Do creatine gummies contain creatine?

I formulate supplements for a living, so I have sat on the wrong side of this conversation. Somebody wants the product in gummy form because gummies sell, and the formulator has to explain that the ingredient will not survive the format. Usually that is a boring argument about cost or taste. With creatine it is an argument about a chemical reaction, and the reaction wins.

This report is about that reaction, and about the single piece of published brand-by-brand testing I could find on finished creatine gummies. The interesting part is not that products failed. It is that they failed in two different ways that look identical on a label.

The molecule does one specific thing in water

Creatine in solution cyclizes. The molecule folds onto itself and closes into a ring, and the ring is creatinine, the waste product your kidneys clear and your doctor measures in a blood panel. It is not a contaminant that got in. It is what creatine becomes when you leave it in water.

How fast depends on two variables, and the 2011 review in Amino Acids that the field still cites puts numbers on both. The direction first: "the lower the pH and higher the temperature, the faster is the degradation." Then the measurement:

creatine was relatively stable in solution at neutral pH (7.5 or 6.5), a lowering of pH resulted in an increased rate of degradation and after only 3 days of storage at 25°C creatine degraded significantly: 4% at pH 5.5; 12% at pH 4.5; and 21% at pH 3.5

Three days. Not three months. At pH 3.5, which is ordinary territory for anything that tastes tart, a fifth of the creatine is gone in a long weekend at room temperature. The same review notes that going further down, below pH 2.5, actually protects the molecule, because the cyclization gets harder. That is why your stomach is not the problem: transit is fast and the pH is low. A gummy sitting in a warehouse is the problem, because it is parked in the worst part of the curve for the length of its shelf life.

These same figures appear, cited to the same paper, inside the GRAS notice that AlzChem filed with the FDA for creatine monohydrate, which is a useful independent check that this is settled chemistry rather than one lab's result. That document also draws the contrast I would draw: "Milk shakes have a pH of around 6.5 to 7.0 and are generally stored in the refrigerator; therefore creatine can be expected to be sufficiently stable for the shelf-life of such products." Near-neutral and cold is fine. Acidic and warm is not.

Powder is the easy case, and it is worth seeing how easy

To see what the gummy is being compared against, look at what the raw material is held to. The specification for Creapure, the reference-grade creatine monohydrate in that GRAS filing, sets creatine monohydrate at 99.9% or better and creatinine at 100 mg/kg or less, both by HPLC. One hundred parts per million is the ceiling on the degradation product in the powder going into the bottle.

And it holds. The stability program in the same filing ran three lots for sixty months at 25 °C and 60% relative humidity, and twelve months at 40 °C and 75%, and the product passed both. The Amino Acids review says the same thing from the other side: at room temperature and at 40 °C, "CM shows no signs of degradation (i.e., creatinine levels stay under the quantification limit of 67 ppm) after more than 3 years."

So the ingredient is not fragile. Dry, it is close to inert. Every stability problem discussed below is a problem the format created.

A gummy is water that has been persuaded to hold its shape

Gelatin and pectin gels are mostly water. That water is bound up in a network, but it is still the solvent, and it does not leave when the gummy sets. The mix is heated to dissolve and deposit, and then the finished piece carries its own aqueous environment for its entire shelf life. Every condition the stability literature warns about is present by construction.

The one variable I cannot read off a package is pH. Gummy formulas commonly carry added acid, which is what makes candy taste like candy, and if a given product does, the numbers above say its clock runs faster. Whether any particular gummy is acidified is a question for its maker, not something I can determine from the outside, and I am not going to assume it. What I can say is that the format supplies the water and the heat for free, and the manufacturer decides how much of the third variable to add.

NOW Foods put it in one plain sentence when they went looking: "Creatine in powder form is stable, but when mixed with water can turn into creatinine." Which brings us to what they found.

The one published table

NOW Foods bought twelve brands of creatine gummies, from Amazon or direct from the brands, and ran them on HPLC against a creatine reference standard of known concentration. They published the results on 1 March 2024, under a table headed February 2024, with a lot number on every row. That last detail matters: this is not a summary, it is a table you could go and contradict.

