On the cover of Asterix and Cleopatra states with which the album was made: “14 liters of Indian ink, 30 brushes, 62 soft pencils, 1 hard pencil, 27 erasers, 38 kilos of paper, 16 rolls of typewriter ribbon, 2 typewriters and 67 liters of beer were needed for the realization of this monster production.” A fascinating one communication: what you don’t need to draw a comic!
Upfront, the popular sports nutrition brand that puts its composition on the front of its packaging, is built on a similar fascination with ingredients. Instead of a cheerful photo of, for example, a strawberry and a splash of milk, an ingredients list and a nutritional table adorn the bars, powders and drinks. Upfront products have now conquered shelves at more than two thousand supermarket locations and are for sale at more than 1,100 other places (gyms, companies, catering). In 2025, Upfront generated sales of almost 17 million euros through stores and almost 46 million euros online.
With its alternative design and slick marketing – 328,000 followers on Instagram, twice as many as XXL Nutrition, which calls itself the Benelux market leader in sports nutrition – Upfront cleverly responds to a new generation that wants to know what its food is made of. And in particular the protein hype, because it has played a leading role in this desire in recent years. Young people in particular want extra proteins, follows from research by market research company NielsenIQto recover from efforts such as strength training at the gym and to build muscle.
Upfront is now investing in the construction of its own stores (Upfront Foodstores). It has had one in its home city of Rotterdam since the end of last year and will open a second one this Saturday. It will be three times as large (from 80 to 250 square meters of retail floor) and will not be located in a remote corner of the city, but in the center. Numbers three and four will follow this summer, also in Rotterdam. The goal is to have ten stores this year, also in other cities.
Director and co-founder Mark de Boer (31) dreams of a hundred stores in the foreseeable future. “Since we opened the first one six months ago, sales have been stable. This year, if we manage to open ten supermarkets, we are aiming for a turnover of 100 to 120 million euros.” His partner and co-founder Harro Schwencke (30) called Upfront on LinkedIn at the end of last year “the fastest growing” food company in Europe, “both online and in retail”. The third founder, Nick Schijvens, left the company in 2024.
De Boer’s spokesperson had declined an interview request, but if NRC enters the head office in Rotterdam, a willing employee will come and pick him up. Meanwhile, in an open space, a chef is baking a snack for the staff. After asking what the conversation should be about, De Boer proposes to talk anyway.
A food technology lesson
The idea for Upfront arose from frustration, he says. “To know what was in products, we had to look at the back, and then the information was in small print. We wanted to develop a format for that. Ultimately, after a lot of brainstorming, we turned the packaging around. So the back is the front.”
That creation took place in steps. “We first copied a concept from a food manufacturer RXBAR from America, which puts a few ingredients on the front. The rest is still in small letters on the back. Selective transparency, that’s what I call it now. What we did was mention more and more ingredients at the front, and then also the nutritional values.” The name Upfront came with it, and reads as ‘at the front’, which it does not literally mean. Literally it is ‘candid’.
The three friends already saw the protein hype rising in 2019, with the first protein bars from the United States. “We were really into that,” says De Boer, “because we were fanatic athletes. We wanted to make a protein bar ourselves. It could cost one euro and had to contain 20 grams of protein. And it had to be ‘clean’. That’s what we called it at the time: having very few ingredients. But the bars became too hard to eat after two months, so we had to throw most of them away and have to start again. That was a lesson in food technology: if you increase the protein content, you have to add humectant, or sugar or fat.”
The granola bar from Upfront.
Photo Walter Autumn
The bar was made by Schwencke in his own kitchen. He had studied both Food Technology and Consumer Sciences at Wageningen University. De Boer and Schijvens had done Creative Technology – “a kind of design study” – at the University of Twente. They combined knowledge of nutrition and knowledge of design.
The three sold their bars online and received them at canteens of colleges and universities at the beginning of 2020. De Boer: “There was visible interest in the clarity we offered. So we knew we had something that worked. Then we decided to fully invest in it.”
Due to Covid, they made the switch to online sales. But the plan to provide a range of nutritious snacks failed. “Our second product was coffee, our third product our own cup-a-soup. But that didn’t work online. Nobody goes to a separate website for soup, coffee and protein bars. This is how we became an online company with a focus on sports nutrition, because hardcore athletes are in a routine and keep coming back. We were able to build a stable business on that.”
A low-stimulus supermarket
Now, five years later, Upfront is going in a different direction, opening supermarkets for basic food. For De Boer, the focus on sports nutrition was a building block for a completely different plan – the big dream was always to create a new kind of supermarket. “It has actually been a five-year detour.”
In that supermarket, clarity is again the central theme. The idea, in short, is: fewer products, healthy products, peace and overview.
