Creatine products are seeing a rise in sales, growing at an estimated 17.2% CAGR according to SPINS data. As interest in the ingredient shifts from the traditional bodybuilder audience to a new wave of consumers focused on overall wellness and cognitive benefits, it has become crucial for manufacturers to create products that cater to mainstream preferences for more appealing delivery formats. Creatine gummies have stood out in this regard.

“While creatine is still a staple among high-level athletes, weightlifters, and bodybuilders for the energy it provides to muscles, it is moving into the mainstream as people are becoming more aware that it’s arguably the most important supplement people can take, whether someone has an active lifestyle, or is just interested in overall optimal health,” said Mark Faulkner, founder and president of Vireo Systems, the makers of Con-Crēt creatine supplements.

Creatine supplies energy to all cells, helping them to absorb and use other nutrients throughout the body. Most people don’t have enough bodily stores of creatine to achieve the benefits seen in supplementation studies, such as improved cognition or optimal immune and cellular function, Faulkner said.  

“For years, it was held back by the stigma that creatine was only for males, or by products that were inconvenient or unappealing to the average consumer,” available only in large tubs of powder, said Darren Candow, scientific advisor for creatine gummy brand Create. But decades of research supporting its role in strength, performance, brain health, bone structure, recovery, and healthy aging are driving it into the mainstream. 

Creatine and sports nutrition leaders and newcomers alike have introduced creatine gummies in the past year.  

Create launched Sour Peach Creatine Gummies, the latest limited-edition flavor in a lineup of gummies containing 1.5 grams of Creapure creatine monohydrate per serving. The gummies are NSF Certified for Sport and third-party tested.  

Con-Crēt recently launched Berry Zing creatine gummies, which feature creatine HCl — a form of the amino acid that the company said is more stable in challenging manufacturing conditions — and contain a 750 mg dose of creatine per 3-gummy serving.  

Bloom Nutrition, a brand well-established in the women’s health market, also introduced creatine gummies in Berry Boost and Orange Squeeze flavors. Each serving provides 5 grams of creatine and is promoted for muscle health and cognitive benefits, “without the bloat.”  

Quality Concerns  

While creatine in powder form is highly stable, its inclusion in gummies has been controversial due to recent exposés suggesting that many gummy products on the market can’t keep creatine stable long enough to meet label claims.  

When exposed to water, creatine breaks down into creatinine, a waste product that builds up in the blood after exercise. Because gummies rely on high amounts of water, heat, and challenging pH conditions, if creatine isn’t protected within a gummy matrix, it is quickly broken down.  

Read More: Next-Gen Gummies: Addressing Manufacturing Challenges to Deliver Best-in-Class Formulations

“Currently, there are no conjugations of creatine that will hold up for very long in an aqueous environment,” said Faulkner. “Creatine ethyl ester will last only a few minutes before cyclizing into creatinine; creatine monohydrate can last a few hours to several days depending on the pH and other conditions; and creatine HCl, which is the most stable, can last up to several weeks or a couple of months.”

None of these forms are stable enough to provide the shelf life needed for ready-to-drink (RTD) formats he said, “unless creatine undergoes a process like the one Glanbia has developed for CreaBev, which evidently envelops creatine in an RTD-stable way.”

Some RTD protein companies have tried to introduce creatine into mass-market protein shakes, but the homogenization and pasteurization processes haven’t been able to prevent high-heat cyclization into creatinine, he added.

“Some companies have expressed interest in bottle-cap technology that introduces the creatine into the beverage at the time of opening or consumption, but I haven’t seen any commercial success in that area yet,” said Faulkner.

Supplement company NOW drew attention to challenges related to creatine gummies in 2024 after it tested 12 products via its internal lab, as it reported that no external third-party labs were able to test gummies at the time. According to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis, just six of the 12 brands tested contained the amount of creatine claimed on the label.

However, the remaining gummy brands tested well below the label claim for creatine, and many products contained significant amounts of the unwanted metabolite creatinine. At the time, Katie Banaszewski, senior director of quality for NOW, noted that the company was surprised that none of the third-party labs that have been participating in the brand’s testing program were capable of testing gummies for creatine content, and called on the industry to address this “dearth of testing capacity.” Each of the products NOW tested were purchased directly from Amazon.  

Because these results were not conducted via an external third-party lab, they should be taken with a grain of salt, Faulkner said. “I do believe many of the failings are true and that many products are not worth buying,” but accredited labs undergo a peer-review of extraction/testing methods, and additional audits on standards, calibrators, methods, records, and other factors, which are critical to establishing validity.  

