Today, we get to take a look at the current state of 5% Nutrition. Of course, when anyone thinks of 5% Nutrition, they think of Rich Piana. Of course, we all know what happened several years ago, and many thought that his popular supplement brand would go away as well. Well, 5% is still alive and kicking, and the continue to make new products. From the looks of it, 5% is here to stay, and for that reason, we asked the current owner some questions on the brand.
5% Nutrition: Life After Rich
What is the mission of the brand?
Rich Piana and 5% Nutrition, two names that have become synonymous in the sports nutrition world for hardcore performance. In the words of Rich, the “5% represents those of us [who] are willing to give whatever it takes to reach their goals.”
Rich has been an inspiration to untold millions throughout his time as a bodybuilder and later as a motivational figure. The allure of Rich’s message is concise, powerful, and everlasting; give everything you have and anything that is required to reach your goals. Along the way, he gave adoring “Rich” fans a front-row seat to the main event: his everyday life. In the process, Rich amassed millions of YouTube and social media followers and became one of the first significant influencers of the bodybuilding industry.
Followers of Rich soon became accustomed to frequent motivational messages, mantras, workout techniques, nutrition, and meal preparation, plus a bevy of social commentary. The most recognizable aspect of his lifestyle, living the “5%ER mentality,” became the foundation of this company, 5% Nutrition. But where his followers really latched on was Rich’s propensity to speak the truth. Uncut, unfiltered, unadulterated. Rather than bullshit anyone with a story of how steroids were not involved in his time as a competitor and weightlifter, he put everything out on Front Street. This only improved his likeability online, even if the cadre of haters from within the bodybuilding community began to voice their displeasure of revealing the secrets behind the sport.
Since the founding of 5% Nutrition, Rich Piana has had the support of a loyal social media following, plus an entire back office team. He knew what he did not know and wisely partnered with experts in the field of sports nutrition and bodybuilding supplements, hiring industry experts, tapping consultants for their honest product feedback.
We are and will always remain a brand defined by the support of our 5% family. We are nothing if not a group of individuals, united around the desire to rise above the mundane, overcome the excuses and challenges presented to us, and yet achieve for each of us what amounts to individual success, in the gym, and in life. Together, we are the family that makes up 5% Nation.
How does 5% carry on the tradition?
We live and work each day in the vision of how Rich would approach things. We honor his legacy by keeping his content and his message alive to millions of followers. To keep us focused, we live each day with the understanding that someone met Rich for the first time today. That individual has connected with Rich’s online content and begin to understand the truth behind the message of what Rich Piana lived for; they have joined and adopted the lifestyle of the 5%ER and will return as often as needed for inspiration and continued motivation. Rich never said his way of the world would be easy, rather just the opposite. So when that new 5%ER is born, Rich is alive with them. In practice, it could be months or even years before some realize Rich has passed away. That’s how powerful his message has been for countless folks around the world.
We at 5% Nutrition have a duty and an honor to uphold the legacy of Rich. While we must remain focused on running a supplements and lifestyle apparel business, we push forward with the big man looking over our shoulders. We imagine how he would react to a new product suggestion or a particular flavor in development. While none of us could ever replace The Legend himself, we conduct ourselves in the light of his intent and the culture he left behind. Each day, our dedicated team, most of whom were here before he passed away, look to their own connection with Rich as they go about their work to keep his story alive.
Anyone can be part of this movement, to lend from its inspiration and the community of 5%ERs without the purchase of our products.
How did you adapt to Covid?
Thankfully, as bad as the pandemic has been around the world, we have been able to retain our operational efficiency, getting employees back to their full-time, pre-pandemic roles just as soon as it was allowable and safe to do so. We continue to operate with an elevated level of precaution as we owe it to our employees’ safety and our customers receiving our goods. If nothing else, it was a reminder to us all that the work we do is indeed essential and does have a wider impact on those outside the walls of our offices and warehouse.
Will you ever remove Rich as the face of the brand?
Rich Piana and 5% Nutrition are synonymous with one another. These two brands, the lifestyle each represents, will be forever linked to the success of one another. Simply put, there doesn’t exist a 5% Nutrition without Rich Piana, and conversely, the opportunity for Rich Piana to reach a global audience is empowered by the embodiment of his 5% lifestyle. Rich Piana continues to live on and share his message for personal growth and achievement through his brand, 5% Nutrition.
Thought process behind formulas?
Product quality and performance are the foundation from which the 5% Nutrition brand was founded and will never stray from our product line. When customers pick up a product from our line, we want them to have every confidence that they are consuming a top-level product made from top-tier ingredients and bottled in a highly controlled environment.
