Naked Nutrition Review: The Purest Protein?

Welcome to our Naked Nutrition review!

Combining minimal ingredients with even more minimalistic branding, Naked Nutrition certainly deserves the “naked” in their name—but even without flashy labels or gimmicky claims, Naked Nutrition’s products speak for themselves.

With an array of performance-focused supplements making up the bulk of their line, Naked Nutrition is leading the pack for clean protein powders and pre-workouts—but they’ve also made their way into the protein cookie and supplement space.

Our team awarded Naked Nutrition with an overall A- grade, with high points for their high-quality ingredient lists  that are about one-third the length of most protein powders out there, stellar customer service responses, and good value compared to other premium supplements.

Pros and Cons

Nutrition With Nothing to Hide: Naked Nutrition Strips Down to the Basics

Giving people control over their health and fitness journey by using pure ingredients that are easy to understand, and as few of them as possible.

Stephen Zieminski, Founder of Naked Nutrition

Back in 2014, former cross country and track star Stephen Zieminski noticed a trend in the supplement world—they were full of additives, fillers, and unnecessary ingredients that just didn’t sit right with him.

Later that year, that dislike of the current supplement industry state of affairs led to Zieminski founding Naked Nutrition, a protein powder line using five ingredients or less. 

Two of the products he started with are still best-sellers today—the Naked Whey sourced from grass-fed cows in Idaho and Northern California, and the Naked Pea protein from raw yellow peas grown in the USA and Canada. 

Now, Naked Nutrition has grown to over 50 products—and, yep, most still have just a handful of ingredients—including protein cookies, gut health supplements, greens powders, pre-workout and creatine supplements, mass builders, and more. 

As a bonus to the clean, minimal ingredients, the “naked” theme also goes along with the unflavored nature of the main products, as it’s rare to find protein powders without a super-sweet taste.

With Naked, you control the flavor—and nutritional content—by choosing what you want to add to the powders.

And not only have the products remained the same during Naked’s nine-year run, but their vision has stayed the same, too—”giving people control over their health and fitness journey by using pure ingredients that are easy to understand, and as few of them as possible,” states Zieminski.

Our Naked Nutrition Review

• Quality (A)
• Transparency (B)
• Website Experience (A)
• Customer Service (A-)
• Value (A)
• Brand Value (B)

These scores balanced out to an overall A- grade, with higher points awarded for ingredient quality, website experience, and responsive and helpful customer service. 

Quality

In this section, we take an obvious look at ingredient quality, but also need to gauge sourcing and manufacturing quality, certifications, formulation, and more to get a complete picture.

A major—and essential—thing that Naked Nutrition is doing right is ingredient quality. 

Most products contain 3-5 ingredients—and many contain just one—and the ingredients are recognizable, never artificial or fillers, and almost always healthy (we’re looking at you, coconut sugar). 

Even their branding passes the naked test, with their labels sticking to an aesthetically pleasing monochromatic theme with minimal writing. 

Their flavored powders are sweetened with either Reb-M (a newer form of stevia made from fermented cane sugar) or a bit of coconut sugar—here are the full supplement facts for the Lemonade Whey Protein Isolate and Vanilla Pea Protein, for example.

It’s also appreciated that they share the amino acid profile, detailing which are essential and branched-chain amino acids and how much of each.

Plus, they source their whey protein from small Northern California and Idaho dairy farms, where the cows are grass-fed year-round and raised without growth hormones like rBGH or rBST. 

Naked Nutrition also has a few certifications under its belt, including Certified Gluten-Free, Non-GMO, and Informed Choice Trusted by Sport—a globally recognized quality assurance program for dietary supplements.

Lastly, Naked’s manufacturing facility and operations are cGMP (Good Manufacturing Practices certified) and FDA-registered, and all products are independently third-party tested—but more on that in the transparency section.

Our team agreed that Naked covered all of the most essential components—ingredient quality, manufacturing, certifications, and formulation—earning them an A for overall quality.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the products Naked has to offer.

Protein Powders

Naked Nutrition offers protein powders from several sources, including Whey, Casein, Pea, Seeds (watermelon, sunflower, pumpkin, and chia seeds), and Powdered Peanut Butter—a lower-protein option. 

All of the protein powders feature minimal ingredients, and no artificial colors, sweeteners, fillers, or preservatives.

