Grads take their workout supplements from Marino to Miami
Class of 2025 graduates Alex Jimenez and Andrew Leisengang started Code Nutra, a workout supplement company, while students at Northeastern.
They started in a Northeastern dorm room, upgraded to a family kitchen in Miami and had just completed the first production run of their workout supplement at a facility in Colorado. Alex Jimenez and Andrew Leisengang, co-founders of Code Nutra, were wired. Literally.
“We’re about to leave the facility, and this guy is running towards the car and screaming “’guys! what did you do?…The caffeine content is way too high in this,’” Leisengang recalled.
Leisengang explained that a math error meant that each individual package of their supplement the company produced, contained 400 milligrams of caffeine – equivalent to nearly six double espressos – rather than the 150 mgs they had intended.
“And we were testing them all day,” Leisengang said.
Entrepreneurship is never without its setbacks, the 2025 Northeastern graduates acknowledged, but perseverance – as well as fixing their caffeine ratios – has paid off.
In Aug. 2025, just after their first production run, Code Nutra rang up $200 in sales. They project over $1 million in sales in 2027.
It’s been “a crazy journey,” Leisengang said, and Northeastern is to thank.
“Northeastern was unique in that it really pushed us down an entrepreneurial path,” Leisengang said.
Leisengang and Jimenez met in 2023 at Marino Recreation Center gym on Northeastern’s Boston campus. They realized they shared an interest in health and wellness and an entrepreneurial streak.
The two set up a dorm room as a headquarters for a pill-based supplement company – sourcing ingredients, building a brand and website, and dealing with manufacturers and customers after classes and on weekends.
It didn’t quite take off, Leisengang said.
“Pills in powdered form, pill form and gummy form even, were an outdated method to be taking supplements,” Leisengang said. “In a lot of cases, by taking pills and powders, the supplements weren’t even absorbing that well into your body.”
So, the two finance majors examined their diets and the different supplements they were taking before workouts – caffeine, honey, beetroot juice, creatine, etc. – and realized that there was no one product that included all of these ingredients.
They were particularly interested in honey as a base.
Raw honey has been used as an energy source for thousands of years, and has a long shelf life – even edible after 3,000 years, as archaeologists recently discovered from an Egyptian tomb. Honey includes natural compounds and nutrients such as antioxidants, vitamins, and polyphenols – natural plant compounds – that are beneficial for health.
Honey gives a “nice, sustained energy,” Liesengang said, because it can be easily broken down as a carbohydrate. It can also enhance the body’s ability to absorb other nutrients or chemical compounds, he added, citing creatine as an example.
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“Honey is just one of those few foods that is delicious and is also extremely functional,” Jimenez said.
After graduation, the two entrepreneurs took to the Jimenez family kitchen. They mixed raw honey with caffeine derived from green tea and from a small Amazonian berry called guarana for a fast-acting and sustained energy boost, respectively. They added some l-theanine, an amino acid, to balance out the caffeine jitters and other amino acids from the tea, and they used sea salt for electrolytes.
Code Nutra’s Energy Honey was the result, originally flavored with ginger and beetroot (ginger also promotes gut health while beetroot promotes blood flow, Leisengeng said).
“The idea was to create a super clean alternative to energy drinks or stimulants that people could take day in and day out, whether that was for the gym or before studying, before class, before work, and know that it wasn’t taking a toll on them and was sustainable,” Jimenez said.
The two entrepreneurs began handing out samples to gym-goers, athletes, and patrons of farmers markets in Miami.
“Everyone was going crazy over the product,” Leisengang said.
One fan was Northeastern graduate Julian Jung, a partner at Republic Ventures, an early stage investment company.
“I would always take preworkout stuff but often had no idea what I was actually consuming,” Jung said.
But not only did Code Nutra offer a “clean label” with understandable and natural ingredients, it gave Jung’s workouts a boost. There was an interesting appeal to a supplement that just had to be squeezed into your mouth – no measuring of powders or diluting in water required, Jung said.
Curious to learn more, he looked at the company’s website and recognized Leisengang from attending a Northeastern University – Miami event.
Jung reconnected, offering feedback on the taste and effectiveness of the product and introducing the founders to potential investors.
Patrick Hurley, an associate professor of accounting at Northeastern, has also been following Code Nutra’s journey. Hurley taught Jimenez in his introductory accounting class, and an extra-credit assignment in the class involved students building a LinkedIn presence.
Hurley praised the “vulnerability” as well as the commitment to quality that Jimenez shared in his posts – from stories showcasing troubles in finding quality ingredients that met the company’s standards, to navigating the balance between the urge to get a new product into consumers’ hands and ensuring that the product is ready to go.
“For an entrepreneur the timeline is so quick and the stakes are so high, I don’t think anyone would begrudge him trying to get the product into people’s hands,” Hurley said. “But to be willing to say ‘if the product is not ready, we’re going to wait until we have that product,’ that commitment to the product is big.”
Other customers have also offered positive feedback about the product.
“Recovery is faster, energy is cleaner. This is what performance nutrition should be,” Miguel Sosa, a Division I soccer player at Furman University who uses the Energy Honey and Creatine Honey, wrote on the Code Nutra website.
Energy Honey is now also available in organic Madagascar vanilla and organic matcha flavors. Leisengang and Jimenez have also added a Creatine-Honey supplement and a caffeine-free Endurance Honey to their product line. Their products are now in retail stores in Miami and, soon, a store in New York City, available online directly to consumers, on TikTok Shop and on Amazon, they said.
“We couldn’t find a product that checked all our boxes,” Jimenez said. “That’s why we went out and created it.”
