Veloforte on 100% natural, protein and what it really takes to fuel your body
An appendectomy was the unlikely catalyst behind the founding of Veloforte, a family-created brand that prides itself on being 100% natural. That foundation – ever more timely as consumers focus on what they are using to fuel their bodies – has brought the brand plaudits. Co-founder Marc Giusti explains to CIN how surgery recovery prompted the creation of Veloforte and what’s next for the company…
IN THE BEGINNING…
Weirdly, it all came from a ruptured appendix. Before founding Veloforte, I had launched a brand and product innovation consultancy – having spent 25 years working with some of the biggest brands in the world across their digital and advertising strategies.
One sunny February morning whilst crossing Leicester Square, my appendix randomly and unexpectedly ruptured, requiring significant abdominal surgery and months of rehab. It was to become a sliding-doors moment for me and my wife, Lara [Giusti].
My focus turned heavily towards fitness and nutrition, re-igniting my passion for long distance cycling alongside a horrifying realisation of the ingredients being stuffed into the recipes of typical energy and nutrition products. That set our perspective from day-one. To build a brand that could actively feed our health-wealth and performance from only natural ingredients. No labs, no gunk, no junk. Just delicious real food, fit for purpose, fit for body. With my all-new insides recently repaired, we weren’t going to go anywhere near the ‘fake goop in tubes’ found on all the shelves.
Getting to our first few products meant leaning heavily on Lara’s 20 years experience as a cardio-respiratory specialist alongside her side-hustle passion for baking multi-award-winning Panforte (an Italian speciality ‘cake’ from Sienna in Tuscany – driven by my family’s Tuscan heritage). She set about making what were to become our three first energy bars: Classico, Ciocco and Di Bosco. As soon as I started sharing these homemade bars with my ride buddies, everyone wanted some. And that was where it started.
I built our first website in a weekend, reached out to events companies and retailers (Sigma Sports were our first) and before long demand grew and our home became a bakery, warehouse and dispatch all at once, with our young kids sticking the labels on the boxes and our friends hand-cutting the bars Lara was making.
After some time, whilst climbing the Puig Major in Mallorca, I found myself riding next to someone called Steve [Marson]. We got talking, he tried some of the bars and a few months later he became the third Partner in Veloforte, bringing decades of blue-chip operations and finance experience. From there, the three of us turned Veloforte into a real thing, with real manufacturing and real customers and our house and kitchen could finally return to normal.
“REAL FOOD THAT REALLY WORKS”
It’s in our nature. The world doesn’t need yet more artificial foods. It needs real nutrition. At Veloforte, we’re dedicated to one thing… crafting delicious real food that really works – helping you #fuelbetter every day with a range of nutrition that puts you in charge of your healthwealth. Real performance and vitality, real taste and quality takes more than mere science.
When it comes to physical performance, nutrition is the only thing you put inside you, everything else you put on or around you. Cyclists, runners, all active people dedicate a lot of their time and money to their passion and performance. From their kit to their wider lifestyles and diets.
Yet, all nutrition brands insist on stuffing their products with artificial ingredients, synthetic or lab-derived flavourings, preservatives, bulking
agents and more – hiding their ingredients in small print, making ‘natural’ claims that have little substance.
To us, this is totally unnecessary and completely ignores the values and health benefits inherently found in great quality, real nutrition – it’s an industry-wide behaviour driven by commercial desires for greater margins and convenience. It’s not about performance. It’s simply untrue that we cannot produce exceptional performance nutrition or healthy eating products from all natural ingredients.
Our products prove that. Look at the macros of any of them – from our all-natural 20g Protein bars to our new CollagenPro, our natural Energy Gels to our Energy Chews – they deliver every ounce as much performance as any artificial alternative, yet with all the health, taste and motivational benefits of real food – in exactly the portable formats our customers need.
RANGE EVOLUTION
Our first three energy bars became seven flavours. Then pure electrolyte powders, followed by a category-first all natural range of energy gels. From there we developed all-natural high protein and recovery powders and our market-leading soft energy chews (the original soft chews).
From there we expanded into wider healthy-eating products, helping our customers to continue their commitment to natural nutrition into their daily lives too with a nutritionally complete range of high-protein overnight oats and gut-healthy oat snack bars.
