Joey Savage, founder of Savage Nutra and President of Future Nutra Foundation, previews the first-ever Future Nutra Innovation Summit and introduces Tensia, a nitric oxide-producing probiotic, on Episode #233 of the PricePlow Podcast.
Joey Savage returns for Episode #233 of the PricePlow Podcast, and he's got two announcements stacked on top of each other:
- First: the inaugural Future Nutra Innovation Summit (FNIS), a September 9-11 blend of trade show, educational summit, and lake resort retreat that Joey's nonprofit built from scratch.
- Second: Savage Nutra's newest ingredient deal, Tensia, a probiotic strain that produces its own nitric oxide from dietary nitrates and already has a home in Alpha Lion's newly relaunched SuperHuman Jacked.
Ben and Mike get the full download on both. Joey walks through what makes FNIS different from a typical trade show (hint: it's built more like a tech company retreat than a supply-side booth crawl), then pivots into the science behind Tensia, a second ingredient made from upcycled duckweed protein, and where strain-specific probiotics are headed next.
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https://blog.priceplow.com/podcast/joey-savage-fnis-tensia-233
Video: Future Nutra Innovation Summit and the Launch of Tensia
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:11:54 — 69.4MB)
Detailed Show Notes: Joey Savage on FNIS, Tensia, and Savage Nutra’s Pipeline
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0:00 - Introductions
Joey joins Ben and Mike, a combination we haven't seen since he first launched Savage Nutra as a standalone consulting operation in Episode #129. He's juggling two major updates this time: the countdown to the first-ever Future Nutra Innovation Summit, just over a week away, and a new round of ingredient distribution news out of Savage Nutra. The trio decides to tackle the summit first since it sets up the ingredient conversation that follows, and Mike wastes no time with the pitch: there's still time to book a flight to Houston.
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1:45 - What Is the Future Nutra Innovation Summit?
Joey explains FNIS from the top. He and the team have attended plenty of industry trade shows and wanted to build something that borrows the best parts of a few different event formats without copying any of them entirely. The result blends a small trade show, a major networking event, and an educational summit, capped at roughly 300 attendees so the room stays full of the people actually building brands, ingredients, and manufacturing capacity rather than a mass-market crowd.
Joey describes it as a curated cross-section of the industry: vendors, contract manufacturers, brand owners, and regulatory people all in the same rooms and hallways.
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3:45 - Innovation as the Benchmark, Not Just Networking
Joey frames the whole event around product development as the leading indicator of where the industry is headed, with effects that trickle down into quality systems, manufacturing capacity, and regulatory policy. He wants FNIS to help the industry plan 20 to 30 years out, not just react to what's already on shelves.
That framing extends to how much has changed since DSHEA became law in 1994. Joey sees FNIS laying some early groundwork for what dietary supplement regulation and quality standards should look like in the decades ahead, rather than treating the current framework as fixed.
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4:15 - A Lake Resort Built for Serendipity
The venue is a big part of the pitch. FNIS takes place at Margaritaville Lake Conroe, a resort with a water park, a lazy river, and boat and jet ski rentals, giving attendees a reason to linger instead of rushing between meetings. Joey and the team made a point of not scheduling any formal meetings during the show, filling the time instead with trade show floor access, an educational series, and the first-ever Pumps Games, a fitness competition inspired by Diana Morgan's What's Up With Pumps networking workouts.
The schedule also includes a DJ and karaoke on the final night, a Day Zero welcome reception on September 8, and breakfast and lunch provided every day of the show.
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6:30 - Borrowing From Tech Retreats, Not Trade Shows
Joey says he looked outside the supplement industry for inspiration, specifically at how companies like Sony and Apple run their own retreats and product reveals. Several brands are using FNIS to unveil new technology and launches they haven't shown publicly before, and Joey chose not to share attendee contact lists ahead of time so sales teams can't pre-plan meetings the way they would at a typical trade show.
The goal is unplanned, serendipitous conversations instead, the kind that happen at the pool, in an elevator, or in line for the bathroom, between people who may have seen each other at shows for years but never actually met.
