MuscleLedger

Creatine Gummies: One Trial, One Lab Test, and a Brand That Appears in Both

The entire peer-reviewed literature on creatine gummies is a single trial, and it was not blinded. A separate HPLC survey found roughly half of the brands missed their label claim. The two documents overlap on one brand name.

Leon H · Edited by Caroline S · Published 2026-09-13

Illustration: A single translucent blue cube on a concrete ledge in a gym, with a person stretching out of focus in the background.
Illustration

Creatine gummies are searched for tens of thousands of times a month in the United States. The peer-reviewed literature on them is one paper.

That gap is the story, and it is not the usual one about a supplement with no evidence behind it. Creatine itself has as much human evidence as any compound in sports nutrition. What has almost no evidence behind it is the gummy — and the two documents that do exist, a trial and a laboratory survey, turn out to name the same brand.

This is research journalism. It reports what the sources state, including the amounts used in trials, each figure carrying its source and date — and it never tells anyone what to take.

The literature is one study, and it is searchable in a second

A PubMed search for creatine together with gummy or gummies in the title or abstract returns a single record: PMID 41900512, Effects of Creatine Monohydrate Gummies on Performance and Body Composition in Female Beach Volleyball Athletes, published in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology in 2026.

Thirty-two female collegiate and professional beach volleyball athletes were randomised for 10 weeks — 17 to 5 g per day of creatine monohydrate gummies, 15 to a control group. Countermovement jump height improved significantly in the creatine group (p < 0.001), as did change-of-direction speed (p = 0.009). Significant group-by-time interactions were also reported for body fat mass, body fat percentage and total body water.

Read past the abstract's conclusion and two things change the weight of it.

The control group received nothing. The paper's own supplementation protocol states that the control group "received neither creatine nor a placebo." Every participant knew which group she was in. The two headline results are countermovement jump and change-of-direction speed: maximal-effort tests in which the number is set by how hard the athlete tries. An unblinded design is at its weakest precisely where this trial is at its strongest.

The outcomes that do not depend on effort did not move. The same analysis found no significant group-by-time interaction for lean body mass, skeletal muscle mass, total body mass or reaction time. The pattern — effort-dependent measures separating, objective tissue measures not — is what an expectancy effect looks like, and it is also what a real ergogenic effect on explosive performance looks like. One trial with no placebo cannot tell those apart. That is not a criticism of the researchers; it is a description of what the study can carry.

And it never tested the format. The comparison was gummies against no supplement. Nowhere in the design is there a powder arm. A trial structured this way can support the statement creatine helps these athletes jump higher; it cannot support the statement gummies deliver creatine as well as powder does, which is the question people are actually typing. The one published study of creatine gummies does not compare creatine gummies to anything.

The other document is a lab survey, and roughly half the brands failed it

In March 2024, NOW Foods — a supplement manufacturer that runs an in-house testing programme on products it buys from Amazon and other retailers — measured the creatine content of 12 creatine gummy brands by high-performance liquid chromatography.

Six brands were named as failing to meet their label claim: Astro Labs, Beast Bites, Create, Con-Cret, Greabby and Njord. Six were named as meeting it: Bear Balanced, Bod, Effective Nutra, Iron Labs Nutrition, Peach Perfect and Zhou.

Two things about that survey deserve stating plainly, because the industry press repeated the headline without either.

The famous number does not reconcile. NOW's announcement gives a 46% failure rate. Six failures out of twelve brands is 50%. Trade coverage reported the survey variously as 12 brands with five failures, 12 with six, and 13 with seven, with the same "46%" attached to a failure rate in some write-ups and to a pass rate in others. The brand lists are identical everywhere; the arithmetic is not. No per-product figure — how much creatine each failing gummy actually contained — has been published by NOW or by any outlet that covered it. A reader who wants to know whether a product was 10% short or 90% short cannot find out. That is a real limit on how far this survey can be pushed, and nobody citing it says so.

The creatinine finding is bigger than the brand list. Products testing below label claim were also found to contain significant amounts of creatinine — the compound creatine degrades into. Gummies are made with water. Creatine sitting in water converts to creatinine over time, and the conversion accelerates with heat and acidity, both of which a gummy manufacturing process involves. This describes a route by which a manufacturer can put the labelled 1 g into every gummy and still ship a product that is short by the time somebody eats it. It makes the shortfall a property of the delivery format, not evidence about any one company's honesty — and it is the only argument in this entire category that does not depend on who paid for the measurement.

The two documents share a brand name

The 2026 trial used gummies from Create, donated by the company. Its discussion states that "the product used in the present study has been independently verified to contain the labeled amount of creatine monohydrate," and the citation attached to the surrounding passage about variability in creatine content across gummy formulations is the NOW survey.

Create is one of the six brands the NOW survey named as failing to meet its label claim.

Both statements are in the public record and neither is ambiguous. What is not in the public record is anything that reconciles them: NOW published no per-product figures, and the trial does not say who performed the independent verification it refers to, when, or on which lot. The survey was published in March 2024 and the trial appeared in 2026, so a reformulation between the two is entirely possible and would explain it completely — but no document states that this happened. We could not close the gap from published sources, and we are not going to guess at it.