Most recently, we launched an exceptional daily collagen supplement called CollagenPro, specifically targeted at supporting whole-body health – feeding not only muscles, joints and bones, but cognitive function, vitality and immunity too. It’s a unique blend of Type I&III collagen with organic vitamins C, D and Zinc. We’re delighted with the responses we’re seeing, especially with almost half of our sales coming from men.
We recently launched our new Protein Crunch Bars… 20g of complete protein, 5g of pure collagen and 0g of artificial nonsense. They’re the first proper protein bars with nothing to hide – nothing artificial, just ingredients found in kitchens, not in small print.
NPD comes from a whole host of inputs. Driven, designed and developed by Lara, she looks at how naturally delicious ingredients can form recipes that exceed their synthetic alternatives and develops products that complement our customers’ needs, giving them ultimate confidence in their nutrition goals.
Trends and customer feedback play a big part for sure, but we have a simple three-part rule. If a product isn’t as natural as it is functional as it is delicious, then we simply won’t make it.
We have some very exciting products in the pipeline, all helping our customers to stack their health and performance odds in their favour.
360 NUTRITION?
What you put in, you get out. If you’re really interested in eating clean, feeding your health and building your performance, you need to consider your whole day, not just your training or riding. That’s why we’ve created something we call the Power System – P.W.R (Performance, Wellness and Recovery). Our range is deliberately designed to help you do this.
For instance, starting your day with a simple cup of coffee and a scoop of collagen, a bowl of our overnight oats and a protein crunch bar at 11.30am means you’ll have had a nutritionally complete morning with up to 55g of protein. Not only does this help you stay fuller for longer (staying away from snacks), it supports your recovery, muscle development, immunity and daily performance. All from a deliciously simple and easy breakfast on the way to work.
With that kind of quality nutrition behind you, your training or competing can be optimised with all natural ingredients, electrolytes, carbs and proteins from our range of performance sports nutrition. A complete 360 view, powered by nature.
43 GREAT TASTE STARS
The Great Taste Awards represent ‘the Oscars of food’. In our space, with our real food proposition, being recognised for the quality of our products, by some of the UK and Europe’s most celebrated food critics, chefs and producers is fundamental.
Our 43 golds make us the most highly decorated natural nutrition brand – no other brand comes anywhere close. When you couple this with over 30,000 5-star reviews direct from our customers, it’s humbling and immensely motivating to see the impact we are having on our sector and our customer’s health, performance and enjoyment.
SUSTAINABILITY
Like you, we love the planet we live on. We want all our 100% natural products to provide a positive contribution to your life and our planet – this includes the ingredients we source, how our products are produced and packaged.
We wholeheartedly support the push towards plastic-free & non single-use plastics and are well ahead of the UK Govt’s latest 2027 plans for improved kerbside recycling – something the UK’s infrastructure has struggled to deliver on compared to other European countries.
For example, all our bars and chews wrappers are recyclable in-store (major supermarkets) as well as through our own free-return recycle programme – an active initiative we’ve had in place since 2019. We are thrilled to be currently trialling the latest recyclable materials across our multi-serve pouches, electrolyte sachets and gels too, expecting to fully adopt them across the range in 2025.
Our ingredients are sustainably sourced too. From high-welfare farms and producers and manufactured in state-of-the-art facilities in the UK.
Lastly, when it comes to our warehousing, distribution and order fulfilment, all our packing is paper-based and widely recyclable from your own home – including the box tape.
DISTRIBUTION THROUGH EXTRA UK
Extra UK has made a huge impact on our abilities to reach and engage with IBDs. Before appointing them, we handled most of our sports distribution in-house. With our small team, it’s extremely hard to make this work well without the kind of resources and talent Extra UK have in abundance. Specifically for IBDs it means fast, flexible ordering and reordering, good commercial terms, the right POS and shelf appeal plus the confidence in continuity of supply and quality needed to help stores stand out and deliver the kind of repeat orders our products are built on.
In an ever more health-conscious world, being able to stock IBDs with the most contemporary natural nutrition products that directly answer customer needs on quality, efficacy, provenance, natural diets, sustainability and performance is something we’re deeply committed to.
