On The Blower With Humantra
Interview → David Morton – 18th July 2025
Were you always into health and fitness, Charlie?
Ironically, health and fitness were just not part of my life until about three years ago. I would have been the unhealthiest guys you know. I wasn't drastically overweight, but I ate poorly, drank a lot of alcohol, and didn't think about sleep. It was just a compound of poor decisions which resulted in me being incredibly unhappy.
I got divorced and my then business just wasn't working out. I was just not looking after myself at all. Then my dad became very ill and passed away. I couldn't process more disappointment or sadness. My mechanism of coping with it all was to go to the gym. I was training twice a day.
Two-a-days. Wow. Didn’t you feel crushed?
Actually, I had a second awakening. I constantly felt like I never had enough energy and I’d always wake up tired. I got headaches all the time. I thought that was normal and everyone felt like that. I had more energy once I started training and wanted to capitalise on that.
It was really from there that the idea of Humantra was born. The idea of creating a supplement stack for an absolute noob. The initial plan was to do hydration products, sleep products and immunity products. Hydration was going to be the first and when we did all the research it became obvious that it’s the most foundational health need on the planet. We say it all the time now: it’s not just a fix - it’s the foundation.
Wasn’t the vibe of electrolyte products very elite? It was all about running your Ironman five minutes quicker…
We weren't interested in that at all. We wanted to help your everyday person. Being optimally hydrated is not about a 5% improvement in terms of how you feel or your productivity. That’s hard to measure. But it's the immeasurables. I personally felt my headaches were gone. My mum is 70 and she's obsessed with the product. My missus drinks an electrolyte and we've got kids of four and five that drink Humantra.
I've got a whole host of Premier League footballers using it. We have Rory McElroy using the product. Humantra can encapsulate so many people. There's something extremely serendipitous about this business. Whether it's luck, timing, opportunity, I don't know. But we've managed to have this snowball growth over the last three years.
I'm still racking my brains as to why.
I'm 41 and feel like being hydrated can absolutely make or break my day. For people like me, what would you say are the main benefits?
I think the one thing that I look at is that your brain is made up of 80% water. We are so fixated on training our bodies, or going to the gym, or running a marathon. We’re willing to go and put our bodies through the mill and get that protein in to fuel our growth and so on. Yet we're so reluctant to do anything for our brain.
For brain health, all our bodies crave is water. If your car needed fuel, you'd fill it up with petrol, right? The fuel our bodies need is water and we're so reluctant to give it that. We'll give a short-term fix like with an energy drink or a coffee. If you spoke to everyone in the office and asked them to pick a drink, I reckon only one in five would choose water.
I think it’s mad that people say they don’t drink water unless it’s got squash in it.
You know, ironically, sugar does help the rehydration process. Sugar means that the electrolytes absorb quicker into cells, so it has a place. Products with sugar in are not evil necessarily. But from our perspective, we're not about rehydration. It's not about a need for you to quickly rehydrate and replace mineral loss.
Our mindset is around proactive hydration, getting on the front foot by waking up and making a smarter choice and when people do that, they feel better and share it with their friends. That’s why we did sachets. You would never give somebody a scoop from a pouch, but I think there's something so beautiful about this art of sharing something positive. I hear it all the time at functions: ‘I was at my friend’s house and they gave me a sachet of Humantra.’ It’s been helpful for us as a business.
What is the next step for the electrolyte sector, then? Not asking you to give the game away, obviously.
Are you familiar with the Walkman story? When Sony designed the Walkman, they put much more function into it. But they thought people just weren't going to understand how to use it. That it would be much harder for people to make behavioural change when it's too complex.
I believe that we're in a time now where the hydration supplement sector is very saturated. There's no two ways about it, it’s very easy to be a supplement brand these days and crank out ever more products.
But we're taking a very different approach. We are going to bang the drum on a really simple message: this is about everyday wellness. Not this clamour of having something unique to be able to penetrate through the noise; to try and create some differentiation where you don't need to.
I think that the category will become exceptionally noisy for a while. It will be about who can offer even more or better for the training obsessed. We’re the antithesis or that. Our message is that hydration is for everybody, everywhere, everyday and we want to help people solve that. It’s a formulation for all-day hydration. There is no need to complicate that.
