Uri And David Minkoff’s Amino-Focused Wellness Brand BodyHealth Launches At Erewhon Market

The Minkoff name has become synonymous with entrepreneurship. Rebecca Minkoff and her brother Uri co-founded the Rebecca Minkoff apparel brand, which sold to Sunrise Brands last year. 

While Uri was running the global apparel company as CEO, he was also building another business with his physician dad, David Minkoff. That business, supplement brand BodyHealth, launched in 2000 as an outgrowth of LifeWorks, a Clearwater, Fla., alternative medical clinic the elder Minkoff founded in 1997 with his wife Sue Minkoff, a nurse. David Minkoff, a 44-time Ironman triathlete, started developing BodyHealth’s wellness products to not only help his clinic patients recover from severe illnesses like cancer and Lyme disease, but also help athletes perform at maximum potential.

Now, BodyHealth has forged its first retail partnership with Erewhon Market, where it will be sold across the upscale natural grocer’s nine Southern California locations. The products carried by Erewhon include PerfectAmino Tablets, PerfectAmino Powder, PerfectAmino Electrolytes, Omega-3 Health, Relief, Reds and Metal Free & Chemical Cleanse. BodyHealth’s prices range from about $35 to $80. A BodyHealth Erewhon smoothie is slated for March 2024.

Uri says he’s thrilled about consumers being able to access BodyHealth products at Erewhon because its more advanced products like Metal Free & Chemical Cleanse, $79, have been limited to “patients that are seeing a practitioner. It’s a unique product that’s customarily carried through clinics.”

Elaborating on BodyHealth’s partnership with Erewhon, Uri says, “There’s so many different things that kind of align there. I live in New York, but I spend a decent amount of time in LA, and whenever I go to Erewhon, I’m like, ‘This is our customer. This is who [BodyHealth] is for.’”

Through LifeWorks and a thriving Facebook Group with about 30,000 members that keeps the Minkoffs in touch with what the BodyHealth consumer wants, they’ve attained invaluable insights on the ingestibles market that have informed the development of BodyHealth’s supplements. Uri says, “We saw hundreds of wellness products and really got to see the gaps in the market.” 

BodyHealth’s flagship product, PerfectAmino, is designed to assist the body in building new protein and collagen for lean muscle and healthy skin. The brand is enlarging its 20-plus item assortment over the next year. It has a gut health product and additional flavors of PerfectAmino Powder on the docket as well as five or six yet-to-be announced releases. 

“We believe we’re bringing a different look to how people consume protein,” says Uri. “Seeing the different things that have been in vogue over the last 15 years, from the paleo movement to the keto movement, now the carnivore movement, the plant-based movement has been part of that, as we look at all those, we think we’ve got a very compelling product that will fit into any one of those diets and reframe people’s relationship with nutrition and food. They’re able to get the amino acids, which can build their protein with a fraction of the caloric impact and in the right ratios.” 

Uri reports BodyHealth’s sales have jumped 50% from last year. Thus far, it’s been bootstrapped by the Minkoffs, and Uri shares they plan to keep it that way for the foreseeable future.

“Never say never, of course. Especially because we’re dealing with people and their health, we like being able to look at things from a long-term perspective and what is right for the customer,” says Uri. “I just had something happen morning with [the prices of] some ingredients, and it was like, well, this is going to be 20 cents more, 50 cents more per bottle. I don’t want to have to have a banker say, ‘OK, we can increase margin for that.’ Not having that in the mix right now has been helpful. Maybe we’ll change our mind, but, right now, I think we like that it’s just us, and we can make those decisions and we don’t have to answer to anyone.”