Hiro Lab
Creatine Monohydrate 500g - Hiro Lab
£24.99
DNA Sports
Lifting Straps - DNA Sports
£9.99
Cheat Meal
Cheat Meal Syrup 500ml - Salted Caramel
£4.99
Cheat Meal
Cheat Meal Sauce 500ml - Smoke BBQ
£4.99
Cheat Meal
Cheat Meal Sauce 500ml - Mayo Ketchup
£4.99
Hiro Lab
Creatine Monohydrate 500g - Hiro Lab
£24.99
DNA Sports
Lifting Straps - DNA Sports
£9.99
Cheat Meal
Cheat Meal Syrup 500ml - Salted Caramel
£4.99
Cheat Meal
Cheat Meal Sauce 500ml - Smoke BBQ
£4.99
Cheat Meal
Cheat Meal Sauce 500ml - Mayo Ketchup
£4.99
FitCookie started in Reading in 2007 with a small shop on Oxford Road and a big idea: to create a place where people could get quality sports nutrition, honest advice and genuinely personal service.
It was founded by Karol Olender, a passionate bodybuilder whose life revolved around training, nutrition and the sport he loved.
But FitCookie was never just a business for Karol. It was an extension of that passion and his desire to help others — from competitive athletes preparing for the stage to people simply wanting to become healthier, stronger and more active.
FitCookie began in 2007 in Reading, when Karol opened our first small sports nutrition shop on Oxford Road.
I was there alongside Karol from the very beginning.
Those early days shaped what FitCookie would become. Karol believed that a supplement shop should offer much more than products on a shelf. Customers should be able to walk in, explain what they wanted to achieve and receive honest, knowledgeable advice from someone who genuinely understood training, nutrition and supplementation.
As the business grew, we moved our Reading store to West Street in Reading town centre. It remains our flagship store today and carries our largest selection of sports nutrition, supplements and healthy food products.
Karol didn’t build FitCookie from behind a desk.
He was a competitive bodybuilder himself, stepping on stage more than 40 times throughout his bodybuilding career and competing both in the UK and internationally.
He competed across UKBFF, IFBB and PCA events, achieving numerous wins and podium finishes. His competitive journey also took him beyond the UK, including the Arnold Classic Europe in Madrid in 2013, where he placed second.
His experience as an athlete gave FitCookie something that couldn’t be learned from a product catalogue.
Karol understood the discipline behind training, competition preparation, nutrition and supplementation because he lived it himself.
And he brought that experience back into the stores.
From the beginning, Karol’s philosophy was simple: help the person first, sell the product second.
That remains part of FitCookie today.
We take time to understand what our customers actually need. That could mean helping an experienced athlete with their supplementation or simply helping someone who wants to improve their diet, become more active or make healthier choices.
Our team doesn’t just work around sports nutrition — healthy living, training and fitness are genuinely part of our lives.
Some members of our team have now been with FitCookie for almost a decade, bringing years of product knowledge and customer experience into our stores.
We would rather recommend the right product than simply sell another product.
Quality matters just as much.
Over the years, we have chosen not to stock certain brands or products when we weren’t satisfied with their quality or the evidence behind them.
We want customers to feel confident about what they buy from us.
What started as one small shop in Reading began to grow.
After Reading, we opened our Bristol store in The Galleries Shopping Centre, followed over the years by locations in Newbury, Crawley, Leamington Spa, Banbury, Oxford and Harrogate.
Like any independent business with a long history, our store network has evolved over time. Some locations have closed, while others have become established parts of their local communities.
Today, FitCookie operates six physical stores across England — plus FitCookie.co.uk, serving customers online.
FitCookie has been actively involved in the UK bodybuilding and fitness community for many years.
From Fit Expo in 2011 to the Arnold Sports Festival at the NEC Birmingham, our team has attended major fitness events, exhibitions and bodybuilding competitions, bringing FitCookie directly into the community we serve.
Over the years, our stores and events have also welcomed some of the most recognised names in bodybuilding and fitness, including:
Kevin Levrone · Rich Gaspari · Mariusz Pudzianowski · Ryan Terry · Martyn Ford
alongside many other athletes, competitors and people from across the fitness industry.
For us, these weren’t simply marketing events.
Karol competed himself. Our team attended competitions, supported athletes, worked at expos and built relationships throughout the fitness community.
Fitness wasn’t a trend we decided to sell to.
It was already part of who we were.
For many years, FitCookie was built primarily around our physical stores and the relationships we developed with the people who walked through their doors.
Then COVID changed everything.
When lockdown meant our customers could no longer visit us in the usual way, they kept asking how they could continue buying from us and supporting FitCookie.
In many ways, our customers pushed us to finally take FitCookie online.
What started from our Reading store quickly became much bigger than we expected.
Online demand grew so rapidly that we moved the operation from the store into a dedicated warehouse, expanded our team and turned what had begun as a response to lockdown into a permanent part of FitCookie.
Today, FitCookie.co.uk delivers sports nutrition, supplements and healthy food products to customers across the UK, while our physical stores remain at the heart of the business.
Our experience with supplements eventually led us to create something of our own.
The FitCookie range was developed because we wanted to offer our customers quality sports nutrition products at accessible prices — products we could confidently put the FitCookie name behind.
The same principle we use when choosing products for our stores applies to our own brand:
Quality we trust. Products we believe in. Prices that make sense.
Nearly two decades after opening that first small shop, FitCookie remains an independent, family-run British business.
And some of the relationships we have built have lasted almost as long as the company itself.
Some of our customers have been shopping with us since 2007, when FitCookie was still a little shop on Oxford Road.
Some still travel considerable distances to visit our stores.
Many of our employees have stayed with us for years, with some members of the team approaching a decade with FitCookie.
That loyalty — from our customers and our team — is something we never take for granted.
In 2024, everything changed when Karol tragically passed away in an accident while on holiday.
For our family, our team and many people who knew him through FitCookie, his loss was devastating.
What followed showed us just how much of a community had grown around the business he started.
Our customers stood by us.
People who had been shopping with us for years continued coming through our doors. Some travelled considerable distances to support our stores. The messages, visits and loyalty we received meant more to us than we can properly put into words.
And so we kept going.
As Karol’s wife, I had been beside him since the very beginning — from that first shop on Oxford Road through the years of growth that followed.
Today, I continue the business we built together, working across the company from our stores, team and purchasing to marketing, finance and the day-to-day running of FitCookie.
The business has changed enormously since 2007.
What it stands for hasn’t.
Need help picking a product? Want to partner with us? Message us on WhatsApp, drop us an email or give us a call.
We're proud to carry it forward.
