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The 90-Year-Old Vitamin Shop That Refuses to Sit on the Shelf
From a Depression-era yogurt counter in Pittsburgh to a global supplement empire of roughly 14,000 people, GNC keeps rewriting the same question: what does a vitamin store look like when the customer shops on their phone?
Ora Organic
Ora Organic is an Austin-based direct-to-consumer wellness brand making plant-based, USDA Organic supplements - vegan protein powders, greens, probiotics, and vitamins - built around clean, third-party-tested ingredients with no synthetic additives. Founded in 2014 and later featured on Shark Tank, it grew from a founder's kitchen-table idea into a multi-product catalog spanning gut health, hormones, recovery, brain health, and skin.
Gainful
Gainful is a New York-based personalized sports nutrition company that builds custom protein powders, hydration, pre-workout and performance supplements tailored to each customer's body, goals and dietary needs. Customers take an online quiz, get a formula matched to them by Gainful's algorithm and registered dietitians, and can chat with a real RD about it. Founded by high-school soccer teammates Eric Wu and Jahaan Ansari and incubated at Y Combinator, the brand grew from a dorm-room experiment into a profitable, multi-channel business now sold direct-to-consumer and in Target stores nationwide.
Jahaan Ansari
Jahaan Ansari is the co-founder and CEO of Gainful, a New York-based personalized nutrition company that builds custom protein and supplement formulas around each customer. A UC Berkeley chemical engineering and computer science graduate, he wrote the algorithm that matches a person's body and goals to a unique blend, turning a college dorm-kitchen experiment that filled its first 50 orders by hand into a Forbes 30 Under 30, Y Combinator-backed brand sold at Target. He raised more than $17M with high-school-best-friend-turned-co-founder Eric Wu, and in 2024 took an unexpected detour onto ABC's The Bachelorette.