Reston's LifeFuels Wants To Keep People Fit During Coronavirus

RESTON, VA — Jonathon Perrelli, CEO and founder of the fitness nutrition company LifeFuels, wants to help people affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

Not only is his company providing free online fitness classes, he's also hiring fitness instructors and trainers who may have lost their jobs due to the pandemic to run those classes.

"We're a subscription-based firm, increasing our subscriber base and community every month," Perrelli said. "The part of that community that's really important to us are these high-end, achieving, fitness instructors and trainers that we felt pretty bad about when they were told to go home in early March."

Just like other non-essential businesses across the state, many gyms and fitness center were told to close up shop following Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's stay-at-home order, which he issued to stop the spread of COVID-19, the illness associated with the new coronavirus.

"We sent our employees home on March 11, which is a little bit earlier than some," Perrelli said. "But by the following week, we had come up with this idea and by March 23, we had launched our first LifeFuels Live, which can be viewed on a number of platforms, including Facebook and Instagram." The videos are then posted to YouTube, where anyone can view them.

Since the launch of LifeFuels Live, the company has posted 21 classes and had over 10,000 engagements. It also just hired its 10th instructor.

"We're doing a service for the community,"Perrelli said. "People need to be working out, people at home without too much to do. Whether they are a LifeFuels user or not, we are just glad to help people that are logging on and working out from all over the world, not just in the D.C. area."

LifeFuels is the first provider of a smart nutrition bottle, which is a three-part platform that contains a bottle, pods and an app.

"Our pods are filled with things you should be consuming every day," Perrelli said. "There are flavors that have attributes such as electrolytes, vitamins, recovery for working out, antioxidants. We have a beauty pod that we'll be launching soon."

People who use LifeFuels to consume nutrition from the pods within each bottle to get their hydration, which is then tracked using the app.

Perrelli originally came up with the idea for LifeFuels when his wife was pregnant with their third child and she wasn't getting the nutrition she needed. This was around 2007, when everybody was starting to use Fitbits to track the output of their exercise.

"I thought tracking output matters a lot, but what about tracking input?" Perrelli asked. "Because input directly correlates to output."

That's when he first came up with the idea for LifeFuels. After several years of development, he launched the company in 2014 and release its first product two years later.

Sales on LifeFuels latest product, which was released in September 2019, have been steadily increasing.

"We are really excited to have a team of just under 50 people in Reston, over 15 have relocated in the last couple of years," Perrelli said. "I haven't laid anyone off since this pandemic started and I don't plan to. I'm really excited to have a business in Reston. A lot of folks live and work and do everything in Reston, so we love the community."

LifeFuel's office is located at 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive, which is where the company does all its beverage design and testing, as well as engineering, software development, and fulfillment.

See also ...

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• Reston Clothing Shop Donating Dresses To Coronavirus Responders
• Herndon's Weird Brothers Coffee Adapts To Coronavirus

This is one in a series of articles Patch is writing about small businesses in the area. Small business owners can also add their the name of their business to our list of open businesses in Herndon and Reston.