provide the optimum balance of quality and price. On that score, the winner in LabDoor’s tests was MuscleTech’s Nitro-Tech whey isolate. The bottom-ranked product on the value scale was Shakeology’s meal replacement shake. The company plans to publish a scientific paper on its price-and-quality findings.
For Thanedar, testing is in the family. His father ran a commercial chemistry lab, and Thanedar set off in the same direction after graduating from the University of Michigan, opening a product-safety lab where he did fee-for-service chemical analyses for supplement manufacturers. “But at some point last year I decided that the process was too frustrating,” he recounts. “I couldn’t tell my friends what was in the supplements we were reverse-engineering. The only information that came out was when two products sued each other. I wanted to find a way to give the information directly to consumers.”
At a startup competition in Indianapolis, Thanedar met a trio of Brazilian entrepreneurs—Rafael Ferreira, Tercio Junker, and Helton Souza—who were working on a website to help pork-industry insiders organize pig shows and pig breeding. After they heard about Thanedar talk about the need for a consumer-facing product testing lab for nutritional supplements, they decided to drop the pig-keeping idea, drive overnight to Ann Arbor, and help him start LabDoor.
The company moved to San Francisco to join the winter 2012 session at Rock Health, the health-focused startup accelerator, and went on to raise $1 million in seed funding. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is the largest backer. Other investors include Band of Angels, Practice Fusion co-founder Matt Douglass, and the Rock Health Fund established by Aberdare Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Mayo Clinic, and Mohr Davidow.
“LabDoor was a good fit for Rock Health because they had a compelling idea and a phenomenal team to make it happen,” says Halle Tecco, Rock Health’s founder and CEO. “We’re excited about LabDoor’s positioning as the trusted source for information and transparency in this massive, growing market.”
Non-paying visitors to LabDoor’s website and users of its free iOS app can see testing summaries for each product the company has evaluated, including quality and value rankings. Jay Robb’s Whey Protein, for example, ranks sixth in quality out of the 50 protein products the company has tested, and 42nd in value. Premium subscribers can see more information, including ratings and detailed analyses of label accuracy, manufacturing purity, nutritional value, ingredient safety, and projected efficacy (based on published studies of the health effects of individual ingredients).
It takes a while to gather all that information and assemble it into concise reports, which is why LabDoor is limiting the volume of reports, for now, to 50 per month or 600 per year. On top of that, the company plans to re-test the products already in its database every year. “We want to prove we have the deepest information in specific columns,” Thanedar says. “That is what is going to help us build our brand. Then we will build toward breadth.”
Within a couple of years, he hopes, the company will have reports for virtually every supplement found in most sports nutrition shops. About 1,000 products account for 80 percent of sales at GNC, the leading chain selling vitamins and supplements.
Among major publications, only Consumer Reports has offered this kind of information directly to consumers in the past, and it has paid only sporadic attention to the supplement market. Last year, for example, it tested caffeine levels in 27 energy drinks. (5-Hour Energy Extra Strength contained the most caffeine in CR’s tests, at 242 milligrams per serving—but that’s still less caffeine than you can get in a grande medium roast at Starbuck’s.) “They very haphazardly come into the space, but it’s not their key focus,” says Thanedar. “We can have higher-utility, easier-to-understand reports than Consumer Reports for all of the products in our database.”
The overall goal at LabDoor isn’t to put low-quality supplement makers out of business, or to persuade consumers that they should stop buying energy drinks or protein powders. Rather, it’s to help shoppers past “analysis paralysis”—the problem of sifting through all the options on nutrition-store shelves—and to gently steer them toward the highest-rated products, that is, the ones more likely to have accurate labels and safe, efficacious ingredients.
“There are low-quality, expensive products and high-quality, cheap products,” says Thanedar. There are also low-quality, cheap products and high-quality, expensive products—“all four quadrants are represented” in a big store like a GNC outlet, Thanedar says. Considering how much some sports and fitness enthusiasts spend on the supplements they’re pouring into their bodies, $50 per year may not be too much to pay for help making smarter decisions.
