Flowers Foods to acquire gluten-free bread maker. Fresh ideas. Served daily. Subscribe to Food Business News' free newsletters to stay up to date about the latest food and beverage news. Potential Russian tax hike send US wheat futures higher. TreeHouse Foods is on the block. Our portfolio serves the needs of elite athletes, active lifestylists and weekend warriors with a wide-range of innovative protein-enhanced solutions that taste great and appeal to evolving consumer demands.
The company is a trusted partner with storied collegiate athletic programs, world-class professional athletes, and elite training facilities. All CytoSport, Inc. The company was founded in by the Pickett family, acquired by Hormel Foods Corporation in , and is headquartered in Walnut Creek, Calif.
Skip to content Explore This Section. The sheer count aside, there is also a lot of mysticism and conflicting research about how much protein bodies can even process at once.
Our bodily systems can only be cheated so much. The company is currently focused on drawing in women, in large part because they are the primary drivers of lifestyle fitness. But Katie drinks Muscle Milk Light for breakfast which helps in other vital areas.
In the last few years, protein-powder brands increasingly started marketing to women , many of them directly through social media influencers.
The Muscle Milk brand also seems to have lowered its testosterone across the board, going from fat, thick block type to a taller, leaner, more even font. The company used to rely on male spokespeople for major campaigns, but starting in , three different national campaigns aimed at women featured female athletes.
Much of her work over the months before I talked to her had concerned her interviews with women to see which athletic brands they connected with and why, what they looked for when shopping for fitness-related things, and who influenced their choices: celebrities, Instagrammers, ad campaigns.
We might not have the time, let alone the money, for Soulcycle classes and a drawer of Lululemon leggings. For the first Golden State Warriors preseason game of the season , the Picketts invited co-workers into their box suite on the half-court line at the Oracle Arena in Oakland. Greg Longstreet drank Bud Lights from the mini fridge; Nikki Brown settled her two sons, who have identical shocks of blond hair, into the front row with plates of catered chicken fingers and ketchup.
In , Muscle Milk built a national campaign around Curry, putting him at the center of both print ads and commercials. The family told me I could meet him the next day at the offices of their new company, Flavor Insights.
The new company is housed in the facility that used to be home to Cytosport before Hormel acquired it Cytosport is not yet a client of Flavor Insights. From the outside, the offices smell overwhelmingly of artificial vanilla. They are attached to a lab and an enormous clean room with a foot-tall vat setup for spray drying, a calorie-free method of flavoring products. Per whiteboards in the lab, the techs were working on a pomegranate flavor. Also attached is a giant warehouse where the family keeps a couple dozen of its collector cars — a McLaren here, a Mustang there.
The Picketts will no longer work on products that go direct to market; rather, they will work on contract, developing flavoring ingredients and profiles for clients. Flavoring is a vital concept to modern food, but famously mysterious and even a little frightening; there have been routine panics about things like artificial sweeteners or the butter flavor in microwave popcorn for decades.
But in the dueling demand for health and convenience, this aversion to industrial food practices is waning.
Manipulating one food into the format of another — vegetables into candy, protein into crackers and chips, nutrient profiles flowing seamlessly from appetizer to dessert and back again — is the only way to satisfy a populace that demands to eat what they want when they want to, and control their intake to stave off disease and death.
Protein drinks, in a way, are the past. The future is macronutrient-perfect food that is not only engineered to fit any diet but flavored to meet any craving — pizza, chocolate, barbecue potato chips. The Picketts think the reason Muscle Milk beat out every other ready-to-drink product to make the jump to the mainstream is flavor — family patriarch Greg labored to make Muscle Milk more like dessert.
While developing ready-to-drink Muscle Milk, Greg Pickett was able to produce small-batch runs of 15 to 20 gallons at a facility in Texas. He tweaked the formula to make it less like dark chocolate, and more like milk chocolate, which we in America associate with candy. He was nervous as he waited for this test version to come off the production line. As he regaled me with stories of his father, the founder of the dubious old-school vitamin supplement company Neolife, the smell of chocolate overtook me.
It reminded me of visiting the Hershey factory as a kid, except this chocolate was less deep — fake, cloying, felt like it was clogging my nostrils. It was too specific; it smelled like potential, like all of the things that could ever hope to taste like chocolate. After Muscle Milk released its ready-to-drink shake in , Pickett said, the CEO of Met-Rx, the competitor who inspired him to try making drinks in the first place, asked him to lunch.
You made protein taste better. Natalie Nelson is an illustrator based in Atlanta. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
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