A drawback of the increasing popularity of endurance sports is the huge amount of plastic packaging waste they generate. When creating our own sports nutrition brand, we decided to start with the product category with the greatest number of consumer pain points: energy gels, which are consumed during sports activity to maintain and boost performance. In addition to their single use plastic packaging, which is unfortunately often discarded on the ground outdoors, they typically contain unhealthy, synthetic ingredients which provide sub-optimal sports performance and cause digestive issues, and hard-to-use, unhygienic packet designs. Thanks to the Metamorfosis project, we have created our own brand of sports nutrition, WIN IT, which addresses these issues. Furthermore, when we designed the project, the European Parliament was set to prohibit the use of many single use plastics in 2021 (it did), yet we found that there was no home compostable packaging on the market which was suitable for long-life semi-liquid products, so we developed our own under the Metamorfosis Project, filling an important gap in the packaging market, which we are able to license to third parties, in addition to using it for our own sports nutrition products. We wanted our packaging to be home compostable, as it is a type of biodegradable packaging which composts at ambient temperature so that, while we will always discourage this behaviour, if it’s discarded in nature, it will compost, adding nutrients to the soil. The preferred ways to discard it are in a city organic waste bin or by literally composting it at home. Plastic can take up to 1,000 years to decompose and, according to UN Secretary-General A. Guterres. Our project is important for society because of the contribution it makes to reducing the presence of single use plastic both in sports nutrition and other sectors. Furthermore, the World Health Organisation estimates that 62% of Europeans are overweight and 25% are obese.Our products, which offer elite sports performance, only contain wholesome, natural ingredients and no refined sugar. Finally, according to Nature, some EU states are losing as much as one third of their bee colonies per year, yet bees play a crucial role for the planet and in our food supply. As we use bee products in some of our formulations, we have committed to donating 1% of revenues to the EU-wide bee protection organisation BeeLife.