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8:15 - TED-Style Access and a Skeleton Crew
Programming includes sit-down Q&A sessions where attendees can step up to a microphone and ask a CEO anything, including Dan Lourenço of Ghost. Ben traces the idea back to a phrase Mike coined in 2020, the "Sturgis of Supplements", and a later conversation that pushed the idea forward. Ben is candid that building FNIS turned out to be exactly as much work as he feared, credited almost entirely to a small, skeleton crew led by Joey.
Joey says if the show goes well, credit goes to the whole Future Nutra team. If anything goes wrong, he wants the complaints directed at him.
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10:15 - The Flavor Competition: A Chopped-Style Showdown
One of the show's signature events is a flavor competition modeled after cooking-competition TV. Three application scientists get 30 minutes to formulate, flavor, color, carbonate, and can a beverage from scratch, then present it to a panel of flavor chemists who judge on taste, pH, and market viability. Industry regulars, including Joey and Ben, will heckle the competitors while they work.
The stakes are real: the winner takes home a custom, WWE-style championship belt, and Joey promises the runner-up won't walk away empty-handed either.
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12:15 - A Nonprofit Built to Fund the Research Gap
FNIS is produced by Future Nutra Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means sponsorships and ticket purchases can be tax-deductible for attending companies. Joey describes the event as a biennial fundraiser that helps the Foundation fund third-party testing of off-the-shelf products and research that connects mechanistic data to real human outcomes.
He points to what he calls the "valley of death" in supplement science: ingredients with strong cell or animal data but no human trials, or human trials that show an effect without any clear mechanism behind it. Future Nutra's research grants aim to fund whichever side of that gap is missing.
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15:15 - Planning for a Second (and Third) Edition
Joey and Ben discuss what happens if the first FNIS lands well. Joey wants to run at least three editions before considering bringing in outside help or handing the event to someone else, and he's committed to keeping it small rather than letting it balloon the way larger trade shows tend to over time. Running the show every two years, rather than annually, is itself part of that plan, since Joey doesn't see a way to sustain an annual cadence on top of his day job.
He expects the second edition to benefit from lessons learned at the first, without losing the relaxed, unhurried pace that's core to the concept.
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17:15 - Building a Showcase-Worthy Production
Joey is most excited about the main plenary stage, where he's personally planning lighting, entrance choreography, and how speakers get announced as they walk out. It's a departure from his usual reputation in the industry as a formulator, and he's leaning into it. For a future edition, he'd like to push the production even further with pyrotechnics and jumbotrons if the event's growth supports it.
Mike points out that because FNIS isn't a for-profit venture, spending on production doesn't come directly out of anyone's margin the way it would at a typical brand-run event.
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19:15 - Getting to FNIS: Flights, Hotels, and Registration
Joey Savage joins Team PricePlow for Episode 129 of the PricePlow Podcast to discuss the launch of Savage Nutra, his novel consulting company
For anyone booking last-minute, Joey lays out the logistics. Fly into George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH), about a 45-minute rideshare from Margaritaville Lake Conroe. Registration for updates runs through an inquiry form at futurenutra.org/fnis, which Joey or his colleague Liz follow up on personally rather than through an automated system.
Day Zero, September 8, is mostly setup with a welcome reception starting at 5:30pm and badge pickup opening at 5:00pm, including two drink tickets per attendee. The main plenary kicks off at 9:00am on September 9, so Joey is encouraging people to pace themselves on that first night.
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21:45 - A Cross-Section of the Industry, Backed by a Nonprofit
Ben expects the show's real impact to surface well after it wraps, once attendees reflect on who they met. FNIS brings together manufacturing and ingredient people who'd normally only see each other at supply-side shows with the marketing and sales crowd from events like the Arnold, plus trade media and regulatory voices like Dan Fabricant.
Ben also credits Informa, the company behind Expo West and SupplySide, with validating the event after confirming early on that FNIS wouldn't compete with existing trade shows. Because Future Nutra is a nonprofit, Ben says it opens doors that wouldn't otherwise be available, comparing the access to a PricePlow comment section where competitors can rub shoulders without a sales pitch attached.