A few months after NOW’s testing, Amazon implemented changes to its dietary supplement seller policy, requiring companies to have their products tested by one of three third-party labs it partnered with to get their products listed on the platform. The program was gradually rolled out across a few categories at first, with sports nutrition products among the first to be included. 

Do Amazon’s Supplement Quality Requirements Make a Difference?   

More recent rounds of testing on creatine gummies suggest that many top-selling products on Amazon are still failing quality tests.  

SuppCo, a digital platform that provides users with independent recommendations on supplement quality based on publicly available quality and efficacy data, recently conducted testing on 11 creatine products purchased directly from Amazon via an independent ISO 17025-accredited laboratory.

The five well-established powder-format supplements passed with flying colors, but four of the six creatine gummies purchased failed either identity or potency tests. Gummy brands Create and Force Factor all exceeded creatine amounts claimed on label, but the four remaining products, EcoWise, Happyummmm, Vidabotan, and DivinusLabs, each failed with less than 1% of the creatine claimed on label or zero detectable creatine, SuppCo reported. Half of these failing products contained substantial amounts of creatinine.

Notably, SuppCo’s testing covered products most popular among users of its health platform, and the four creatine gummies that failed testing sold a total of 50,000 units on Amazon in the month prior to these tests.

However, even the passing gummy products “demonstrated the inherent challenge of stabilizing creatine in gummy format; both had significant levels of creatinine,” which is relatively harmless, but a sign of how difficult it is to maintain ingredient integrity in the format, the company noted.  

In a prior conversation with Nutraceuticals World, Jordan Glenn, PhD, head of science at SuppCo, said that Amazon’s dietary supplement seller policy won’t be enough to stop bad actors from selling creatine gummies and other products that fail to meet identity or potency specs.

“There is a glaring hole in the approach. Brands can choose their own specific sample of a product to test, and ship it to the third-party testing lab,” he said. “Effectively, what is being tested is still in a brand’s control, rather than randomized … We would love to see Amazon adjust their policy to conduct randomized testing of supplements, with samples pulled directly from Amazon inventory on the brand’s behalf. We believe randomized testing is the only way to prevent the type of failures shown in our creatine testing.”  

Amazon’s policy does little to verify product integrity, and based on test results, some brands must simply not be adding creatine to their gummies, Faulkner concurred. Further, Amazon rarely removes products for quality concerns, and companies are still allowed to submit data from their own internal laboratories to one of the third-party organizations the retailer works with, meaning the potential for forged testing results remains.  

On the other hand, many well-intentioned brands do not do enough to account for the inevitable degradation of creatine in the gummy matrix over time, which includes accounting for the high-heat conditions of shipping, and for sugar content, which catalyzes a Maillard-Browning reaction, said Faulkner.

“Very few gummies have Supplement Facts integrity, and probably none would, if subjected to expiration date testing, hold up to their stated shelf life. The issue is that gummies are more like ‘perishables’ than they are like standard dietary supplements,” he said.  

Create has also commissioned testing of its own products and a number of competing brands, and has reported discrepancies it found to retail platforms, including Amazon, said Candow. 

“We do believe that Amazon’s updated seller policy has helped raise the bar, and there are now a number of legitimate creatine gummy brands on the platform, including Create, that meet potency label claims and maintain proper compliance standards. At the same time, there are still products available for purchase that fail to meet even basic label claim requirements. This is a problem not just for consumers, who may be misled, but also for reputable brands that invest in compliance, safety, and quality.”

The long-term prospect of creatine gummies will depend on stronger quality standards and “batch level testing and transparent compliance documentation,” Candow added. Creatine itself is scientifically established; however, its gummy form is not, leaving a rapidly expanding category caught between consumer enthusiasm and manufacturing practicality.

A Dearth of Fit-For-Purpose Testing 

Personal trainer and fitness influencer James Smith partnered with Eurofins to test several top-selling creatine gummy products in July 2025. Of the nine supplements tested, gummies from four brands (Create, Wellboost, Myvitamins, and Known Nutrition) contained relatively close amounts of creatine to what was claimed on the label per serving (ranging from overages to a minimum of 73% of claimed creatine), while five brands (Ovrload, Gains Nutrition, Unique Physique, Supplmnt, and Push) contained borderline undetectable amounts of creatine. 

In that time, Push has reportedly halted sales of all of its gummies in order to investigate its products and conduct additional tests with Eurofins. At press time, the company’s website said its creatine gummies are “not currently for sale in the United States.”

