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When Oliver Cookson was in primary school, most of his friends wanted to be astronauts or race car drivers.
When asked to draw what he would like to become, he said he wanted to build a business and employ a lot of people.
Some 35 years later he had done just that. His mother gave the drawing back to him a few years after he sold his company, MyProtein, in a multi-million pound deal.
Oliver Cookson launched MyProtein in 2004 before selling it to THG for millions seven years later
After a few years working with various ventures and doing a fair bit of philanthropy, Cookson now wants to take on the supergreens industry.
Can he replicate the same success he had with MyProtein and become a British success story for a second time?
It all started in the playground
We meet in a chic Victorian hotel in Cheadle Hulme, near where Cookson grew up and currently lives part-time.
The rest of the time he lives in Monaco ‘for the sun… and business benefits’. It is quite clear that although he is a local boy, he has adapted well to the luxurious life with his designer clothes and flashy car.
While Cookson may now be used to the finer things in life, his upbringing was not smooth sailing.
His father, a used car salesman – ‘a bit of a wheeler dealer’ – and mother, a secretary at a pension company, separated when Cookson was young.
He and his mother had to start from scratch and moved to a social flat without an electricity meter and without central heating.
‘I was away from my friends, isolated… and not wearing the nicest sneakers. There is worse poverty, but I was certainly poor.
“I remember thinking I wanted better than this, but I didn’t know how to do it. That is what sparked the drive in me and perhaps also a natural entrepreneurship.
“I know it’s a bit of a cliché now (but) I used to buy and sell things at school.”
Starting MyProtein with an overdraft of £500
Although Cookson may have been enterprising in his teens, he struggled academically and left school at the age of 16 without a final exam.
After school he spent six months ‘doing nothing’ until he saw a David Lloyd gym open near his home.
‘I’d never been to a gym before and I thought it would give me some focus and discipline. I was religious and went five times a week.’
From there, the natural progression was to research protein powders and supplements that, at this point, were aimed at bodybuilders rather than casual gym goers.
Cookson launched MyProtein with whey protein powders before expanding its range
He had his ‘eureka moment’ in his mother’s kitchen.
“I looked at the whey protein I was taking at the time and didn’t even know what it was.
‘It was liquid gold, the dairies threw it away.
“I called them up and asked how much natural raw whey protein was there.
‘It cost £3 per kg and the product I used, which was 908 grams, was £30.
‘I thought you could sell it for £3/kilo, with some flavouring, for £15 and still have a huge profit margin,’ and the seeds of MyProtein were born.
Cookson was a self-taught web developer at the time, having learned the ropes at the age of 9 from his father’s neighbor David.
It meant he could become the first person to put a branded protein product online.
‘Now if you want to create an e-commerce site it’s a few clicks and you’re done, but there was nothing like that in 2003/4. I built the entire platform from scratch on my own and in my spare time.”
While many founders might claim to be down-to-earth, he seems genuinely baffled by how he did it: “I built the entire warehouse management system.
‘If I’m completely honest, I have no idea how I did that. I don’t think I could do it again.’
‘It was profitable after week one’
Before Cookson launched MyProtein, protein powder was mainly sold at Holland & Barrett or even on eBay, but it was ‘spit and sawdust’.
The market was not nearly as saturated as it is now; it is estimated to be worth billions worldwide.
I never took a pound of investment or loans, it was completely bootstrapped
Despite being the first player on the market, Cookson still had an uphill battle to climb.
Gym-goers tend to be more conscious than most of what they put into their bodies, so a challenger in the space offering half-price protein naturally brought skepticism.
Cookson chose to enter the hardcore bodybuilding market first, which helped launch MyProtein into its core target audience in a pre-influencer world.
“My message to them was: You buy a product designed for a 16-year-old beginner, or a 20-year-old seasoned professional.
‘MyProtein is designed for you. We broke down each ingredient so they could buy it individually or create a custom formula.”