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26:15 - From FNIS to Savage Nutra: Introducing Tensia
With FNIS covered, the conversation shifts to what Joey's distributing through Savage Nutra. His FNIS booth includes a six-and-a-half-foot hologram featuring Tensia, the newest ingredient in his portfolio. Joey's first placement for it landed inside Alpha Lion's SuperHuman Jacked, which the brand's Darin Decker discussed on the podcast's SuperHuman relaunch episode.
Joey compares explaining Tensia to a new hire versus explaining something familiar like citrulline, which converts to arginine and then nitric oxide, the mechanism most pump-focused supplement users already understand. Tensia works differently, and Joey has to build that understanding from scratch with people new to the ingredient.
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28:15 - How Tensia Produces Nitric Oxide From the Inside
TENSIA is a bacterial strain that lives in the gut and secretes peptides and enzymes that support vasodilation, the widening of blood vessels that improves circulation during exercise. Joey connects that mechanism to both a sports nutrition angle, better nutrient and oxygen delivery during training, and a broader cardiovascular angle, since the same pathway is associated with healthy blood pressure.
The explanation requires walking through nitric oxide basics that go beyond what most consumers already know from citrulline-based pre-workouts, including how nitrates, nitrites, and nitric oxide relate to each other along parallel pathways in the body.
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30:00 - Skipping the Two-Hour Wait for Nitrate Conversion
The core of Tensia's mechanism is an intrinsic nitrate reductase enzyme, something the human body doesn't produce on its own. Normally, dietary nitrates from foods like beets or cured meats get absorbed, secreted into the mouth, converted to nitrite by oral bacteria, and finally converted to nitric oxide, a round trip that Joey says takes about two hours under ideal conditions.
Tensia can perform both conversion steps, nitrate to nitrite and nitrite to nitric oxide, directly in the gut. Joey says that once Tensia is established, he no longer needs the hour-plus pre-workout timing routine he used to rely on to line up his nitrate intake with peak pump.
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32:15 - From an Estonian Cheese to a US Sports Nutrition Debut
Tensia traces back to an Estonian research group that isolated the strain from a child's gut in 1995 and first commercialized it in a functional cheese product. Joey found the strain while digging through scientific journals and reached out to license US distribution rights.
The strain is formally Lactobacillus plantarum TENSIA (DSM 21380). Its published safety program included laboratory testing, an animal model, and three-week human interventions across different age groups. The investigators reported no harmful effects at the tested doses, although the human research delivered TENSIA through probiotic cheese rather than a powdered sports-nutrition formula.[1]
He also sees potential synergy pairing Tensia's ACE-1 inhibiting peptides with ACE-2 inhibitors like VasoDrive-AP, since the two work on different isoforms of the same blood-pressure-regulating pathway.
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36:15 - Is the Gut Becoming a Precision Fermentation Factory?
Joey frames Tensia through the lens of precision fermentation, except the fermentation happens inside the consumer's own gut instead of in a bioreactor. Open questions remain: whether Tensia's output changes based on diet, whether colonization is semi-permanent once established, and whether the strain can transfer its nitrate reductase genes to other gut bacteria through horizontal gene transfer.
Lactobacillus plantarum is a common, well-tolerated resident of the human gut, unlike rarer colonizers that need very specific dietary conditions to take hold. Joey notes that a course of antibiotics works as a practical off switch if anyone wanted to clear the strain, and the supplier's documentation even specifies which antibiotics work.
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40:15 - Z-Biotics and the Case for Designer Probiotics
Joey brings up Z-Biotics as a comparison point for how far genetically engineered probiotics have already come. The company uses CRISPR to modify probiotic strains for specific functions, including one that converts acetaldehyde into acetone to reduce hangover symptoms and another that converts free sugars into fiber in the gut. Both products are already commercially available.
Peptides are having a moment in sports nutrition. VasoDrive-AP® didn't arrive with the wave. It's been a clinically studied cardiovascular ingredient for 30 years, and a new 2026 study finally tests it for muscle pump in lifters.
Joey finds the fiber-converting strain more interesting than the hangover strain, since it addresses blood sugar spikes rather than simply removing consequences from another behavior. He sees Tensia sitting in the same category of purpose-built, mechanism-driven probiotics rather than general-purpose gut health strains.
