The Start of a New Adventure
I am Bart Harmsen, the founder of BYE Nutrition. About ten years ago I started this adventure with my business partner Melvin Drissen. Now that we have had our products in stores for eight years, I would like to share again how it all started.
My Life on the Bicycle
My original plan was never to start a sports nutrition brand. At the time I was a professional cyclist, representing the Netherlands both on the road and on the track. For seven years I rode for the national selection up to the U23 category and spent the last two years as a semi-professional road cyclist and as a professional track cyclist. During that time I became Dutch champion five times, participated in World Championships, and won several World Cups.
Challenges with Traditional Sports Nutrition
I always had the dream of being among the top road and track cyclists. Although I did not have the greatest physical talent, I was driven to belong to the top and made sure everything around it was perfect. Nutrition and training were crucial; my training sessions were supervised internally by the Dutch selection, but for my nutrition I had to arrange a lot myself or rely on what the team provided. Especially sports nutrition was a tricky issue. Over the years I have tried many different brands and what I noticed is that especially at multi-day races, where we ate only sports nutrition for 7 hours, I, my teammates, and basically half the peloton had stomach problems after a few days. This was bound to affect our performance!
The Solution: The Beginning of BYE Nutrition
Driven by the need to solve these problems, I delved into the world of sports nutrition. I discovered that many products were heavily chemically processed and consisted mainly of simple sugars,dyes, and chemical ingredients. This inspired me to develop my own sports nutrition: how could I make sports nutrition consisting of multiple forms of carbohydrates, not chemically processed, and using more pure ingredients? After several months and developing, I started with bars-our Endurance Bar, 100% natural, a mix of slow and fast carbohydrates. Not much later followed with our isotonic sports drink, 100% natural flavored and free of chemical dyes or flavors. Then kw
amen there were soon more products and my teammates also got wind of it and wanted to use this nutrition too, so we had to scale up. A year later, there were 20 teams-hard running, triathlon, or cycling-with my nutrition. All in silver foil packaging, 20kg bags of isotonic powder and shots with no logos. Often these teams were sponsored by other brands but bought the nutrition from me. For me this was not a problem because I had no brand or logo anyway. In these 2 years I was able to continue developing the products with all the teams by asking for feedback each time and seeing how products could be better. Today we still work the same way and a product is often tested by ambassadors and top athletes for 1.5 years before we release anything.
From Silver foil to Shop shelves
A few years later, I quit cycling and Melvin and I started BYE Nutrition, which stands for Boost Your Energy, together. Melvin handled sales and I handled development and marketing. Now, 8 years later, our products are in 50 stores and we have been able to make a lot of people happy with our products. For me, something I could never have imagined 10 years ago.