Cookson sold MyProtein to THG, the e-commerce company founded by Matt Molding
‘I started it with £500, that’s the honest truth. It was my overdraft. It was profitable after the first week and I have never invested or borrowed a pound since, it was completely bootstrapped.”
Cookson kept the team lean and after six months hired his mother as chief blender before adding operations staff to pack orders.
’16-hour days sound like a cliché… but I did everything from packing orders to the website, customer queries and new product development and marketing.’
It wasn’t until a few years later that he hired middle managers before adding a senior management team in 2009, five years after launch.
Sale to The Hut Group
However, there came a point when Cookson began to explore his options and considered selling a minority stake to private equity before a possible full exit.
“I wasn’t burned out, there was no loss of passion, but I had no security. The analogy I use is a fruit machine. If you keep pressing that button you get jackpot, jackpot, jackpot. One day you might pivot and lose your money.
“One day something could have happened that was out of my control, like a new law banning protein powders or something like that.
“I thought, I want to change the legacy of the Cookson name and I can do this because I have an awful lot of equity. If I can take some chips off the table and still keep some chips, that would be a wise move.”
Yet it didn’t quite work that way. In 2011, Cookson sold MyProtein in its entirety to The Hut Group (now THG) for £60 million plus shares, which he says was not his initial plan.
Several years later, there was a lawsuit between Cookson and THG over the sale and the valuations that both parties had placed on the company.
He doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with the way MyProtein has developed.
‘Am I happy with the direction MyProtein has taken? When you think about things in life, I think you always think about the best things… I try not to live with regrets.
‘You make those decisions at that moment and you have to learn to live with them.’
While he had quite a few millions in the bank, he was unprepared for the ‘complete void’ the sale left him.
‘I would have liked to have spoken to someone before I sold MyProtein because it was my life, my purpose was a complete void.
After a year of “messing around,” he launched GoNutrition, which he now admits was a “kneejerk reaction” and a “mistake.”
‘I knew I would never work sixteen-hour days, but I knew I could add a lot of value. I didn’t invest that much in it, it was less than a side job.’
He sold the company in 2019 for a six-figure profit.
Life after a multi-million pound sale
Now Cookson thinks it’s time to get back into the nutrition game, but this time he wants to tackle the supergreens industry.
They are the latest trend to take social media by storm, with influencers touting a number of false health claims.
Cookson launched Verve Nutrition in late 2023 with an exquisite blend of 80 ingredients. It seems like a strange move for the entrepreneur who tends to stay ahead of the curve rather than following trends.
It’s not even the first time he’s dealt with green powders; he launched one in 2008 with MyProtein.
Cookson has launched Verve Nutrition and hopes to conquer the huge supergreens industry
He claims there will be a ‘unique element that will be game-changing’ that he will launch in due course, but for now customers can simply buy the 300g V80 mix – 30 portions – for £75.
The landscape for businesses has changed. Although Cookson was at the forefront of e-commerce in 2004, it’s easier than ever to get started online, whether that’s through Shopify or TikTok Shop. It means more people can sell their own products. What does that mean for Cookson?
He thinks transparency is key to Verve’s success and he thinks he can shake up an industry that desperately needs change.
Cookson claims that 95 percent of the proprietary blends offered by most companies will be full of filler and cheap products.
“You get a little bit (of the expensive ingredients) just to get the claim on the label and you get absolutely no benefit whatsoever.” For me that is a negative and that is not okay. If I’m consuming a product that’s supposed to be a health product, I want to know how much of everything I’m getting.
What I’ve done is turned it on its head: for each of the 80 active ingredients in Verve, we tell you what’s in it. We have nothing to hide.’
Unlike his attempts at companies after the sale of MyProtein, Cookson appears to be ready and thinks he can make as big an impact on supergreens as MyProtein did for protein powder.
He’s overdrawn by far more than £500 this time, but he’s also got far less to lose.
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