PROFILE: DRINK WHOLESOME

Company founder Jack Schrupp ’14 offers protein powders made with natural ingredients — that also taste good

IAN ALDRICH

Jack Schrupp ’14 was a student-athlete at Williams College, where he rowed and ski-raced, when he hit the wall with mass-produced protein supplements. Not only did they taste bad, he says, they also didn’t make him feel particularly good. There had to be a better way.

“I wanted something that was made with real food,” says Schrupp, a Gilford, New Hampshire, native who now lives in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, where he teaches French at a private high school. “That means food close to nature that you could go into the woods or a field and pick up and eat. A lot of the protein powders have this awful chalky taste. The good stuff has been stripped out, so you end up masking the flavor with peanut butter or ice cream. All of a sudden, you’ve got something else entirely.”

Schrupp got to work, turning the kitchen of his rented college house into a laboratory as he sourced and experimented with ingredients. The trips to the local health food store were never-ending, as was the process of recipe refinement.

“It’s not as easy as throwing a bunch of things together in a blender,” he says with a laugh. “I made a lot of batches that didn’t taste very good.”

But, as Schrupp tweaked his recipes and shared his concoctions with friends, he realized he wasn’t the only athlete looking for a better post-workout supplement. In early 2020, Schrupp launched the limited-ingredient protein-powder company Drink Wholesome with two flavors, mocha and peanut butter.

Then came chaos. Three weeks after Drink Wholesome’s debut, the pandemic hit, and Schrupp had to reorient his business model. There would be no events to showcase his product; no one-on-ones with store owners to talk about what he’d created. Then, an interesting thing happened as Schrupp navigated a rocky business climate: He shifted his focus to e-commerce and discovered a much wider market than he’d ever imagined.

“I came into this thinking I was making something for high-level athletes, but it turns out there are all these other people who are just looking for more simplicity in what they eat,” says the 25-year-old. “They are drawn to our ingredients — egg whites, coconut, maple sugar — because they are things they recognize. It’s people who are careful about what they eat, but also people who have certain medical conditions and they just can’t digest the stuff that goes into the other protein powders.”

Today, Drink Wholesome sells eight flavors, including a new vegan vanilla offering, and there’s hope of building out the lineup further. As he moves toward that expansion, Schrupp plans to keep his company focused on a simple but important principal — providing good choices when people are more intentional about what they consume.

“Food should make you feel good,” Schrupp says. “Even something like a protein powder, it shouldn’t be something people have to choke down or suffer through in order to meet their health or fitness goals. If it doesn’t taste good or make you feel good then, in my opinion, you probably shouldn’t be eating it.”