With roots in Colorado and a mission forged in the professional cycling world, The Feed is a sports nutrition service founded a year ago and upgraded this month, built to deliver fuel for intense exercise and endurance activity to your door every month. Even if you're not getting paid for your next race or running a grueling marathon, The Feed caters to all levels of fit, always-moving Coloradans and is designed to power athletes, weekend warrior or otherwise, through workouts, even those who don't perform like the pros.
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The service is partly the brainchild of Matt Johnson and Bryan Smith, whose credentials with Slipstream Sports, the company behind professional cycling team Garmin, based in Boulder. Johnson, the president of the team, recognized that their experience in the cycling world gives them the perfect foundation to cater towards endurance athletes. Johnson particularly notes that through their work with Team Garmin cyclists, they realized how important proper nutrition and hydration are for maximum performance, a fact often overlooked.
"We got very smart and gained a lot of expertise," Johnson says. After that, he noticed a lack of the same nutritional know-how in many recreational athletes who may not make a living from the sport but still compete frequently in endurance events.
Johnson realized that nobody teaches casual cyclists or runners how they should eat, stay properly hydrated or refuel mid-race. Thus, The Feed was born, aiming to deliver a monthly box containing not only the latest and greatest in drink mixes, energy shots and meal replacement bars, but also a wide range of information on how best to consume them. Going a step further than many other sports-snack boxes on the market (although none of them were targeted at endurance athletes, Johnson notes,) the founders brought nutrition coaches into their service to help explain how to optimally combine training and eating, and assigns every subscriber one of these helping hands.
Coaches are part of the reason that Johnson stresses that The Feed is not built just for the high-intensity or professional athlete, although he admits that he wasn't surprised when they did start gravitating towards the service for its convenience and one-stop aspect. However, Johnson founded The Feed with hopes of attracting the type of everyday sports enthusiasts for which Colorado is famous, making Boulder the ideal home base for his company.
"The Feed provides for those who might be dying for a snack at the office, but they want to stay on track," he says. "It is for those asking 'how do I stay an office athlete?'" Instead of alienating those who don't make sports or sports nutrition their life, he wants to include them in the know-how of the professional world.
With a year of business under its belt providing for the myriad ranks of Colorado's active, the company has just launched a new website that lets shoppers customize their boxes with their favorite sports nutrition products and have them sent to their doors once a month, saving money and circumventing the trip to the store. It is also a way to take advantage of the breadth of choice in the sports nutrition world, something that even Johnson wasn't expecting.
"It surprised us in a happy way," he said, "that there is more out there." He designed The Feed to make the most of this selection, with users able to try out single flavors of a bar or drink mix without committing to buying a box, an expense and commitment which scares away many casual sports snackers. With options for almost every imaginable dietary restriction, it's all part of The Feed's plan to make sure everyone--not just the finely honed athletes of Team Garmin--trains better.
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