Noogs Founders Paige and Ben Foote on Entering the Performance Energy Product Market in Pink Jumpsuits
Founders of Noogs share what differentiates the sour energy chews, how their dog Daisy inspired the name, why pink jumpsuits became part of the brand story, and their experience becoming first-time parents as entrepreneurs.
While stationed in Los Angeles as a military spouse, Paige Foote was looking for community. The small base where her partner Ben Foote served as a project manager and information security officer was too far from the nearest base housing option and, therefore, lacked the family networking opportunities of many other military bases.
“I think I made one military spouse friend when we were stationed there,” Paige says. “I just felt like there was no way for me to build community through that.”
As a way to meet people, she joined a half marathon training group through a charity for the Los Angeles Marathon.
“I loved it and was really excited about it because you would meet with a group of people every Saturday morning and do your long run together,” Paige shares. “Everybody would cheer for each other coming in at the end, and it was just a really positive experience.”
After completing the race, Paige joined South Bay Runners Club to continue running for social connection. Ben would occasionally tag along to run with the group, too.
Finding Their Entrepreneurial Drive
When Paige began training for more half marathons and eventually her first full marathon, she struggled to find energy products she liked and decided to fuel with her favorite sour gummy candies. They were good, but not perfect.
“It’s getting stuck in my teeth. It doesn’t have electrolytes, so I’m trying to find that from other places. It’s kind of hard to chew,” Paige explains about the gummy candies. She remembers thinking, “I feel like I can make something that’s more designed for sports performance.”
With a background as a registered dietitian and experience working in sports performance, she experimented with ingredients in their kitchen, but quickly realized gummies were difficult to make.
Paige and Ben were now living in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a military move in 2020. With Ben’s full support and interest in developing Paige’s energy product idea into a business, they began discussing next steps.
Ben decided to get out of the military at the end of his contract and leverage his degree in entrepreneurship, which he earned before joining the military, and an MBA that he acquired afterward.
Both originally from Oregon, they reached out to Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Program, which helps food-related entrepreneurs develop and grow their businesses. After about a year and a half of working with the Food Innovation Program, the formulation for the sour gummies was finalized in the spring of 2023.
By that same fall, Noogs was selling online and had placements in a few running stores, including Charlottesville’s local Ragged Mountain Running Shop.
Putting the Noogs Brand Together
Envisioning a brand personality that’s fun, welcoming, and unintimidating, Paige and Ben chose to name the company after their dog Daisy’s nickname, Noog. The co-founders quickly became recognizable at race expos and events, wearing their pink jumpsuits and distributing samples of their sour gummies to runners.
Two of Noogs’ flavors are inspired by Paige’s favorites — Electric Watermelon and Poolside Pop — while Lemon Zinger was chosen as a more approachable option. Wicked Apple was a recommendation by their manufacturer, and Paige says she was shocked by how much they loved it. Both Strawberry Lemonade and Blue Raspberry Blast were developed after receiving many customer requests for the flavors.
Noogs products are designed to be easy to chew, and they use natural ingredients for coloring such as blue spirulina and black carrot concentrate. Each flavor has two- to three-times the electrolyte content as other gels and chews, coming in at 150 milligrams of sodium per serving.
“The nice thing is that sour coating, it hits your palate first, and it masks that salty flavor,” Ben explains. “Unless you’re looking for the salt, you really shouldn’t notice it.”
When Paige and Ben worked on the formulation for the caffeinated gummies, they learned that combining two flavors balanced the bitter aftertaste of the caffeine. So, Poolside Pop and Strawberry Lemonade were chosen, each with 50 milligrams of caffeine per serving.
On the operations side, the husband-and-wife co-founders found a natural division of responsibilities based on their individual experiences and skill sets. Ben’s business and project management background led into managing the manufacturing, logistics, finances, and customer relationships on the B2B and wholesale side. Paige is the nutrition and product development expert and also manages all marketing and customer-facing responsibilities, including partnerships and event coordination.
“The business is always top of mind. We’ll go for walks. We’ll talk about the company. We’ll be at lunch and dinner, and we’ll talk about things that are going on,” Ben shares. “But thankfully, we trust each other completely to get the work done, and we both care a lot about doing a good job.”
Navigating Life and Business Together
While building Noogs as a husband-and-wife team, Paige and Ben were also prioritizing building a family. Experiencing a miscarriage while simultaneously entering the busy expo season in 2024, Paige shares how that time period was both emotionally difficult to navigate yet uplifting to be surrounded by runners who shared in their excitement for Noogs.
About a year later, Paige and Ben were able to celebrate, posting an Instagram announcement with Daisy — all three of them dressed in their pink jumpsuits and holding a baby jumpsuit and ultrasound. Paige shares that becoming a mom is already helping shape how she wants Noogs to show up for her fellow mother runners.
These days, while alternating taking calls and co-working during Isaac’s naps, Ben and Paige are working on new flavors, dotting their calendars with expos, and adding to the 250-plus stores that carry Noogs’ products.
Below, Paige and Ben share the personality behind the Noogs brand, how their jumpsuits become part of their story, and the journey to becoming a mom while building a brand.
What inspired the name of your company?
Ben Foote: We named the company Noogs in honor of Daisy, and how we got that name is that Daisy looks like a chicken nugget. We started calling her Nug when we first got her, and then, just through Millennial doggo language, that turned into Noog.
