For years before CODE existed, our pre-workout was three ingredients.
A spoonful of raw honey. A pinch of sea salt. A double espresso.
That was it. No proprietary blend. No 27-ingredient label. No artificial sweetener engineered in a flavor lab. And it worked better than anything we'd ever tried out of a tub.
This is the story of how a refusal to drink synthetic anything became a supplement company.
Two Athletes With A Standard
We met in college. Both athletes. Both already obsessive about training, both already paying attention to what we put in our bodies.
While most of campus was figuring out the party scene, we were dialing in nutrition like our performance depended on it — because it did.
We had one rule: if it didn't come from the planet or an animal, we wouldn't eat it. If it wasn't a single-ingredient whole food, it didn't go in.
The same rule applied to supplements. Before we'd take anything, we'd spend months researching it — heavy metal content, microplastic levels, sourcing transparency, processing methods. We didn't want clean. We wanted top of the top of the top.
Most of what we found on the shelf didn't pass.
What We Actually Took
When you strip out everything that fails the single-ingredient test, what's left is a short list. Real food. A pinch of salt. A coffee.
That became our pre-workout.
The honey hit fast — glucose into the bloodstream, sustained energy from the fructose, trace minerals and amino acids your body recognizes. The salt replaced what we'd lose through sweat. The espresso brought clean caffeine without the synthetic stimulant cocktail in pre-workout powders.
Combine the three. Throw it back. Train.
For years, that was it. We tried other things — pre-workouts, gels, performance drinks. Nothing felt as clean. Nothing gave us as much usable energy. Nothing left us feeling normal an hour later instead of strung out and crashing.
The Friends-And-Family Phase
At some point, the people around us started noticing.
What should I take for energy? What should I take for recovery? What's actually clean? The questions kept coming. We'd done the research they hadn't. We had answers.
It became obvious: the supplement aisle was a graveyard of fillers, fake clean labels, and synthetic compounds. People wanted what we had — clean inputs they could trust. Most of them weren't going to spend three months reading studies to find them.
We knew we wanted to build something. We just didn't know what.
The Question We Couldn't Stop Asking
Every time we mixed that pre-workout, we'd have the same thought: this should be a product.
Honey was already the cornerstone of our diets. Athletes have used it before competition for thousands of years. Warriors. Endurance runners. Strength athletes across every era. There's a reason — it's a complete carbohydrate package your body knows how to use immediately. Glucose for fast fuel, fructose for sustained energy, trace minerals that processed sweeteners strip away.
When we started looking at the supplement market through a "what if honey was the carrier" lens, it was obvious. No powder. No shaker. No clumps. No synthetic carrier your body has to fight to absorb.
The first formulation came together fast in concept: the pre-workout we'd been making by hand for years, but in a sachet. Raw honey, natural caffeine from green tea and guarana, L-theanine for clean focus, Redmond Real Salt for electrolytes.
That became Code Nectar. Today it ships as Energy Honey — Vanilla, Matcha, and Beetroot Ginger.
From Counter to Sachet
The leap from "this works for us" to "this is a product" was bigger than we expected.
R&D took four months — and most of that wasn't formulation. It was sourcing. Finding raw honey that was actually raw. Finding farms that didn't superheat. Finding suppliers that would tell us the truth about what was in their barrels.
That story is its own essay. The short version: most of what's labeled "raw honey" on shelves isn't. The processors push it past 160°F. They water it down. Some of it isn't honey at all.
We didn't want to be that. So we kept looking. We finally landed on a small family-owned US farm. Locally sourced. Glyphosate-free. Never heated past 80°F. The same honey we eat ourselves.
That's CODE.
Try the original pre-workout, productized: Energy Honey — Vanilla — the closest expression of what we used to mix on the counter.
Read next: Why Most "Raw Honey" Isn't Raw — The Honey Industry's Dirty Secret