquarters. Courtesy of Nutrabolt ![\"Nutrabolt](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/nutrabolt-hq-aerial.jpg\")
An aerial view of Nutrabolt\u2019s office building, in the Westlake area of Austin. Courtesy of Nutrabolt <\/p>\n