The current supermarket offers chaos and shopping is hell, says De Boer. “When I walk through a supermarket now, I feel panic. Then I wonder: am I in a marketing slot machine or am I here to buy my food? All signs, arrows, colors. Supermarkets offer twenty to thirty thousand products. We offer two hundred. In our supermarket we make it simple. People regain control over what they eat. And we offer stimulation.”
The Upfront test location at the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam.
Copyright Walter Autumn
It can be seen when he shows the visitors around the Upfront supermarket, right next to the office on the site at the Van Nelle Factory. That supermarket is small, no bigger than a local shop: one elongated room, with products on the walls on either side. The same product is always on display from the bottom to the top shelf, on shelves one above the other. “We have one kind of everything: one peanut butter, one pasta.” That pasta is made from durum wheat semolina, from Italy. “And only food, no other products, no shampoo.”
Healthy food is a second pillar. De Boer sees the ‘food industry’ as a “very big problem”, and he would have grown up with that view. He doesn’t want to say anything more than something going on in his family.
Don’t worry about claims
De Boer prefers to avoid the term ‘healthy food’. Of course he would like to shout from the rooftops that his range is much healthier, but: “‘Unhealthy’ and ‘healthy’ are too subjective terms. Sometimes people live to a very old age on a diet that experts say is harmful. I don’t want to burn myself with far-reaching claims. I would much rather that people experience the positive consequences of food for sale from us for themselves, and then come back.”
He talks about “comprehensible nutrition,” and in his philosophy it means that the Upfront supermarket does not offer “ultra-processed” products. There is a lot to say about that term. Ultra-processed stands for all actions and additions that make products long-lasting, soft and easy to digest. The foods are made using complex industrial processes such as refining, bleaching and deodorizing, and have long ingredient lists that include artificial flavors, emulsifiers and preservatives. So many additives, and an ingredients list that is incomprehensible to laymen.
According to Marlou Lasschuijt, nutrition researcher at Wageningen University, scientific research provides at best weak evidence for harmful effects of ultra-processed food, such as weight gain. “There are too many variables to draw firm conclusions about causes. One of the problems is that there is such a diversity of what falls into the ‘ultra-processed’ category. Whole wheat bread from the bakery does not fall under this category, but whole wheat bread in the supermarket does.”
Researchers tend to agree that foods high in fat, sugar and salt are usually ultra-processed. If it is also easy to eat and contains few essential nutrients – so that people hardly feel satisfied, want to eat again quickly, and therefore consume too many calories – it leads to obesity.
How does De Boer view ultra-processed food? “People who eat ultra-processed food structurally consume more calories than the amount required for maintenance. Even if only a little per day, they store it and that causes problems. It is a secondary effect of ultra-processed food. Not every ultra-processed product is bad or causes health problems. But the supermarket does contribute to obesity, because more than half of the range now consists of ultra-processed products.”
Concession to the concept
It is remarkable that the principles behind the Upfront supermarket are at odds with how Upfront sports nutrition is made: it does indeed fall into the ultra-processed category. The 50 gram protein bar, for example, contains an emulsifier and 12 grams of sugar – three sugar cubes. For that reason, your own sports nutrition is not for sale in your own supermarket.
De Boer acknowledges that this is difficult to reconcile. “We keep the channels separate. Sports nutrition gives us the means to sell basic nutrition. That does not mean that we will kill sports nutrition as soon as our supermarkets are functioning properly. They can coexist. But I don’t want to pretend that sports nutrition can replace your diet.”
Doesn’t it annoy an idealist who wants to radically change the nutrition industry that he has to continue selling ultra-processed sports nutrition? “I understand the question. But sports nutrition has a specific purpose. You run a marathon and take a gel that contains ultra-processed components: that improves your performance. Or you take creatine as a supplement to accelerate your muscle growth, that’s not surprising.” Still, he finds it “disruptive” that there is more sugar than protein in the bar: “That is a concession to our concept.”
The new Upfront store on the corner of Nieuwe Binnenweg and Mathenesserlaan in Rotterdam.
Photo Walter Autumn
Saying goodbye to sports nutrition is not an option. But De Boer hopes that in ten years the sports bar will represent a small part of Upfront’s entire sales. “The turnover in the supermarket market in the Netherlands is approaching 60 billion. And the supplements market does not even touch 500 million, a fraction.”
On the horizon is still the desire to grow our own food. The first step towards self-production is having your own factory on site. “It mixes the majority of the powdered products that we sell online. There are plans to open a second and third factory this year.”
And then? Upfront potato fields and tomato greenhouses? “Very interesting from a technical point of view. I would like to link certain types of crops to our store.” But De Boer may be a dreamer, but he is also a realist. “That is not something you just do. First the factories. There are a lot of efficiency gains to be made there.”