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42:00 - Building Effects Over Time
Joey expects some benefit from a single dose of TENSIA, but believes the bigger payoff comes from consistent daily use. He discusses 20-milligram and 80-milligram commercial doses, with the higher amount costing notably more to produce and therefore being more likely to appear in single-ingredient or minimally dosed products.
Importantly, the published human trials presently available report TENSIA exposure in CFU through probiotic cheese or yogurt—not as 20- or 80-milligram doses of powdered raw material.[1-3] SuperHuman Jacked sits at the lower end of Joey's commercial dosing range, while Joey personally supplements closer to 80 milligrams.
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44:00 - Joey's Own Regimen: 80mg Plus Nitrates
Joey personally takes roughly four times SuperHuman Jacked's Tensia dose, closer to the 80mg amount he favors personally, alongside a separate 500mg dose of dietary nitrates later in the day. He describes noticing a distinct vasodilation effect from the nitrate dose once Tensia is established in his system.
He's been consistent with Tensia for the past three to four months, after first experimenting with it years earlier while working at Glaxon, and says his body composition has shifted noticeably in that window, with muscle replacing fat at a stable overall weight.
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45:45 - Keeping a Powdered Probiotic Alive and Stable
Formulating Tensia into a powder requires roughly 50% overage to account for die-off during shelf life, so a 20mg label claim requires about 30mg of raw material at manufacturing. Capsules with strong desiccants, like calcium silicate and silicon dioxide, hold up best, and Joey also mentions CSP-line stick packs as another viable delivery format.
Zooming out, Joey explains that probiotics ship on ice to keep them dormant, since the strains grow fastest near human body temperature. He adds that live and dead cells often work together in a finished product, borrowing a line from a mentor: every probiotic study is arguably a postbiotic study, since not every organism in the dose survives to do its job alive.
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48:45 - CFU, AFU, and the Push for Better Potency Testing
Joey and Ben discuss the limits of colony forming units (CFU), the standard label metric for probiotic potency, which relies on plate counts that don't always match what a lab test later finds in the bottle. That gap is well known within the International Probiotics Association, which Joey and Ben attended a meeting of at a past SupplySide show.
Darin Decker, VP of Sales at Alpha Lion, joins the show to unveil the brand's all-new red SuperHuman lineup and the debut of a novel ingredient called Tensia on Episode #228 of the PricePlow Podcast.
An emerging alternative counts individual cells directly through flow cytometry rather than growing colonies on a plate. Joey sees it as a more accurate, QA-friendly way to verify potency, since it accounts for natural die-off over a product's shelf life rather than assuming every labeled cell survives.
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51:45 - The Shift Toward Designer, Strain-Specific Probiotics
Ben notes that mainstream probiotic consumers still buy based on the category alone, without checking which species or strain is actually in the bottle. Joey has predicted on the show for years that the industry would move toward specialty, strain-specific probiotics instead of generic lactobacillus blends, and he sees that shift finally underway among more advanced consumers.
He compares it to how the public came around to accepting a gut microbiome exists at all before it could ever accept the idea of customizing it. Functional probiotics remain a niche for now, mostly biohackers and competitive athletes, rather than a mainstream purchase decision.
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54:15 - Not His Whole Career, and Shipped Fresh From Estonia
Asked whether functional probiotics are becoming his primary focus, Joey says it's a niche he finds interesting enough to champion, but not the entirety of what he wants to build long term. On the logistics side, Savage Nutra doesn't warehouse Tensia domestically, which would otherwise require dedicated temperature-controlled storage. Every shipment instead comes directly from Estonia on ice via air freight, along with the import paperwork required to bring a foreign bacterial strain into the United States for human consumption, a process Joey says is more involved than most people would expect.
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55:45 - The Clinical Evidence So Far (and What's Still Needed)
Joey walks through the evidence we have so far. Published safety work confirmed that the ingested strain could be recovered after probiotic-cheese consumption, supporting its ability to survive passage through the gastrointestinal tract.[1] A three-week program in healthy adults reported reductions in systolic and diastolic blood pressure when TENSIA was delivered through either cheese or yogurt.[2]
The broader blood-pressure evidence is more preliminary, however. An obese-hypertensive pilot didn't easily demonstrate a TENSIA-specific blood-pressure benefit between groups, although detection of the strain was associated with blood-pressure changes.[3] Mike brings this up in the next section. EFSA's 2014 assessment concluded that the evidence available at that time did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship for maintaining normal blood pressure, citing methodological limitations and the absence of an established mechanism.[4]
The clearest gap for us is athlete-specific data. Joey's goal working with TENSIA's supplier is funding a dedicated athletic-performance study to measure what the strain can do both alone and stacked with dietary nitrates, since the existing human research has focused on cardiovascular, metabolic, and general safety outcomes rather than exercise performance.
