Muscle Milk

Muscle Milk came out of CytoSport, a sports-nutrition company founded in 1998 in Benicia, California by a father-and-son team, Greg and Mike Pickett. Their first protein products hit the market in 1999, and in 2000 came the one that mattered: Muscle Milk, a protein powder — later joined by the ready-to-drink bottles everyone actually remembers — that turned the crusty gym-rat protein tub into a mainstream grab-and-go product.

The 2000s were its decade. As gym culture went mass-market, Muscle Milk went with it — the tubs at GNC, the coolers at the campus rec center, the bottle sweating in a cup holder after morning lifting. Star athletes like NFL running back Adrian Peterson signed on as endorsers, Greg Pickett fielded his own Muscle Milk-branded sports-car team from 2007 — it would win back-to-back American Le Mans Series championships in 2012 and 2013 — and the brand plastered itself across the sports landscape: everywhere fitness culture lived, the bottle was already there.

Then there was the name. Muscle Milk contains milk-derived proteins — whey and casein — but no actual milk, and the packaging said so outright: "Contains No Milk." Rivals cried foul (a 2009 Nestlé challenge before the ad industry's self-regulator got the brand's claims referred to the FTC and FDA), and in 2011 the FDA sent CytoSport a warning letter calling the labels false or misleading — a product named milk, claiming to contain no milk, while listing milk ingredients in its own allergen statement. The absurdity was half the brand's charm, and late-night jokes wrote themselves. The business, meanwhile, kept getting bigger: Hormel bought CytoSport for about $450 million in 2014, and PepsiCo took it over in 2019 for $465 million.

Muscle Milk is still on shelves, but its cultural moment is unmistakably the 2000s — the decade when protein stopped being a bodybuilder thing and became a lifestyle thing, with a paradoxically named bottle leading the way.