Nutrabolt CEO Doss Cunningham joins the PricePlow Podcast to talk Cellucor's rebrand, C4 Energy growth, the Bloom investment, and building the Proctor & Gamble of supplements and welness in Episode #222
Nutrabolt CEO Doss Cunningham has spent more than two decades building Nutrabolt and the C4 brand into global household names, doing it almost entirely from behind the scenes.
In Episode #222 of the PricePlow Podcast, that changes, and we get to shine a light on the visionary leader. Doss sits down with Mike and Ben for our first in-depth podcast conversation together, covering everything from C4's origin story to the strategic reinvention of Cellucor.
Changes for Cellucor, C4 Energy’s Growth, and Expansion Beyond Bloom
The trigger for the conversation is what's happening right now. Cellucor wiped its social media slate clean and launched Cellucor Longevity Creatine + NAD as the opening move in a new Active Health & Wellness direction. But Doss goes much further here, covering the hard lessons from failed brands, the Bloom investment and portfolio vision, C4 Energy's push to own the "Everyone's an Athlete" performance lane, and what's coming next across the Nutrabolt lineup.
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https://blog.priceplow.com/podcast/doss-cunningham-nutrabolt-222
Video: Doss Cunningham on C4, Cellucor, and Building a Supplement / Wellness Empire
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:53 — 46.7MB)
Detailed Show Notes: Doss Cunningham and Nutrabolt on the Future of Cellucor and C4
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0:00 - Introductions
Doss grew up in Austin, Texas, then headed to Texas A&M, where an early opportunity at a small supplement startup changed his plans entirely. What started as a good college job became a 24-year run building one of the industry's most recognized brand families. He worked up through CFO and COO roles before taking the CEO seat, spending 19 years building the company in College Station before moving back to Austin.
Before all that, though, Doss was just a teenager who couldn't gain muscle. He tried creatine, egg protein, and whatever Weider had on the grocery store shelf. That early obsession with finding something that actually worked is probably why product quality and efficacy have always felt personal to him.
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3:00 - Going Public: Why Now?
For years, Doss kept a low profile by design. He's self-described as private, focused on building rather than on his own visibility. But Mike noticed a shift: regular LinkedIn posts, another podcast appearance, and a moment two years ago when Doss let PricePlow shoot video during a company tour.
Doss mentions that a new communications leader nudged him in that direction, but he says the real motivation is about the team. Nutrabolt's people work hard, and being able to tell that story publicly is something they take pride in. He'll post on LinkedIn and show up on select podcasts like this one. YouTube and TikTok, though, are firmly off the table.
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6:30 - The C4 Origin Story
C4 launched in early 2011 with a clear business problem to solve. Cellucor had a premium image that made it hard to break into specialty retail, where brands like SuperPump 250 and NO Xplode were priced at $30 to $35 while boxed Cellucor out on perceived value. The fix was straightforward: undercut the category 10 to 20 percent per serving. A 30-serving C4 ran $24.99 and a 60-serving ran $39.99.
The timing turned out to be fortuitous. GNC pulled USP Labs' Jack3d from shelves over its DMAA content, and Nutrabolt had already proactively removed that ingredient from their products (well before any other mainstream company did). When the call came asking whether they could support GNC at full speed, the answer was yes. C4 went from second or third in pre-workout to category leader almost overnight.
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12:30 - Hard Lessons: Failures as Fuel
Cellucor Longevity Creatine Powder with NAD+ hits with 5g creatine, 250mg NMN, BioSNEDS NADPro quercetin cocrystal, and ApigenSol apigenin. It supplies NAD+ precursors and blocks the enzymes that break them down. Smart formula, fair price.
Doss is candid about the stumbles. Cavalier was a super-premium male aging brand that landed in the wrong retail environment without the brand investment it needed. Neon Sport launched when everything was working, but the team found they couldn't run multiple brands at once without the organizational depth to support both.
The bigger lesson was about operational discipline. For years, the default filter for new projects was "will it drive growth?" That almost always led to yes, and the resulting multi-brand, multi-channel, multi-geography complexity nearly overwhelmed the organization. Selling something in is easy, Doss says. Getting consumers to keep coming back is the whole game, and they had to learn that the hard way.
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17:15 - The Beverage School
The move into C4 Energy around 2016-2017 wasn't just a product expansion. It was an education in a completely different operating model. In small-format convenience and grocery channels, velocity is everything: if your product doesn't turn fast enough, you're out within a year with no second chances.
That urgency has changed how Nutrabolt thinks about the supplement side too. Retailers who once gave brands multiple cycles to work through problems are getting tighter on patience as they manage working capital efficiency. The discipline built in the beverage business, knowing exactly when to invest behind a product and when to pull back, is now one of their biggest competitive edges in supplements.
