I'm speaking personally here. I fell in love with Flow Nutrition Bars the first time I tasted one. (Flow is now a CycleHub partner, but we were customers first.)

It was at Sea Otter Australia in 2025, and Flow Nutrition's founder Ricky Dann had a tent, a table of blue-wrapped bars, and a couple of plates of samples speared with toothpicks.

I'm a whole-food snob, snacking on a Kanzi apple as I type this, yet the bar won me over because it tasted so natural and chocolatey. It felt like real food, rather than a food-like product. I bought a box, and I've never been without some in the pantry since.

What I did not know that day was that the man handing out toothpicks has a PhD in the physiology of surfing, and has run 60 marathons in the last few years.

The Man in the Lab Coat

Ricky learned to create a vision board from Vince Kelly, who used them as a training tool when Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at the South Sydney Rabbitohs. Today, he has laid out all his future hopes for Flow Nutrition on his board.

“I really believe in it,” Ricky says. “Visualising the future and seeing it every day is powerful. I keep it right above my desk.”

Ricky has a Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD in Exercise Science, did his doctoral research on the sports science of surfing performance, and has published multiple peer-reviewed papers on action sports.

But Ricky isn’t just a brainy guy in a lab coat. He is also an athlete.

There was hardly a day in the first 18 years of his life when he didn’t play tennis, cricket, or both. He is also a keen surfer who grew up just inland from Noosa. He says snowboarding is the sport he loves most. He named his brand after the flow state he gets when shredding the slopes.

Ultras Teach You How to Eat

Cyclists often say that you have to train your stomach to absorb lots of carbs over a long, hard ride. But no one knows more about eating for performance than ultramarathoners.

In the last few years, Ricky has completed two Ironman triathlons, about 50 marathon-distance runs, and multiple 160k ultramarathons. These extreme sports have informed the way he makes Flow Nutrition’s products.

The event he’s currently training for is a last-one-standing backyard ultramarathon, a race where competitors run a 6.706 km loop on the hour, every hour, until they can’t take another step.

He loves the format because there’s a central hub at the start-finish line. It is where his crew is, and every hour he gets to come back to the same spot and see the same people. By comparison, in other ultra races, you might be alone for ten hours.

Ricky placed fifth in his first backyard ultra, in Sydney in March 2026, after running 220k over 33 hours.

“Coming fifth was absolutely insane,” he remembers. “There were lots of very, very good runners there, so I didn’t dream of placing so well.”

You’ll Like What’s in the Box

Ricky’s dream had always been to pursue a high-performance manager position, but when Covid hit, he watched as many of the top sports scientists he looked up to lost their jobs. He wanted more control over his career, he tells CycleHub.

It seemed natural to make a supplement and protein recovery bar. He focused on surfers at first but now talks about Flow Nutrition in terms of three pillars: action, adventure and endurance sports.

The bars and powder took him two to three years of research and development. He’s self-funded, so he can’t meet factories’ usual minimum production runs of tens of thousands. Despite the constraints, he now has three successful products.

His feeding system consists of the energy bar, recovery bar, and Flow Fuel sachets. It fuels you before, during, and after your rides or other workouts. Ricky says he formulated all three products with the help of sports dieticians and his own background as an athlete and exercise scientist.

Ten years out, Ricky imagines seeing Flow Nutrition at every trailhead and in every retailer across action, adventure and endurance, and sponsoring major action-sport events.

“My most important goal is to build out a global community that understands how to fuel, so they can do what they love for longer,” he says. Ricky has a closer connection to his customers than many business owners do.

“I have met most of my customers at market stalls, events, or through some other social connection,” he says. “I am proud that they feel like they are part of the family.”