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57:15 - Why Gut Health Baseline Matters for Colonization
Uday Gosalia, founder of UGo Beyond, joins Ben and Joey Savage on the US Capitol steps during the NPA's 2026 Fly-In Day, discussing Mandatory Product Listing, minor supplement access, and the case for consistent DC advocacy on Episode #220 of the PricePlow Podcast.
Mike raises a detail from the obese-hypertensive pilot: TENSIA was detected after the intervention in 16 of the 25 participants receiving probiotic cheese, or 64%, meaning nine had no detectable strain,[3] signaling bad health. Joey proposes baseline gut health (including biofilms, dysbiosis, and yeast overgrowth) as one possible explanation, while floating a caprylic-acid protocol as something a future study could investigate. That explanation remains Joey's hypothesis rather than a conclusion established by the trial.
He frames the gut as a set of distinct biomes, comparing the skin, colonic, small intestinal, and jejunal environments to different ecosystems that each favor different bacterial populations, which is part of why healthier individuals tend to respond more predictably to probiotic supplementation than sicker ones.
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1:02:00 - A Second Ingredient: Upcycled Greens From Duckweed
Savage Nutra's second ingredient comes from an unlikely source: duckweed. Plantible Foods extracts Rubi Protein, a complete, allergen-free protein used as a vegan egg white replacement, from lemna (duckweed) at its production facility in Eldorado, Texas. Joey is distributing the upcycled byproduct left over from that extraction process as a greens ingredient, which he says carries notable levels of trace nutrients including iron, a highly bioavailable form of vitamin B12, and the carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin.
Unlike Tensia, this ingredient has no human clinical trials behind it. Joey positions it as a nutrient-dense superfood addition for greens powders based on its composition rather than any specific studied outcome, and says Plantible has raised well into the tens of millions of dollars to scale production.
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1:06:15 - How Joey Picks What He'll Distribute
Joey describes himself as curating his ingredient portfolio rather than taking on whatever comes his way. He'd rather pitch a supplier on something he's genuinely excited about than field pitches from suppliers looking for distribution, and any inbound pitch would need to win him over before he'd take it on.
Both of his current ingredients took years to land: five years from discovering Tensia to securing distribution rights, and two to three years working with Plantible Foods before they agreed to the duckweed greens deal. Joey confirms two more functional probiotic strains are already in his pipeline, though he isn't ready to name them yet.
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1:09:15 - Closing: Sample Tensia at FNIS
Attendees at FNIS can grab a free capsule of Tensia at Joey's booth, dosed at the full 80mg amount, with a chance a few other functional probiotics make an appearance too. Ben and Mike wrap up excited for both the show and a planned deeper dive on Tensia once product samples arrive.
Joey has one more update: Savage Nutra's own website is getting a relaunch around the same time as the show, alongside the existing futurenutra.org hub for FNIS.
Where to Follow and Learn More
Connect with Joey Savage and Savage Nutra
- LinkedIn: Joey Savage
- Instagram: @savagenutra
- Savage Nutra on PricePlow - Sign up for news alerts
- savagenutra.com
Connect with Future Nutra Foundation
Resources Mentioned
- Joey Savage Launches Savage Nutra Consulting | Episode #129
- SuperHuman Goes Red: Darin Decker Reveals Alpha Lion's New Pre-Workouts | Episode #228
- Darren Thompson: Inside PerfectShaker | Episode #209
Products Discussed
Thanks for tuning in to Episode #233! Joey, we'll see you in Houston. Congrats on FNIS, and we can't wait to dig deeper into Tensia once samples land.
Thanks to Perfect Shaker for sponsoring the episode. Check out their shaker cup lineup at PricePlow.com/perfect-shaker.
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