Authored By chloe.morrison

Military veteran and local entrepreneur Benjamin Lowry is raising money for his new platform, called Scoop, which will allow users to create their own workout supplements.

Kickstarter Scoop is currently raising money via Kickstarter. Click here for the Kickstarter campaign, which includes a video with more information.

The idea to help people make their own blends came to Lowry when he was in airborne school, where supplements weren’t allowed because they aren’t regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, he said.

Throughout his time in the military, which included three deployments in Afghanistan for a counterterrorism mission, he saw people using supplements in ways that could be unhealthy, he said.

“I saw for too many years young guys going to the military base vitamin stores and getting powerful preworkout blends with mystery ingredients and risky stimulants, all to mask the fact that the supplement itself was garbage,” he said.

Lowry said there’s a lack of transparency in some supplement blends, a problem he aims to correct with his new platform, which will allow anyone to choose ingredients and pick the dosage of each ingredient. The user can buy exactly what they want and share it with others.

His team has studied recommended doses of all the ingredients and allows users to pick from a range within the appropriate amount, he said.

Users who don’t want to create their own can browse the other custom-made blends on the site, which should launch next month.

And anyone who does create their own can share the blend via social media and make money if others buy their blend.

As a user creates the blend, the platform adds the costs for ingredients in real time so the user knows the price. There’s a small markup so Scoop can make money, Lowry said.

He’s partnered with buddies from high school who got degrees in computer science and became software engineers while he was in the military.

The team aims to start production in Chattanooga in August.

They are working to find a facility, and the number of people they hire will depend on the demand, Lowry said.

He hopes that Scoop will disrupt the big-box supplement industry.

Maybe vitamin and supplement stores will go the way of Blockbuster, he said.

“We’re using all the powerful resources of the internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to go into a store and pay a company that’s marking up a product if you can create exactly what you want [online].”