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22:00 - Reinventing Cellucor: Active Health & Wellness
Here's the reason we invited Doss onto the podcast -- seeing Cellucor's recent reinvention. The brand reset its social media and is repositioning around a broader definition of performance, targeting what Doss calls the "Active Health & Wellness" consumer. He points to Thorne as inspiration: quality-first, relevant across a wider range of health goals than traditional sports nutrition covers.
C4 Energy partners with Josh Hart and is now the official energy drink of the LA Lakers. For a drug-tested athlete, NSF Certified for Sport isn't a marketing badge -- it's the whole point.
Creatine was the natural entry point. Its mainstream crossover is definitely happening, now with women, aging adults, and cognitively-focused consumers driving demand well beyond the gym. The Cellucor Longevity Creatine + NAD+ is the opening statement, pairing 5g of creatine monohydrate with NMN and a BioSNEDS™ delivery system (NADPro™ and ApigenSol™) to approach cellular energy from multiple angles. Cellucor Vitality (collagen peptides + creatine) is already out and extends that line into recovery and longevity. Doss doesn't formulate, but Mike notes that he is in a ton of those formulation and innovation meetings.
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29:00 - Peptides and Exclusive Innovation with Nuritas
One of Doss's clearest competitive philosophies is around ingredient partnerships: find novel ingredients first, lock in exclusive relationships, invest in building them, and earn the credibility that comes with being first. Ben points out that PeptiPump® was a textbook example. Nuritas discovered it using AI-driven peptide science, C4 launched with it exclusively, and it worked.
Doss confirms the Nuritas partnership, which also brought PeptiStrong® into the C4 lineup, is ongoing and active. When Mike asks whether peptides are next for the Cellucor Active Health & Wellness line, Doss calls it "a pretty good bet." The aspiration stays the same in every category: show up with something real, not just another version of what's already on the shelf.
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32:30 - Portfolio Strategy: Bloom and the P&G Vision
When asked about the Nutrabolt portfolio vision, Doss cites Proctor & Gamble: brands that stay relevant for generations by constantly innovating and staying close to the consumer. Nutrabolt invested in Bloom in January 2024 specifically to close a demographic gap. Before that, women made up only about 25 to 30 percent of Nutrabolt's business.
C4 Energy's Cereal Killer brings fruity cereal flavor to the performance energy drink category -- 200mg caffeine, beta-alanine, zero sugar, and NSF Certified for Sport. Saturday morning nostalgia meets serious training fuel.
The move was data-driven. They studied Bloom greens powder buyers and found those consumers were also buying Celsius and Alani. When asked directly if they'd try a Bloom energy drink, the answer was overwhelming. Between the Keurig Dr Pepper distribution partnership and rapid product development, Bloom Energy was on Target shelves by July 2024, just six months after the investment closed.
Cellucor, Doss says, is being stretched toward the middle ground between C4's performance intensity and Bloom's female/wellness positioning.
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38:45 - C4 Energy: Owning the Performance Lane
With roughly 3 percent market share, C4 Energy isn't competing quietly. Doss makes clear they're going after Red Bull and Monster by outperforming them on a per-dollar basis, since outspending them simply isn't realistic at their current scale.
The strategy hinges on expanding who counts as an athlete. C4's "Everyone's an Athlete" campaign targets the people doing hard physical work every day: long-haul drivers, construction crews, military, and first responders. This is where the energy drink market actually lives. Pair that with recent NBA partnerships and the Josh Hart deal (Knicks, Celtics, Heat, Lakers, Canada Basketball), Saquon Barkley, and NSF Certified for Sport credentialing, and C4's positioning as the performance energy drink gets harder to dismiss.
In order to push this forward, one thing that would have to happen is a reduction in beta-alanine, discussed later.
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43:15 - Cereal Killer, M5 Extreme, and the Art of the Big Swing
C4 Energy Cereal Killer just landed at 12,000+ 7-Eleven and Speedway stores nationwide. What started as a limited Halloween drop proved so popular it earned permanent status and massive retail expansion.
Ben notes that C4 products come up more on this podcast than anything else, and two moments stand out. The Cereal Killer flavor, which Mike has called the greatest energy drink flavor ever, launched as a limited 7-Eleven exclusive. Mike notes a LinkedIn post where he laughs at the irony of Nutrabolt's professionalism, all to be bested by a flavor that "literally murdered two other flavors off of the C4 lineup". Doss admits he was skeptical at first. It became C4's highest-velocity SKU by a large margin and is heading to broader distribution.
