Redpoint Nutrition takes the most compelling research in sports nutrition, puts it together to make products that target the specific and unique performance demands of rock climbing and backs it with real-world testing by elite athletes.
Redpoint Nutrition was founded by Jason Hendrickson in 2007. With the goal of bringing a sport-specific performance supplement to rock climbing, he assembled a team of experts, including an independent researcher with a PhD in Digestive and Nutritional Physiology, a world-class US-based nutritional supplement formulation laboratory, and a crew of elite and professional climbers to be its real-world product testers. Redpoint Nutrition officially launched its first product, CRANK Forearm Fuel, in February 2009 after more than a year of rigorous R&D.
Jason started climbing in the early '90s while still in high school. He cut his teeth at Salt Lake City, Utah's original climbing gym, The Body Shop, and years later found himself financing his climbing pursuits by pouring holds and shipping orders for Pusher. Climbing was Jason’s passion, spending countless hours bouldering in Little Cottonwood Canyon and Joe’s Valley, sport climbing in American Fork and Maple Canyon, and taking road trips to the various climbing areas of the Western US.
In 2005, Jason was forced to turn his athletic attention away from climbing due to a recurring finger injury. He began training and was soon competing at an elite level in triathlon, road cycling, cyclocross and single-speed mountain biking. Always excited by the challenge and humility of learning new movement-based sports, he recently left his bicycles behind and started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu under multiple-time world champion Rodrigo Medieros in Pacific Beach, California. In between attempts to choke - and avoid being choked by - his training partners, you'll find him running, surfing, and enjoying some easy bouldering on the beaches of Southern California.
Jason recently summarized his motivation for starting Redpoint Nutrition as follows:
"I discovered something interesting once I broadened my athletic horizons beyond climbing: Athletes in all these other sports relied heavily on sport-specific nutritional supplements to improve their performance, speed their recovery, and to simply maintain good overall health in the midst of insane training programs. I became a student of sport-specific nutritional supplementing, obsessed over finding what worked and what didn't.
"The stuff we, as athletes, do to our bodies isn't normal. No amount of shopping at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's is going to give your body everything it needs when you demand so much of it. It took a serious, chronic finger injury for me to really understand the importance of doing everything you can to ensure a lifetime of enjoyment and performance doing the sports you love.
"I decided to take my years of experience using different supplements and create something that I knew worked and that was geared specifically to rock climbers. I knew going into it that the real difficulty would be getting climbers to realize that they're truly athletes, and to persuade them to start thinking in those terms. 
"Climbers have very unique needs as athletes. The importance of a climber's strength-to-weight ratio presents an interesting challenge when contemplating the most appropriate nutritional supplements. Strength is typically a function of muscle mass, but it’s hard to be a good climber if you're hauling around a bodybuilder's physique. In addition, climbing is neither a purely endurance nor a purely power sport. It's combination of both but at varying levels depending on what you're climbing. It's a tough challenge to find the right supplements, but it's possible and that's what I feel we've done.
"Redpoint Nutrition and CRANK Forearm Fuel is, and this probably sounds weird to most people, really my way of giving back to a sport that I dearly love and that every day I miss being able to participate in at my former level. I financed Redpoint Nutrition from my own bank account. This is a small business in every sense of the term. But it's not about money for me, it's about helping other climbers, the next generation of climbers, do things my generation never thought possible. Seeing that progression is the most inspiring thing in the world to me.
"I want Redpoint Nutrition to introduce climbers to all the benefits of nutritionally sound, appropriate and effective sport-specific supplementing. We've made so many breakthroughs over the years in climbing, whether it's sticky rubber on our shoes, chalk on our hands or indoor gyms full of artificial holds. We follow a pattern. Each new breakthrough is initially rejected by the current generation of climbers, but it opens up new doors and it expands what we think is possible on the rocks for the next generation. 
"Rock climbers are athletes. As much as we (or at least I) like the simplicity of being dirtbags and hanging on rocks in the mountains all day, the things we do to our bodies require a higher level of nutrition that you simply can't get from a can of tuna and a jug of water stuffed into your backpack. In my eyes, nutritional supplementing will provide the next huge opportunity to advance the sport of rock climbing. I want to help climbers understand how much they're being held back by outdated beliefs, rumors and superstition about sport-specific nutritional supplements. If we can map the human genome we can certainly find safe, effective nutritional methods to help us hang on a little longer."