About Gummy Gainz Co Los Angeles
OUR STORY
We're Sunny and Eugene. We met in a Venture Feasibility class at USC Marshall and ended up building Gummy Gainz Co together.
A class at USC Marshall
Sunny was a beach volleyball player who'd transferred from Stanford to USC. Eugene was a PhD candidate working on drug development. We didn't have much in common on paper.
The class brief was to find a real problem worth solving as a business. We didn't realize the problem was already sitting between us.
Two different starting points
Sunny Villapando
Co-Founder
"Playing beach volleyball at Stanford and then USC, I was always balancing training with school. Like a lot of athletes I had a sweet tooth, and the recovery snacks on the market just weren't fun to eat. I'd end up grabbing candy after practice instead of anything I was supposed to be eating."
Eugene Zhou
Co-Founder
"I was working on my PhD in drug development at the time, mostly bio, chem, and lab work. The thing I couldn't get over was watching NCAA athletes walk into lectures with armloads of candy after training. It was their reward. I started wondering whether we could make the reward actually do something useful."
If athletes are already reaching for candy
The observation kept bothering us. Athletes were going to eat candy after training regardless of what the nutrition books said. The question wasn't whether they wanted candy. The question was whether you could deliver real recovery nutrition in the form they were already choosing.
That became the project. A gummy with real protein and the carbs your muscles need after exercise. Not a vitamin gummy, not a protein bar in different packaging. The actual candy format, with the work built in.
A gummy that does the work
It took a lot of iterations. We worked with food scientists on the formulation: 20 grams of complete protein per pouch with a carb-to-protein ratio your muscles actually use after training. We needed it shelf stable so it could live in a gym bag, and tested clean enough for athletes who can't risk anything else.
The pouch you see today is the version we landed on after a year of recipe work. We're still iterating.
What we're committed to
No. 01
Tastes like real candy, because if it doesn't, nobody finishes the pouch.
No. 02
20 grams of complete protein per pouch with the carbs your muscles use after training.
No. 03
Lab-tested for banned substances, with Informed Sport certification in progress.
1% better, every day
We built Gummy Gainz Co for the athletes who train hard, for the parents fueling kids through tournament weekends, and for the coaches and dietitians who refuse to choose between something that works and something kids will actually eat.
Thanks for being here.
Co-founders · Gummy Gainz Co