“The data is very clear, you can see when something has creatine and when something doesn’t have creatine,” Smith said in a video detailing the test results. “There are two scenarios; either the people selling these gummies know there’s no creatine in them, and that’s a terrible thing, or it’s the alternative scenario in which they don’t know there’s no creatine in their product, which is equally as bad.”

Smith noted that certain brands, such as Push, dispute the accuracy of HPLC as the optimal test method for pectin-based gummies. However, in the testing Smith commissioned from Eurofins, variances between HPLC testing and Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography (UPLC) across several pectin-based gummies were minor, meaning that a gummy with relatively close amounts of creatine to what is claimed on a label shouldn’t read as undetectable in HPLC tests.

Smith noted that Eurofins has adopted a modified version of the USP Creatine Monograph specifically for pectin-based gummies, but this methodology might not yet be available across many third-party testing services.  

A shortage of capacity to test for creatine content in the novel gummy format across leading labs is a glaring problem. Testing capacity has improved in the past year or two, “but it remains uneven,” said Candow. “When we first launched Create, very few labs could reliably measure creatine and creatinine in a gummy because most methodologies were designed for powders or capsules.”

Since then, the company partnered with Eurofins to develop a gummy-specific methodology, and “established labs have started adapting their methods as creatine and pre-workout gummies have grown in popularity,” but there are still accuracy variances.  

Vireo Systems will continue collaboration with Eurofins and other analytical labs to further improve testing methods, said Faulkner. “These extraction and analytical processes are very challenging for these gummy matrices, and they differ based on gelatin, pectin, agar, and other forms of gummy base material.”

Extracting creatine cleanly and fully from a gummy is challenging, and “the instrumentation needed for these tests after samples have been extracted and prepped is not only expensive, but very sensitive to operate. Different analysts can get different results on the same samples if the art and science aren’t perfectly in sync. Labs internally track their coefficients of variation, which are a measure of quality for the lab, and keeping CVs in an acceptable range is a challenge in these testing procedures.”  

Up Next: Manufacturing Gummies: Opportunities for Nutraceuticals and Pharmaceuticals

Manufacturing and Stability Challenges in Creatine Gummies

Faulkner said Vireo Systems will “continue to do research and methods-of-manufacturing optimizations to protect the creatine from heat and moisture. The blending innovations are really quite impressive, but are slow to develop and validate.”   

“In our own internal analyses, creatine degradation is highest during the initial manufacturing process, and is minimal thereafter,” Candow said. He noted that there are several ways to improve creatine’s stability through proper manufacturing choices, such as reducing water activity, which is easier to control in solid forms than in liquids; using low-heat methods during cooking, setting, and storage; maintaining a stable pH throughout the manufacturing process; and including 15-25% overages to compensate for losses during production. Gummies are then allowed to cure for 2-3 weeks to lower water activity, further enhancing creatine stability.  

“We are also proud that Create offers the only NSF Certified for Sport creatine gummy on the market,” Candow added. “This certification, widely recognized as the gold standard for supplement safety and integrity, gives athletes, professionals, and everyday consumers confidence that our products are free from banned substances and manufactured to the highest quality standards.” 

“For ready-to-drink beverages, the challenge is far greater because creatine sits dissolved in solution where it is much more vulnerable to degradation over time,” said Candow. “To date, we are not aware of any company that has successfully stabilized creatine in a shelf-stable liquid format at meaningful doses.” 

Specialized Forms of Creatine for Gummies  

Manufacturers are working to develop creatine monohydrate powders with added protection against conversion to creatinine over a product’s shelf life.  

In May, TSI Group launched a new creatine processing technology called OptiCreatine, designed to improve its solubility, stability, and palatability. It enables manufacturers to incorporate creatine into tablets, gummies, effervescent pellets, granules, and pre-mixed products, the company reported, and its solubility enables pairing with other active ingredients like BCAAs, collagen, protein, glycerol, caffeine, and a wide range of flavors.  

Glanbia Nutritionals also launched CreaBev, a creatine monohydrate with a unique encapsulation technology that provides enough solubility and stability to incorporate creatine into both gummies and beverages. In a study on neutral pH RTD formulations, 95% of a standard creatine monohydrate had been converted to creatinine, while only about 30% of CreaBev degraded into creatinine after 12 months in the RTD format.  

AnaBio Technologies has also released Active TR Creatine, a microencapsulated creatine monohydrate that maintains integrity in liquid formulations and is released only upon ingestion. Clinical studies support its ability to withstand both aqueous and acidic conditions.