Who is Stage Two?

Stage Two was started by Samuel Frigerio and Forrest Lin, based in Toronto, Ontario.

Forrest trains as a cyclist. A lot of that training happens in Zone 2, the aerobic base zone where you’re working hard enough to build real fitness, but at a pace you can sustain for a long time. That’s the part of training that actually compounds, month after month. Creatine works the same way, and that’s where the name came from.

Neither of us comes from supplements, sports science, or nutrition. Samuel spent several years as an electrical apprentice, realized it wasn’t where he wanted to be in ten or twenty years, traveled for a while, and was working at a pizza shop when Stage Two started coming together. Forrest studied mathematics and economics at NYU, worked in finance, came to a similar conclusion, and started building his own businesses instead. He’s built and sold four products on Amazon before this one.

We came across the soft chew format while looking at other creatine products and hadn’t seen anything quite like it. The more we looked into the category, the more questions we had: about serving sizes, about texture, about whether the creatine content in these products was even accurate.

We worked with our manufacturer to rework the formula, texture, and flavor from what we originally found. Our first version used only stevia and sucralose as sweeteners, and both left a bitter aftertaste that lingered, especially after coffee or food. We moved to glucose syrup as the main sweetener instead, since it tastes better and disappears faster. A small amount of sucralose stayed in, because the chew needed it to hold its texture and stay stable, and we’d rather tell you that than leave it off the label or pretend it’s not there.

We kept the serving to two chews. We individually wrapped every one. And we made every batch publicly verifiable, because asking someone to trust a supplement label with no way to check it isn’t good enough.

We came at this from the outside. It took longer than we expected to get right, but we’re proud of what we ended up building.