Pre-Workouts

While many pre-workout powders are full of artificial colors, sweeteners, and filler ingredients, Naked Nutrition offers several healthy alternatives. 

The Naked Energy Pre Workout comes in several flavors, including Original (Unflavored), Fruit Punch, Citrus, and Stim-Free, for people who don’t want the hefty caffeine dose. 

However, the Citrus and Fruit Punch flavors do contain 6g and 9g of added sugar, respectively.

Naked also offers a Creatine Monohydrate powder for those wanting a single-ingredient exercise helper.

Dietary Supplements

Naked Nutrition is more than just performance-related powders—it also carries gut health powders, multivitamins, greens powders, and fiber supplements.

Protein Cookies and Baking Mixes

Healthier protein cookies can be hard to find—but Naked Nutrition offers three flavors (Chocolate Chip, Oatmeal Raisin, and Sugar Cookie) with 10g of protein, 1-5g of sugar, and mostly recognizable ingredients.

They also carry Protein Baking Mixes, including Protein Pancakes, Protein Brownies, and Protein Banana Bread—all with 15-22g of protein for a healthier way to get your sweet fix.

Transparency

It’s no secret that consumers are fans of transparent brands—from product information and founder stories to supply chains and ease of finding policies, transparency is undoubtedly important. 

While the Naked Nutrition site is rife with product and ingredient information—which is much appreciated—details about sourcing, manufacturing, and brand/founder backstory were a bit lacking.

As mentioned in the quality section, we have sourcing information for two products (the Naked Whey and Naked Pea), but other than that, it’s anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for manufacturing—we know that the facility is GMP-certified in the United States, but that’s about it. 

Details about third-party testing are also a bit vague.

While it’s a plus that third-party testing is done on all products—with a rarely seen name drop of the company, Siliker—Naked states that “We do not send the official lab reports to customers, as we are prohibited from doing so by the lab.”

However, some (but not all) supplement pages show heavy metal testing, so what’s unclear is if these are data replicated by the Naked team or actual lab results.

Plus, not all products contain this imagery—it’s great that it’s provided for some (which is more than we can say for many supplement brands) but more transparency is always appreciated.

We’d especially like to see the heavy metal results for products like the Organic Brown Rice Protein, as brown rice is known to be rife with arsenic contamination (although they state all products are reportedly tested).

On the plus side, the shipping and return policies were easy to find and understand—no issues there.

Website Experience

Although Naked Nutrition has a minimalist—or dare we say, naked—website design, the cleanness of it works with its theme. 

Nothing crazy or over-the-top high-tech here—but what more do you really need with a supplement website? 

The e-commerce experience is intuitive and straightforward, and the site offers a wealth of educational resources ranging from fitness tips to supplement information to recipes. 

The “Shop” drop-down menu offers a few broad categories, split up into “Protein”, “Supplements”, and “Shop By Goal”. 

The site performed smoothly on both mobile and desktop devices, with no noticeable bugs or annoying pop-ups. 

All in all, a solid A for Naked Nutrition’s website experience. 

Customer Service

Naked Nutrition provides three lines of communication—email, phone, and chat—from which we received helpful and rapid responses. 

However, while the phone was not operated by a human, the robot we chatted with was surprisingly helpful and able to understand what we said—no repeatedly screaming phrases at the phone here.

In addition to answering our question fully, the robo-phone sent us a follow-up text with a helpful link to an article explaining things in more detail—well done! 

The chat and email functions were similarly well-answered, with just a few minute’s delay during regular business hours. 

All of this would easily have led us into A+ territory, but we had to dock some points for the strict return policy—only unopened and unused items may be returned within 14 days for a full refund or exchange, minus any shipping charges.

Fourteen days isn’t too long of a time—30+ days is ideal for non-perishable items—and it’s always appreciated when a customer can return an opened product that didn’t work for them (especially when we’re talking about 5-pound, $90+ canisters). 

Shipping was pretty standard (5-7 business days with an expedited option of 2-3 business days) with free shipping after reaching $99—not too hard to do here, as we’ll see in the Value section. 

But overall, Naked Nutrition had stellar customer service responses, with a slight decrease in our book for the return policy. 

Value

At $94.99 for their grass-fed whey protein, Naked Nutrition is not inexpensive—although you get plenty of bang for your buck with this 5-pound, 76-serving container. 