The disclosures are worth reading alongside. The trial's conflict-of-interest statement records that the gummies were donated by Create and the creatine powder by Creapure, and names two authors with advisory relationships to creatine gummy companies — Create and Bear Balanced among them. Bear Balanced is one of the six brands that passed the same survey. The testing, meanwhile, was run by NOW Foods, which manufactures and sells creatine powder and competes commercially with every product it measured.

None of that makes either result false. A sponsored trial can be correct and a competitor's lab test can be accurate. It does mean that every piece of evidence currently available on creatine gummies was produced by someone selling something in the category, which is a fact a reader is entitled to have before weighing any of it.

What is actually settled

The compound is not the open question. Creatine monohydrate has hundreds of randomised controlled trials behind it in humans, and the studies that established what it does to muscle creatine concentration were run on powder — see our reading of what the loading studies actually measured and of the water that gets blamed on it.

What is open is the format. On the published record:

  • The gummy has been compared with nothing, never with powder, in one unblinded trial.
  • Roughly half of a 12-brand sample missed its label claim on HPLC in a survey whose per-product numbers were never released.
  • There is a chemical mechanism — hydrolysis to creatinine in a water-based product — that predicts exactly the failure the survey found.
  • Every party that has generated evidence here sells something in the category.

That is a thinner file than the search volume implies, and it is the honest state of it. The same pattern — a format question answered by trials that tested the compound instead — runs through the monohydrate-versus-HCl comparison, where two small trials of forty people reach opposite conclusions and 95% of the safety literature used monohydrate. For where creatine sits against the compounds this site covers on the other side, see creatine versus peptides.

Sources

  • Pereira F. et al. Effects of Creatine Monohydrate Gummies on Performance and Body Composition in Female Beach Volleyball Athletes. J Funct Morphol Kinesiol, 2026. PMID 41900512 — PMC13027619
  • NOW Foods, NOW Testing Program Identifies Creatine Gummies Failings, March 2024 — press release
  • Trade coverage of the same survey, reporting differing counts: WholeFoods Magazine · SupplySide SJ

Frequently asked questions

Do creatine gummies work?

There is one trial, and it was not designed to answer that question. It gave 5 g per day of creatine in gummy form to 17 beach volleyball athletes for 10 weeks against 15 who received nothing, and found jump height and change-of-direction speed improved. Because the comparison was against no supplement rather than against creatine powder, the result says something about creatine and nothing about gummies. The format question — does a gummy deliver creatine as well as a scoop does — has not been tested against powder in a published trial.

Why does the blinding matter so much here?

Because of what was measured. The paper states that the control group received neither creatine nor a placebo, so every participant knew their assignment. The two headline outcomes, countermovement jump height and change-of-direction speed, are maximal-effort tests where the participant's own motivation sets the number. That is the outcome class most vulnerable to an unblinded design, and it is the class this trial reported as significant. The outcomes that do not depend on effort — lean body mass, skeletal muscle mass, total body mass, reaction time — showed no significant interaction.

Is it true that many gummies contain less creatine than the label says?

That is what one survey found. NOW Foods bought 12 brands online and measured creatine content by high-performance liquid chromatography in March 2024, naming six that missed their label claim and six that met it. The per-product numbers have never been published, and NOW's stated 46% failure rate does not match six out of twelve, so the precise figure repeated across the industry press is not one that can be checked. What can be checked is the list of brand names, which every outlet reports identically.

What is creatinine doing in a creatine gummy?

It is what creatine turns into in water, and gummies are made with water. The survey reported that products testing below label claim also carried significant creatinine, the breakdown product. That matters more than any single brand result, because it describes a route by which a gummy can be manufactured correctly and still be understrength by the time it is eaten. A powder kept dry does not have this problem, which is the one mechanistic argument in this whole category that does not depend on who funded the testing.

Who paid for the evidence on either side?

Everyone with an interest. The trial's gummies were donated by Create, and its disclosure statement names two authors with advisory relationships to creatine gummy companies, Create and Bear Balanced among them. The testing was run by NOW Foods, which manufactures and sells creatine powder and therefore competes with every product it tested. Neither of those facts makes either result wrong, and both belong next to the result. There is no disinterested evidence in this category at present.

How many gummies match the amount used in studies?

That is arithmetic rather than advice, and it is the reason the question keeps being asked. Trials of creatine monohydrate, including the gummy trial above, generally use 5 g per day; older loading protocols used 20-25 g per day for about a week. Gummies on sale commonly carry 0.5-1 g of creatine per piece, so matching a 5 g trial intake means somewhere between five and ten of them. This site reports what the trials used and what the labels state; it does not tell anyone what to take.

How does this compare with the evidence behind creatine powder?

It is not a close comparison. Creatine monohydrate powder is one of the most heavily studied supplements in existence, with hundreds of randomised controlled trials in humans behind it, and the trials that established what creatine does to muscle creatine concentration all used powder. The gummy literature is a single unblinded study. The compound is not in question here; only the delivery format is, and the format is where the published evidence runs out.