Ben also brings up C4 Dynasty, a loaded, kitchen-sink pre-workout that he argues was simply poorly timed rather than poorly made. Doss agrees. Then there's M5 Extreme. Mike explains that it was a dual-layer tub with stimulants in the top portion and a mass-building section below, and Doss says it was an early personal experience with Cellucor. Doss's tease when asked about a comeback: "maybe we're already working on it."
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50:45 - C4 AlphaBomb and Deura9™ Caffeine
C4 AlphaBomb is the most technically ambitious product in the C4 pre-workout lineup. It features Deura9™ (d9-Caffeine), a deuterated caffeine molecule that delivers significantly higher peak exposure and longer-lasting energy than standard caffeine. It's C4's highest-stim formula to date, priced above $50.
The premium price limits reach, so Nutrabolt is launching C4 AlphaBomb Sport, a more accessible version with broader distribution targeting a late-summer to early-fall 2026 rollout. The goal is to get Deura9™'s innovation in front of a wider audience at a price point that doesn't require a second thought. Doss says real marketing investment is going behind it, not just a quiet direct-to-consumer drop.
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52:00 - C4 Energy Redesign and Reformulation
Nutrabolt takes pre-workout innovation to new heights with C4 Alpha Bomb featuring Deura9 d9-Caffeine -- a deuterated caffeine molecule that delivers 4x higher exposure and longer-lasting energy than regular caffeine. This is unlike any pre-workout we've ever tried!
Doss walked through big changes to the C4 Energy lineup. The most significant: beta-alanine is reduced in the energy drink can. Research showed the paresthesia (tingling) sensation was pushing users away at a far higher rate than it was retaining loyal ones, and removing it could open up a market three times larger. Heavy users, when surveyed, didn't value beta-alanine inclusion as much as the team assumed (we can get it in nearly any pre-workout or standalone anyway).
The visual refresh runs parallel. The Bomber mascot is going wider across packaging and apparel. C4 Ultimate Energy got a clarity fix: yellow now signals the standard 200mg can and black signals Ultimate at 300mg, cleaning up years of brand confusion. Frozen Bombsicle and Cherry Cola are already posting velocity gains under the new design, and smaller-format C4 cans are on the horizon.
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57:30 - C4 Smart Energy: The Sleeping Giant
C4 Smart Energy is off traditional retail shelves, and Doss says that was a necessary reset. Nutrabolt stretched itself trying to run Yellow, Ultimate, and Smart simultaneously, and Smart suffered for it. It's now being rebuilt with a digital-first approach, a handful of intentionally selected beachhead retail accounts, and a new can design that's already complete.
The long-term bet looks to compete with lighter-branded cans like Celsius, but with better functional ingredients (aka "Smart"). Powered by Cognizin® citicoline and positioned squarely in cognitive performance, Doss calls Smart Energy the brand's "sleeping giant". The cognitive supplement category isn't going away, and he expects 2027 to 2028 to be when Smart Energy makes its full push. When it does, he says, people will start talking about it.
This was a great conversation, and the guys could go on talking about flavors forever, but Doss's time is valuable and the team closes there, ready for another trip to Austin anytime.
Where to Follow and Learn More
Connect with Doss Cunningham and Nutrabolt
- Doss Cunningham on LinkedIn
- Cellucor on Instagram: @cellucor
- C4 Energy on Instagram: @c4energy
- Nutrabolt on LinkedIn
- Cellucor Official Website
- Nutrabolt Official Website
- Cellucor on PricePlow (sign up for news and price alerts)
Resources Mentioned
- Cellucor Longevity Creatine + NAD+ - the launch that triggered this conversation
- C4 AlphaBomb™ (Deura9™ Caffeine) - C4's highest-stim pre-workout with deuterated caffeine
- C4 Energy Cereal Killer Flavor - Mike's pick for greatest energy drink flavor ever
- PeptiPump® by Nuritas - AI-discovered pump peptide, exclusive to C4
- Cellucor Vitality (Collagen Peptides + Creatine) - the follow-up to Longevity Creatine in the Active Health & Wellness line
- C4 Sport 5th Generation - NSF Certified for Sport upgrade
Thanks to Doss Cunningham for making time and giving us a rare look inside the Nutrabolt machine. With the Cellucor rebrand underway, C4 Energy pushing hard on market share, and both AlphaBomb Sport and Smart Energy on the horizon, there's no shortage of news ahead. Keep your alerts on.
A big thanks to Perfect Shaker for sponsoring this episode. They're putting a laser-etched shaker in Doss's hands as we speak. Check out their lineup at PerfectShaker.com, and if you want to hear the full Perfect Shaker story, catch our conversation with founder Darren Thompson in Episode #209.
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