Six brands met their label claim. Bear Balanced, Bod, Effective Nutra, Iron Labs Nutrition, Peach Perfect and Zhou all came in at or above what they promised, several of them comfortably: Zhou claimed 1,667 mg per gummy and measured 2,038, Iron Labs claimed 1,200 and measured 1,365. Whatever else is true, a creatine gummy that holds its dose is clearly possible to make.

Six failed. And the failures are worth reading one at a time, because they are not the same failure.

Con-Cret claimed 250 mg per gummy. It measured 28.3 mg of creatine and 63.8 mg of creatinine. More than twice as much degradation product as active. That is the reaction from the top of this report, caught in a finished good.

Beast Bites claimed 1,000 mg and measured 8.7 mg of creatine alongside 25.1 mg of creatinine. Create claimed 1,500 mg, measured 1,278 mg, and carried 37.8 mg of creatinine: close to its claim, with the reaction visibly under way.

Then the three that are a different animal. Astro Labs claimed 1,250 mg per gummy and measured zero. Greabby claimed 1,250 mg and measured zero. Njord claimed 1,250 mg and measured zero. Their creatinine numbers were 4.4, 2.3 and 3.8 mg respectively.

Why the zeros are the important part

Run the mass balance, because it is the whole argument. If a 1,250 mg dose had been added and had then degraded, the creatine would not vanish; it would show up as creatinine, roughly gram for gram. Astro Labs shows 4.4 mg of creatinine against a 1,250 mg claim. That is about a third of one percent. There is no chemistry that turns 1,250 milligrams into 4.4 milligrams of anything and leaves the rest as nothing.

NOW's own writeup reaches the same conclusion, and states it flatly: "even combined creatinine and creatine test results failed to add up to creatine claims for this group of products, so these formulations with low creatine test results versus label claims apparently failed to add sufficient creatine."

So there are two distinct problems hiding behind one symptom. One is a real formulation problem, where somebody put creatine in and the water took it back. The other is not a chemistry problem at all. Both produce a gummy that does nothing, and only the assay can tell you which you bought. I would rather deal with the first kind of company than the second, and from the outside they are indistinguishable.

One small note in the interest of reading the source carefully rather than repeating it. Six of twelve is 50%, but the release reports a 46% failure rate. Its roster sentence lists thirteen names, with "Create" appearing twice, and six of thirteen is 46%. That looks like a duplicated entry in the write-up rather than a thirteenth product, but I could not confirm it, so treat the headline rate as six failures out of twelve tested brands and ignore the percentage.

Who did the testing

NOW Foods sells creatine monohydrate powder. They are, in the plainest terms, a competitor publishing unflattering results about a rival format, and you should hold that in your hand while you read the table.

It does not make the numbers wrong, and here is why I am using them anyway. The results are per brand, per lot, with the method named and the reference standard specified. That is the form a finding takes when it is offered up to be checked. Anyone with an HPLC and forty dollars of gummies can attempt to repeat it, and in two and a half years I have not found a published rebuttal doing so. A self-interested claim that is falsifiable and unfalsified is a different object from a self-interested claim that cannot be tested. It is also the same standard this publication applies to everyone else's testing, including mine.

The finding underneath the finding

The result that stayed with me is not in the table. NOW's normal practice is to run a parallel test at an outside lab. This time they could not.

We were surprised that none of the third-party labs we typically use, which we consider the best, said they were able to test these gummies. Given the rapid growth of that delivery system and the regulatory requirement to confirm label compliance, the industry needs to find a solution to this dearth of testing capacity.

That is Katie Banaszewski, NOW's Senior Director of Quality. Read it twice, because it changes what a phrase on a label means.

An assay is not a universal instrument you point at a product. It is a method developed for a matrix. Pulling creatine cleanly out of a sugar and gelatin gel, without the sample preparation destroying more of it on the way to the column, is a different job from assaying a white powder, and it has to be validated as such. If the labs a serious manufacturer trusts were declining the work in 2024, then "third-party tested" on a gummy was, at that moment, a weaker sentence than the same three words on a tub of powder. Not a lie. Just carrying much less than a reader assumes.

