Our approach to product development
OUR APPROACH
We’re proud of our products and invest a lot of resources in developing them. Our product development is led by Dr Greg Potter, who has a PhD in nutrition and sleep and an MSc and BSc in sport and exercise science. To develop the best products possible, Greg works with the rest of the Resilient Nutrition team plus academics, food scientists, manufacturers, packaging experts, sustainability experts, and participants who trial the products. Everything we develop goes through dozens of iterations before settling on the final product. This process comprises a few systematic steps, including:
- Careful reviews of the scientific literature, including the burden of the problem being addressed by the product, the biology of the problem in question, and nutrition interventions to amend the problem.
- Sourcing of rigorously tested ingredients.
- Development of prototype products in conjunction with food scientists.
- N-of-1 testing.
- Pilot testing using participants representative of the people who will use the product.
- Sourcing of packaging that is appropriate for the product’s use case, conducive to the product’s stability, and as environmentally sustainable as possible.
We plan to do rigorously controlled studies of our products in the future, but the financial realities of being a startup preclude us from doing anything like a traditional randomised controlled trial (this type of trial can cost millions of pounds to complete).
If you’re at an academic institution and are interested in partnering with us to test the efficacy of our products, we’d love to hear from you! Ping us an email to humans@resilientnutrition.com.
WE VALUE TRANSPARENCY AND ONLY USE PROVEN DOSES OF THE BEST INGREDIENTS
It was once common to see the words “proprietary blend” on supplement labels. This was inevitably an attempt at disguising the fact that the products didn’t contain nearly enough of the active ingredients to have any meaningful effects. The good news is that nowadays there’s less of this type of secrecy, and at Resilient Nutrition we’re transparent about what goes in our products.
We only use ingredients that have been clinically proven to be safe and effective at producing the effects we want of a product. Unlike so many companies, we never assume that something will positively affect human biology just because it improves the function of rodent, a fly, a worm, or cells in a dish.
We’re also exacting in selecting specific forms of individual ingredients. Let’s use cocoa to exemplify this. Variables such as cocoa genetics, growing conditions, processing, and storage substantially affect the chemical composition of the cocoa products you end up consuming, and these variables might have meaningful effects on your health over time. For instance, cocoa from Africa tends to be much lower in cadmium than cocoa from Latin America, which matters because cadmium is toxic. For this reason, we only use African cocoa products at Resilient Nutrition.
Let’s use Ashwagandha as another example of how we select ingredients at Resilient Nutrition. Ashwagandha is rich in certain bioactive chemicals that have desirable properties. The main bioactives in Ashwagandha are thought to be the withanolides. If you buy an Ashwagandha extract that doesn’t contain a standardised proportion of withanolides, the content of these bioactives might vary tremendously from batch to batch. This variation will lead to fluctuations in the effects of the extract. For this reason, we use KSM-66 Ashwagandha, which is both standardised for specific bioactives and is the best-studied Ashwagandha extract available.
At Resilient Nutrition we also have stringent quality control checks in place. We have certificates of analysis for all our ingredients, we manufacture our products in BRC-certified facilities, and we have used third-party testing bodies such as Informed Sport to show that our products only contain what we say they do.
Our commitment to only using proven doses of the finest ingredients does push up the price of our goods, but we believe the resulting improvements to our products more than compensates for the extra cost.
"CLEAN" LABELS AND NOTHING NON-ESSENTIAL
We know that some of our customers favour “clean” labels, meaning products that contain only “wholesome” ingredients and comprise as few ingredients as necessary to get the desired effects. You therefore won’t find any weird chemicals such as artificial sweeteners in our products. This does occasionally mean that we could make slightly tastier products if we sacrificed our commitment to only using ingredients that we truly believe are healthy (there’s no healthy sugar substitute that behaves just like sugar!), but we’re not willing to make this compromise.
We also recognise that now and then certain ingredients become in-vogue “superfoods” even though rigorous science shows they have little nutritional merit. As our approach is science led, not trend led, you won’t find us hopping on any bandwagons that aren’t going anywhere. There are also ingredients you might not be familiar with that sound bad but that are in fact good for you.