Under Cunninhgam’s watch, Nutrabolt has grown from a niche supplement maker into a health and wellness giant, with brands including C4 Energy and Bloom in its portfolio
Nutrabolt is in growth mode, and Doss Cunningham has the keys.
Cunningham, Nutrabolt’s longtime CEO, has been with the company since the mid-2000s, helping to steer a period of impressive, sustained growth, including recently exceeding $1 billion in sales.
Today, Nutrabolt’s portfolio includes C4 Energy, Cellucor, Xtend and now Bloom, which the company took a majority stake in earlier this year. Nutrabolt has also secured investment from Keurig Dr Pepper and Kevin Hart, while signing athletes including Saquon Barkley to key marketing partnerships.
On the innovation front, C4 just released Performance Energy Shots, which pack 200 milligrams of caffeine into a two-ounce package, while Bloom launched a better-for-you soda line, Bloom Pop, this past summer.
Cunningham sat down with Athletech News to discuss his company’s rise from a niche supplement brand to a household name in health and wellness, share what’s coming next for Nutrabolt’s brands including Bloom and C4, and explain why he’s so bullish on the functional-beverage category.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Athletech News: You joined Nutrabolt very early on in your career. Can you tell us about your journey with the company?
Doss Cunningham: I consider myself a founder because I joined very early on. The company was started in late 2002 — I joined in 2004 and became a member of the C-suite shortly thereafter.
I took over as CEO and took a majority stake around year five, when we were still a small, several-million-dollar-a-year company. We went through such a radical transformation from being a small boutique supplement company to going down this pursuit of being a global health and wellness company. It’s been an incredible journey, and I’ve been very fortunate to be in a great category with a lot of opportunities for new, creative ideas.
ATN: What’s Nutrabolt’s evolution been like over the past two-plus decades?
DC: The company today is a very different company, with a very different vision, from what we had 23 years ago. We started off as a sports-nutrition company, with one line of products under the Cellucor brand. We were focused on the more hardcore fitness enthusiast, and we sold through specialty retail, GNC franchise stores, and mom-and-pop supplement stores.
Through that Cellucor line, we developed C4 in 2011, which was the first time we entered the pre-workout category. It immediately took off with consumers. All that success brought in private equity interest. We took on an investment in 2014. That was a major inflection point as we started to build out the management team and established our first board of directors, and we really started to think about becoming a global health and wellness portfolio. We ended up buying back the company from the private equity, taking on a good amount of debt to do that. In 2018, we launched beverages.
ATN: C4 entered the ready-to-drink energy category in 2018, a move that changed the brand and the entire Nutrabolt portfolio. What did you see in the energy-drink market at that time that made you confident C4 could compete?
DC: I thought the energy drink category was pretty stale. It was the same type of products, just with different designs — Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar. I thought of C4 as a brand that could bring functional benefits to a commodity category, and make sure that the product was positioned in the zero-sugar format, which was where all the growth was.
We moved into the energy-drink space, and immediately we had a strong uptake. We started expanding into 7-Eleven, Circle K, QuickTrip, then into Walmart. Our beverage business went from zero to a few hundred million in sales in several years. That’s when Keurig-Dr Pepper knocked on our door. They invested in our company in 2022, and we formed a distribution partnership. That immediately helped us streamline our distribution network and drive improvements in household penetration.
ATN: Nutrabolt first invested in Bloom in 2024, before taking a majority stake in the brand this year. Why did you decide to make that move, and what are your plans for Bloom moving forward?
DC: One of the biggest pieces of my vision is thinking about how we can be a health and wellness leader. I’ve always said I want to be the Procter & Gamble of health and wellness. We’ve had historical positioning in the performance and sports-nutrition space, and now in performance energy, but we were missing the female shopper, and we weren’t yet really resonating with the Gen Z shopper. Bloom is female-forward and (popular with) Gen Z and younger Millennials.
But the real thesis of the investment was that we could build a beverage brand together. We launched Bloom Energy in the summer of 2024, and then off that success, we launched Bloom Pop, a better-for-you soda proposition, in the summer of this year, which is set to go into broader distribution in January.
We see the Bloom brand as being a great platform for us to do a lot of innovation. We want to continue to grow into new categories, like we demonstrated with our move into better-for-you soda.
ATN: More broadly speaking, what innovation opportunities do you see in the beverage space?
DC: I think the sports-drink category hasn’t seen a lot of good innovation. You’ve got the incumbent brands — I won’t name them — the big dogs that have run the space for a long time.
Also, the protein category has historically been very high protein and more heavy, decadent flavors like chocolate and vanilla. We’re looking at different ways to bring some new protein technologies into maybe more of a sparkling format, or a lower dose of protein that people can consume multiple times per day.
I also think there’s a lot of opportunity when you pair these traditional categories with functional benefits, and then take on a better-for-you positioning, which is free of artificial ingredients and low sugar. That’s where the consumer headspace is.
ATN: Speaking of the sports-drink category, C4 recently partnered with NFL star Saquon Barkley. How do you plan on leveraging him as a face of C4, including opening the brand up to a wider audience?
DC: Our consumer base really respects Saquon Barkley. When you’re selecting athletes, some of them are very relevant on a regional basis, but it’s hard to find athletes who have national brand appeal. He checked all those boxes, and we were able to work out a deal that made sense for both parties.
Saquon, and our other athletes, are the aspirational side of the brand. We’re thinking about how we can take the C4 brand from this niche gym, sports and fitness background to the masses. One of the campaigns we’re working on now is about identifying hard-working Americans who still require performance to do their job well — the construction worker, long-haul truck driver, delivery person, movers that are pulling furniture up and down stairs all day long, as well as firefighters, public-service workers and police officers who are out there doing hard work.
ATN: Is Nutrabolt actively looking for new acquisition targets following the Bloom deal?
DC: M&A is going to be part of our core strategy long term. We can, of course, still flex our innovation muscle and build things, but I think there are some great opportunities in what we can bring to some of these earlier-stage companies that are looking for infrastructure, acceleration and distribution.
Right now, we’re focused on Bloom — the brand’s on fire, so we’re really trying to make sure we can execute well — but my eyes are open.
ATN: Looking ahead, what’s your long-term vision for Nutrabolt?
DC: We want to be a larger-scale, multi-brand portfolio company. Adding Bloom into the mix provides a lot of credibility that we can do that. I think there’s going to be opportunities for us to add more brands to our portfolio that are all unique in the way they meet unique needs and different consumer cohorts.
We’re looking at different ways to be able to finance some of the M&A we want to do. The public-company option is very interesting to us. We’re thinking about an IPO, but it’s got to be the right timing and align with our strategy. There’s no rush to make that decision.
Longer term, I see us, increasingly, as a functional beverage company. That’s not to say we won’t do more work in the nutritional supplement space, because we will. But I just think beverage is the most obvious, large, scalable product form factor to achieve our long-term ambition.