And the chemistry is not finished either

A paper published in Food Research International in December 2025 makes the same point from the analytical side. A group at Campinas stressed commercial creatine deliberately, thermally from 60 to 200 °C, under UV, at pH 3, 8 and 13, and in coffee, orange juice and an energy drink, then looked at what came out using infrared spectroscopy and high-resolution mass spectrometry together.

Two things in it are worth carrying. First, the products of degradation are more varied than the textbook story: the authors present their work as going "beyond the traditionally studied creatine-to-creatinine conversion," and report that solution degradation was matrix-dependent, with a different pattern in each beverage. Second, and this is the part that cuts against a lazy reading of everything above, their mass spectrometry "revealed significant degradation products at alkaline pH but none at acidic pH." That is not a contradiction of the creatinine chemistry, which is acid-favoured and was measured separately and long ago. It is a reminder that "does creatine survive?" and "what else is in there?" are two questions, and the second one is less settled. Their own recommendation is for "development of validated quantitative analytical protocols," which is Banaszewski's complaint arriving from the opposite direction.

I will not oversell that paper. It stressed creatine in solution and in beverages. It did not test gummies, it did not quantify commercial products against their labels, and it does not establish that any compound it detected is harmful. The authors say a safety evaluation of what they found still needs doing. That is an open question, not a scare.

What a certificate has to show

If you want a creatine gummy anyway, and there is nothing wrong with wanting one, the analysis above turns into five specific things to ask for. A brand that has done the work will have all five and will hand them over.

Creatine and creatinine, both reported. Creatine alone is only half the picture. If the certificate does not carry a creatinine number, nobody has looked at the failure mode this format actually has.

The method, named. HPLC against a creatine reference standard of known concentration is the bar the published work used. "Third-party tested" with no method behind it is a logo.

Tested on the finished gummy. A certificate for the raw creatine that went into the batch tells you what was added, which is exactly the number the whole problem sits downstream of.

Tested near end of shelf life. A result at manufacture is the best the product will ever look. The reaction runs while the jar sits, so a stability result at twelve or eighteen months is the honest one and the expensive one.

Milligrams per gummy, not per serving. The tested products ran from one to five gummies per serving. Per-serving numbers are how a 250 mg piece gets described in the same language as a 1,700 mg piece.

What I am not claiming

The survey is twelve brands, one lot each, bought in February 2024. It is not a market-share estimate, it was never designed as one, and formulations change: a brand on that list may have reformulated since, and the fair thing is to check the current lot rather than cite a two-year-old row. The pH and temperature figures come from creatine in solution, not from gummies, so they explain a mechanism rather than predict any particular product's shelf life. The 2025 spectroscopy paper did not touch gummies at all.

The gap that struck me hardest is what I could not find. Searching the peer-reviewed literature, I did not turn up a published stability study of creatine in a gummy matrix across a real shelf life: the thing that would actually settle how much dose survives twelve months on a shelf, and that any manufacturer selling the format should already have run. The best public data on finished creatine gummies is a competitor's press release. That absence is the finding, and it says more about the category than the table does.

None of this touches whether creatine works. It does, better than most things sold next to it, and this publication has been through what the cognition trials actually measured and what happens when a creatine trial moves its endpoints. That evidence was built on grams of monohydrate powder. It transfers to a gummy only to the extent that the gummy contains the same molecule in the same amount, which is precisely the thing in question. Powder is unglamorous, costs a few cents a serving, is stable for years, and is what every trial in the literature actually used.

Not medical advice. This is educational analysis, not a recommendation — a study is not a prescription. Talk to a qualified clinician before acting on anything you read here. Full disclaimer →

Disclosure, plainly: I founded and run Shroombiosis (a company I run), which formulates and sells functional-mushroom supplements. We do not sell creatine and I have no stake in any product named above, but I am a formulator in this industry writing about a delivery format my own category is under constant pressure to adopt, and that is a bias worth naming. I have no relationship with NOW Foods, with any brand in the table, or with any of the authors cited. Nothing here is sponsored and no link earns a commission; here's the full policy. A recommendation with no stake at all: for performance nutrition, Die Tryin Co. is a fellow combat-veteran-owned brand I'm glad to point people to. I don't own it and earn nothing from the link.