CEO Corner: Dom Iacovone on Raw Nutrition’s Rise to the Top
Led by Iacovone and backed by bodybuilding legend Chris Bumstead, Raw Nutrition has burst onto the scene as a top supplement brand
Raw Nutrition has done something few brands are able to do: make a name for itself in the highly competitive supplement industry.
Led by CEO Dom Iacovone and backed by bodybuilding legend Chris Bumstead, Raw Nutrition has emerged as one of the fastest-growing supplement and sports nutrition brands, winning Brand of the Year awards from retailers including The Vitamin Shoppe and GNC.
The company, which sells products including protein powders, pre-workout drinks, creatine and more, might just be getting started. Earlier this year, Raw completed a partnership transaction with The Quality Group, a German sports nutrition giant backed by CVC Capital Partners, that will see Iacovone and Bumstead come on as co-owners of The Quality Group.
Iacovone sat down with Athletech News to discuss his inspiration for co-founding Raw Nutrition, how the brand has leveraged Bumstead’s celebrity to drive awareness and what’s next for Raw following its partnership with The Quality Group.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Athletech News: You have an interesting journey into health and wellness entrepreneurship. Can you tell us about how you first got involved in this space?
Dom Iacovone: Raw Nutrition was an accident. I did my undergraduate degree in molecular microbiology and from there, I got my doctorate. I have a good friend, Matt Jansen (Raw Nutrition’s co-founder), who is an esteemed bodybuilding coach. He was interested in starting some type of nutrition or vitamin company. We started that, which was Revive MD. People really enjoyed our vitamins, and they wanted us to make a protein and pre-workout company. At the time, it was a super-saturated market – we swore up and down we’d never start one.
ATN: What made you comfortable enough to make the jump into that side of the supplement industry and start Raw Nutrition?
DI: We knew that in order to make it in this space, we needed someone who could take us from zero to 100. That someone was Chris Bumstead. Chris was already a part of Revive MD, and we brought him on board as a partner in Raw early on. It’s not a traditional influencer relationship – he came on as a 25% owner of the brand. So we had a really strong plan going in, and the brand has exploded into what it is today.
ATN: Chris Bumstead is one of the most influential people in fitness with millions of social media followers. How does Raw Nutrition leverage Chris’ celebrity to drive brand awareness?
DI: In the beginning, Chris was the brand. When we first launched, people didn’t know about Raw Nutrition, but they knew “CBum.” Today, our Raw products are selling better than products from the CBum line. That was by design – Chris always wanted to have his own brand, but he didn’t want the brand to be him. He never wanted to create a brand and call it “Chris Bumstead supplements.” We all have short shelf lives in any industry, and we wanted to build a household name that could stick around much longer than we were popular.
We now have 9,000 ambassadors, including some of the best athletes in the industry. We’re able to leverage them the same way we used to just leverage Chris. Now, Chris can take a step back – he’s still a very important part of the brand, but we’re not relying on him to sell products anymore.
ATN: Who is Raw Nutrition’s core customer? Is the brand for hardcore bodybuilding and fitness enthusiasts, or is it geared more toward general consumers?
DI: I’d say it’s all of the above. We don’t want to lose where we came from. We started in the bodybuilding world, and we always want to make the best bodybuilding supplements. But as our product lines grow, you’ll see that while we absolutely cater to bodybuilders, we’re also creating formulas, like our Essential Pre-Workout, that are made for other types of athletes like the weekend warriors who are going to the gym. They don’t necessarily need a $55 pre-workout to go and crush legs for Mr. Olympia. However, they do want to have a good workout, they want to spend $20 or $25 on a pre-workout. So it’s about growing the right way without losing our core audience.
ATN: Raw Nutrition has an impressive apparel business, selling things like sweatshirts and t-shirts. How big is the apparel side of the business?
DI: It’s pretty big. We probably sell more clothes than any other supplement company – on a good launch, we can do a million dollars just in apparel. When we first started that, we put a lot of marketing efforts behind our apparel shoots. It’s great marketing – we’re fully aware that someone walking around with a Raw shirt on only does good for us. We want to give back and make sure people love wearing what we represent.
ATN: Raw Nutrition recently completed a major transaction with The Quality Group. Why was this the right move for the brand?
DI: We started the process about a year and a half ago, and the main thing we wanted out of all of this was to find a partner who knew what we needed to grow to the next level. I think any realistic entrepreneur knows they can get a brand to a certain point, and then they’re going to need help to get it to that next level. We were sitting at around $150 million a year in revenue, and I knew that in order for us to get that to $700 million a year, we needed strategic investment. And it’s not just money; we needed people who are super smart and know how to scale.
We talked to a lot of different brands and strategic partners, and we landed on The Quality Group, which owns More Nutrition and ESN in Germany. The majority of (The Quality Group) is owned by CVC Capital Partners. When CVC acquired The Quality Group around three years ago, they were doing around the same in revenue that we’re doing today; they’re now doing around one billion dollars in annual revenue.
ATN: With that deal done, what are your goals for the future of Raw Nutrition?
DI: We have a lot of white space we need to fill. We’re planning on launching Target at the end of this year, then Costco, most likely. Bum Energy is very new, so it has a lot of room to grow. We plan on scaling those for the next of couple years – I’d say 2026 and 2027 will be large growth years. Around 2027, we’ll see what the market looks like. There are a lot of ways we can go, but in a perfect world, an IPO would be the move.
We also have a lot of cool, new products launching. We’ll soon be launching a new brand underneath Raw that will focus on high-quality female supplements.