When we were naming the company, we really wanted our company to be very fun and welcoming and vibrant. We’re a serious product, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We wanted to be very approachable because a lot of sports nutrition, at least especially historically, has been very aspirationally marketed — imagery of these really intense Olympic athletes crossing a finish line and sweat pouring down.
Our product can be used for that. But what we found, there’s so much value in all the community-based running that’s popped up across the U.S., especially since COVID, and people finding health and just being together and running, whether you’re a party-pacer or you’re an elite …. We didn’t just want to be focused on marketing to elite athletes. We wanted any athlete, any runner of any level, to feel comfortable using it so they would feel comfortable getting into the sport.
Finding the right running shoes, going into a club for the first time — it’s all really intimidating. And if you’re not being marketed to, sometimes it just feels that much more exclusive. So, we really want to be inclusive.
Daisy loves everybody. She’s not afraid to go up and say hi. She’s always excited to see you. And when we go to expos, that’s who we want to be as a brand. That’s who we are as people, too. So, Noogs is a fun name. It’s fun to say. It’s a little bit silly. It’s very welcoming and playful, and that’s who we wanted to be.
How did the pink jumpsuits become a key part of your brand story?
Ben Foote: When we first launched Noogs, we had an opportunity to go to the Fancy Food Show in partnership with the Oregon State’s Food Innovation Center that we partnered with to make our product. We thought we were going to have this really cool packaging and all these display banners and the table setup.
Well, the product failed in manufacturing. We couldn’t sell it. So, all we had was a bag of 200 samples that we had from a previous batch. Our packaging got delayed. Classic experience for an entrepreneur, by the way. Our displays got delayed, too, in shipping and couldn’t make it in time for the show.
We got in this meeting with a cohort of other entrepreneurs who are working with the Food Innovation Lab, and we’re like, ‘Hey, we don’t have anything. We have nothing to display. All we have is these 200 samples.’ There are buyers from Kroger and Whole Foods and all these companies going to be there.
This one entrepreneur who’s a few years ahead of us, he was like, ‘Listen, that stink you don’t have that display. It stinks you don’t have your packaging. But even with those things, nothing is going to represent your product like you guys will. So, you need to go out and be your own billboards. Go out and be your own banners. Go out and buy some jumpsuits and just meet people.’
Paige and I were like, ‘That’s actually so true.’ If you go to an expo, especially a B2B expo or a consumer expo, so often people will sit behind the booth and not engage because it’s scary talking to people and trying to interact and trying to sell your product.
This product embodies so much of who we are personally and what we’re trying to do. If we don’t embody that ourselves, if we’re too scared to be fun and be welcoming, then this wouldn’t work anyway.
So, we went on Amazon. We found jumpsuits that were perfect. They had all the pink, all of our brand colors on it. We bought them, it got to us, and we got out from our booth in those jumpsuits, held the plate. We had to cut samples in four.
It was a confidence-booster for us because even though we had nothing to display, people were coming over just because we were wearing our jumpsuits and we’re being fun and engaging.
The jumpsuits, and just being that really bright and colorful and owning who we are as a brand, has become an instrumental part of Noogs. We’ll go to pitch competitions. People will all be dressed in suits and ties, and we’ll come out in jumpsuits. That’s who we are…and I love it because it’s really so much more fun to be your authentic self and be your authentic brand, no matter where you are.
What can you share about your experience becoming a mom and the role it’s played in your entrepreneurial journey?
Paige Foote: My story with becoming a mom is actually woven into the Noogs story a little bit. It was a long journey. We got pregnant in 2024, and then we had a miscarriage late in the first trimester, which was just so hard. We lost our baby, and that was in late September, early October.
What starts that time frame? Expo season. It was just like, boom, going straight into expos and having to be on. It was just so nonstop. At the same time, I’m grieving that loss. We’re also actively trying to conceive again, and really struggling. This was the start of something that would become a year-long process of trying to conceive.
I’m so grateful for that busy season, though, because that helped carry me through a really tough time. It was just something so positive I could focus on when I was also so heartbroken — the rest of my personal life was really, really tough.
So, on one end, I’m crying because I see another negative pregnancy test or I’m invited to a baby shower, and I’m just dealing with that. But then the next day, I get to walk into an expo and interact with tens of thousands of athletes who are in the running community, so positive, so encouraging, so fun to be around, and supportive of Noogs and what we’re doing. I’m interacting face to face with people telling me, ‘I trained for my first half marathon,’ and ‘I finished my first half marathon using Noogs.’
While everything was falling apart personal-wise, I could still help people and I had this thing to look forward to and work towards. Eventually, we ended up conceiving Isaac. And the following year, I got to go through the expo season pregnant. That just felt really full circle.
Now, I get to understand what it’s like to be a mom. I have a whole new understanding of runner moms, that community, and just how much of a challenge it is for any mom out there who’s trying to raise children and train for something. So much respect. I didn’t have any idea, and I feel like that’s going to help me even more as the owner of Noogs — just thinking about how our products can maybe support moms, or as a business, what we can do to support them and uplift them.
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“The jumpsuits, and just being that really bright and colorful and owning who we are as a brand, has become an instrumental part of Noogs. We’ll go to pitch competitions. People will all be dressed in suits and ties, and we’ll come out in jumpsuits. That’s who we are…and I love it because it’s really so much more fun to be your authentic self and be your authentic brand, no matter where you are.” - Ben Foote
