About
Two athletes, four parents, and a label that didn't add up.
01 — Measured people
Aminotype was founded by two former college athletes: a wrestler and a track athlete.
They came from the two sports that worship measurement. Wrestlers live by the scale — every gram accounted for, every morning. Track athletes live by the clock — hundredths of a second, recorded and kept. Long after the competitions ended, the habit didn't: weigh it, time it, write it down.
For years they compared notes on nutrition the way former athletes do — protein targets, recovery, what the evidence actually says versus what the tub claims. It was a hobby. Then it stopped being about them.
02 — The parents
Both sets of parents were getting older, and the questions changed. Not how do I perform but how do I stay strong: muscle kept into your seventies and eighties, joints that hold up, energy across a day. The two of them started doing for their parents what they'd always done for themselves — comparing notes, reading the research, doing the arithmetic.
What they found in the market for their parents was worse than what they'd found for themselves. Products “for seniors” that were under-dosed and patronising. Protein drinks built for hospital wards. And a new wave of “custom” and “personalised” brands that sounded like the answer.
03 — The audit
So they audited the custom category the way they'd been trained to: measure it.
The findings were not complicated.
- Finding 01
Stock formulas behind quizzes
The quizzes mapped everyone onto a handful of stock formulas.
- Finding 02
Names printed on standard tubs
The “personalisation” was, in case after case, a name printed on a standard tub.
- Finding 03
Proprietary blends with hidden doses
The blends were proprietary, which is the industry's word for you may not know the doses.
Some products were competently made — for an average person who does not exist.
Even the custom solutions were mostly stock. That was the conclusion, and once they'd reached it, the hobby was over.
04 — Two years in the laboratory
The track athlete had become a biomedical engineer. He treated the conclusion as a specification: if a formula is ever going to be truly individual, everything underneath it has to be rebuilt.
Two years followed, spent on the unglamorous layers:
| Sourcing | Ingredients bought to written specifications, from named origins, with certificates of analysis verified rather than filed. (The full standard is on the Ingredients page.) |
|---|---|
| Formulation | A typing system that balances a base protein with free-form amino acids to a reference pattern, dose by dose, for one person's age, training and goal — and re-balances as they change. |
| Production | The engineering problem nobody in the category wanted: how to manufacture a batch of one, accurately, hygienically, and at a scale where it remains a product rather than a performance. Batch records, assay gates, and traceability from ingredient lot to individual tub. |
05 — What came out
Aminotype. A company that types you, compounds your formula, prints the whole panel on the label, and re-types you as you change — protein first, because protein is where the arithmetic matters most, and then whatever else can be formulated honestly at the resolution of one person.
The first formulas were compounded for four people: two wrestlers' parents and two track parents — in their seventies and eighties, unimpressed by marketing, and exact about what they would and wouldn't drink. Every formula since has had to satisfy the same reviewers.
You are the formula.
— The founders