The True Cost of Upholding The Momentous Standard®

Kendall Zylstra

September 22, 2026

The Momentous Standard® is our relentless pursuit of better, and the proof is in the decisions we make to uphold it.

That has meant discontinuing a best-seller, going months without our multivitamin in stock, walking away from a creatine that was already winning, and destroying finished product instead of letting it reach customers.

Quality doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of hundreds of decisions most people will never see, measured against three pillars: Science, Sourcing, and Certification. Here is what a few of those decisions actually cost us.

Why We Stopped Selling One of Our Best Sellers

Every year, we put our entire product range under review. And the question is always the same: does the evidence still support this product, at this dose, with these ingredients?

In 2024, Fadogia failed that review. It was one of our best selling products, and our science team concluded that the growing body of research no longer met our standard.

So we stopped selling it. We didn’t quietly work through the remaining inventory or wait for demand to cool off first, because science isn’t a tool we use to justify the products we already want to sell. It decides what we are willing to offer in the first place.

“It wasn’t a hard decision. It was the right decision,” as our CEO & Co-founder Jeff Byers put it.

We Had a Winning Creatine. We Replaced It Anyway.

Our previous creatine wasn’t broken. It was already one of the best on the market, and nobody was asking us to change it. But we saw an opportunity to go further, and we had to pursue it.

Instead of building around an existing creatine source, we went the other direction: we wrote the specification first, then searched for a partner capable of meeting it.

Matt Chorney, our VP of Innovation, set the threshold at no change being too small. “If we found an area that we thought we could improve, even if it’s to the microgram level, we wanted to pursue it.” Rather than focusing on a new format, like gummies, gels, or flavor systems, the work focused on improving the creatine ingredient itself.

The search led us to a pharmaceutical facility that was willing and able to meet our standard. Momentous® Signature Spec™ Creatine has 10x fewer impurities and 2–5x stricter heavy-metal limits than other premium creatines, plus expanded screening for PFAS and microplastics.

We didn’t make the change because our old creatine failed our standard. We made it because we found an opportunity to raise it.

We Destroy Finished Product When It Misses the Mark

The first time it happened, Matt Chorney was standing at a track meet.

“I got a phone call from our advisor at the time saying that we needed to talk about some recent protein results,” he says. “I remember my heart and stomach just absolutely dropped.” The cause turned out to be a slight shortfall against label claim, traced back to natural variance in the potency of the raw material from one lot to the next. We rebuilt the product with overages so it couldn’t happen again.

The product itself never made it to a customer, because that’s what happens when a finished product doesn’t meet our standard. Five production lots failed NSF testing in the last 12 months, and every one of them was destroyed.

Sometimes the cost shows up as an empty shelf instead. When three consecutive production runs of Essential Multi failed because of one ingredient, we chose to go out of stock for months and accept the lost sales, rather than release it without certification.

None of that is comfortable, but it’s necessary to uphold the level of quality and consistency we built The Momentous Standard® on. NSF Certified for Sport® is administered by NSF, an independent third-party organization we neither run nor influence. We either pass the certification, or we fix what failed and test it again.

Why the Standard Has Three Pillars, In That Order

Plenty of brands rely on science, many source carefully, and some invest in independent third-party certification.

True quality comes from consistently hitting all three. Fadogia met our sourcing and certification requirements, but the science stopped progressing. So, it had to go. Essential Multi got through science and sourcing, then sat in a warehouse waiting to pass certification. Signature Spec™ Creatine is the result of all three working together in pursuit of a new industry benchmark.

We do all three, in that order, every single time. It’s a standard we choose to hold ourselves to, even when it would be easier not to. It’s worth it to deliver a product we would take ourselves.

It’s Not the Industry Standard

Every decision described here cost us more than the alternative. And in every case, there was an easier option. We’ll always choose the one that upholds our standard.

That’s what it means to live The Momentous Standard®. Science determines what we make. Sourcing pushes us to make it the best it can be. Independent third-party certification verifies that the finished product meets the standard we set. And when any one of those pillars tells us there’s more work to do, we do it.

Because a standard only means something if you’re willing to uphold it. That’s The Momentous Standard®.

See how The Momentous Standard® shapes every product we make