Hardcore supplements remain the undercurrent of the brand, catering primarily to those hardcore bodybuilders yet we also create secondary products in many of the supplement categories to help those just getting into the game. We aim to create performance-based formulas with powerful, complex ingredients just brimming at the edge of overflowing while keeping it legal. We remain dedicated to producing functional foods, creating proteins, bars, and cookies to meet the craving for a snack without destroying your daily macros.
When it comes to product development, our goal remains the creation of something unique special, with only the highest performing ingredients matching Rich’s philosophy of supplementation served to our customers a realistic and reasonable market price. Overdosing key ingredients, sticking to functional, scientifically backed ingredients, and testing each lot to ensure taste and profile adherence is core to our fundamental approach of putting our customers first. In fact, we have had products take well over a year to formulate, from ideation to go-to-market, with the knowledge that any products which bear the 5% Nutrition name will need to be top-tier category performers.
We are also sticklers for product taste and mixability. While we work with high-octane ingredients, many of these added together in our overdosed formulas can be tricky to formulate when it comes to taste. We pride ourselves on ensuring a product tastes as well as it performs, with staff spending countless hours taste-testing new and existing products before each lot is packaged for consumer purchase.
We have pulled a finished product from the very trucks they were to be delivered on for a relatively minor discrepancy in taste, as compared with what was intended from our initial formulation of the product. We take product flavoring and taste very, very seriously. We value maintaining standards that allow us to consistently deliver superior taste over many of the competitors out there and take this process very seriously, lot by lot.
Any products to look forward to in 2021?
Rich was always innovating, pushing the team, and at times, even pushing the entire industry for more. However, Rich was also intuitive and understood that while 5% Nutrition could continue to develop high-performance products, it also needed to expand its appeal and better mesh to a larger audience of 5% followers now living his message on lifestyle and goal-oriented success. There was already an appeal for his message and the products of 5% Nutrition outside his own small community of elite bodybuilders, the question was how to make consumers see the products for their performance attributes.
As evidenced by the Legendary Series pre-workout lineup, we are revamping both the look and many of the formulas behind our customer’s favorite products. Early in 2015, Rich had approved what he called the “chromed out” label look, adapting the grunge and often raw look of the first products created while continuing the same hardcore theme to deliver on a series of more recognizable and repeatable design elements.
As the product family continues to expand into new categories of sports nutrition, we are constantly adding new flavors and improving formulas to use only the latest scientifically based ingredients to stay at the forefront of development. We have also elected to extend the 5% Nutrition lineup to include a set of products designed to be both entry-level for those just getting into the hardcore gym lifestyle and provide current 5%ERs with the ability to tailor their supplementation experience from us to meet their prescribed fitness and performance goals. Enter the 5% Core lineup. Products from this series will feature more simplistic formulas designed namely to augment the 5% Nutrition products a customer might already be using, yet still, deliver formulas that are a step above what would normally be considered.
Initially, we will be coming to market with several new powder and capsule-based products for the 5% Core lineup, including L-Glutamine and L-Citrulline unflavored powders and several capsule-based products, such as Vitamin C 1000, a Nootropic, ZMA, and Energy. The 5% Core lineup will debut in the spring of 2021 and will be available in most online marketplaces, brick and mortar stores carrying 5% Nutrition, and internationally through our distributors.
Why should a consumer choose 5%?
We are never satisfied with the result of a product. The moment one has been released to the public, it enters the cycle again, getting reviewed constantly for ingredient compliance, product quality, and performance, and stacked up against any new and available ingredients to hit the marketplace.
It is imperative for our products to be consistent and accurate; therefore, each lot produced has samples sent out for third-party review and testing prior to being approved. The taste, mixability, and overall appearance are evaluated, and in the case where this is an existing product and flavor, it is compared to a previous batch sample. Only those product lots which meet or exceed expectations will be released for sale. While this may seem as though it should be standard practice, we are not aware of any companies like us which taste test every small batch before releasing it to the consumer. We average nearly a 5-star rating across all our supplements via 14,000+ reviews, due in large part to this testing and approval process.
It is such a rarity, that we have to implement the process with our vendors and contract manufacturers in order to satisfy this request. While this may require some last-minute changes to product releases and new products hitting the marketplace, we would much prefer our loyal 5% Nutrition customers wait for the right batch of their favorite product from us, rather than send out a subpar product that doesn’t live up to the high standards of quality, taste, and performance we’ve aligned the reputation of the brand 5% Nutrition and Rich Piana himself.
What’s on the label is what’s in the bottle, period. As disparaging as a statement as this is, our recent experience with the global pandemic has done little to abate the much-maligned “bathtub formulators” who manage to spring up overnight with products claiming to cure cancer, lose a million pounds, and take you to the moon with their latest product laced with who-knows-what ingredients. We stick to our guns and ensure our products contain only the best ingredients in the products we formulate.
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