Plus, Naked Nutrition beats out most other premium competitors when it comes to both the price and protein content of grass-fed whey protein powders.  

Grass-Fed Whey Protein	Cost	Protein/Serving
Naked Nutrition Naked Whey	$94.99 for 5 lbs (76 servings)($1.25/serving)	25g
Opportuniteas Grass Fed Whey Protein Concentrate	$104.99 for 5 lbs (74 servings)($1.42/serving)	24g
Garden of Life Organic Grass Fed Whey Powder	$38.25 for 16.93 oz (12 servings)($3.19/serving)	21g
Levels Grass Fed 100% Whey Protein	$94.95 for 5 lbs (71 servings)($1.34/serving)	25g

But Naked isn’t all about whey protein powder, they also have a wide array of dietary supplements—let’s take a look at how collagen peptides and pre-workout powders compare. 

Collagen Peptides	Cost/Serving	Collagen Content
Naked Collagen	$41.99 for 60 servings($0.70/serving)	9g/serving
Dr. Kellyann Complete Collagen	$59.00 for 60 servings($0.98/serving)	10g/serving
Ancient Nutrition Multi Collagen	$49.95 for 45 servings($1.11/serving)	10g/serving

Pre Workout Powder	Cost/Serving
Naked Energy	$44.99 for 50 servings ($0.90/serving)
4 Gauge	$45.00 for 30 servings($1.50/serving)
Legion Pulse	$44.99 for 20 servings($2.25 per serving)
Garden of Life Sport Organic Plant-Based Energy + Focus	$28.59 for 40 servings($0.71/serving)

Naked products’ high quality—both what they put into them and what they keep out—with their comparable prices to other premium brands led to an overall A grade from our team.

Brand Value

Last but not least, this category encapsulates how much impact the brand has in the world, including philanthropic efforts, innovation, impact on public nutrition, and industry disruption. 

Naked Nutrition’s products definitely have a positive impact on public nutrition, as the supplement world is notoriously rife with sketchy fillers, preservatives, and not-so-healthy ingredients. 

Although today we see many more of these clean supplement brands, there weren’t too many on the scene almost a decade ago, when Naked Nutrition was founded. 

However, when it comes to a few things—sustainability, philanthropy, and institutional knowledge—we’d have liked to see more. 

While they do focus on some environmental practices, like choosing organic and local ingredients and “reducing waste wherever possible,” we’d appreciate a less-vague sustainability plan in action. 

On the philanthropy side, the founder reportedly gives partial college scholarships and contributes to charities but prefers not to publicize it—commendable, but we can’t necessarily award points for this. 

Lastly, institutional knowledge, a general term for the technical or scientific brains behind the brand, is unknown—are there doctors, scientists, or researchers formulating the supplements? 

If so, we’d love to see it.

Our Experience

Our team sampled the Clear Naked Whey (Fruit Punch Whey Protein Isolate), one of their newer products.

Whereas whey protein concentrate (the breadwinner of their Naked Whey line) contains about 80% protein, whey protein isolate is 85% protein—essentially, it further “isolates” the protein portion of whey.

We found this fruit punch-flavored whey protein to be delicious, easy to mix (albeit quite foamy at first), and perfect for a tropical-tasting post-workout drink.

Plus, we loved the pink-and-white branding and how the powder magically turned from white to hot pink upon shaking. 

Although we didn’t get to try anything else, we learned about the versatility of the unflavored protein powders from the Naked Nutrition team.

As they told us, “Our protein powders can be used in baking for high-protein treats like pancakes and muffins. Instead of water, there’s also a variety of ways to mix protein powder, like with fruits, milks of your choice, and other goodies like cacao nibs, chia seeds, etc.”

FAQs

Final Thoughts

Overall, Naked Nutrition receives an A- rating with high points awarded for their impressive customer service responses, high-quality ingredients, and commitment to improving public nutrition with better-for-you protein powders and supplements.

The top areas of improvement we would recommend would be their lack of transparency with product manufacturing and third-party testing results, as well as more measures put in place for sustainability.

Final words from the Naked Nutrition team summed up their mission well, stating, “We believe in taking a long-term approach and making sustainable improvements to your daily routine, nutrition, sleep quality, stress levels, strength, mobility, and cardio health. As a supplement brand, our goal is to support you in that lifelong wellness journey with clean, transparent, high-quality products that you can be confident about putting in your body.”