To understand how a protein snack the size of a pingpong ball made it from a kitchen in Highland to a collection of Costco stores along the Wasatch Front — with reportedly more to come — you have to go back to the 2020 Utah high school 6A tennis championships.
Allison Story and her partner, Emma Reynolds, won the state championship that year in doubles, helping their school, Lone Peak High, to a second-place finish in the large school division.
The girls attributed their victory in no small part to the tasty PES (performance-enhancing snack) they took before every practice and every match: the protein-packed balls of nutrition that came from the above-mentioned kitchen.
All season long, Allie’s mom, Jan, would blend the ingredients together, mold them into bite-size pieces and put them in a plastic baggie for Allie to take to school the next morning.
The idea was to give the girls stamina and energy, so the third set would feel like the first set.
Proof that they were onto something came from not just how energetic the girls looked in winning their state trophy, but long before that during the season, when Allie’s teammates routinely sidled up to her at practice like she was a drug dealer — and asked her to slip them a baggie.
“We wanted to pack as much nutrition as we possibly could into a hundred calories.”
That’s Allie’s dad, Stephen Story, speaking. He’s the mastermind behind the protein balls: the secret ingredient, as it were. Every nutrient that went into them, every gram, every fiber — not to mention figuring out how to make them taste good enough so teenagers would eat them — came courtesy of his more than four-decade career as a food scientist.
He first made a name for himself — quite literally — in 1989 when he created Stephen’s Gourmet Hot Cocoa, a brand that quickly cornered the Utah market.
Originally, he made the hot chocolate for his own enjoyment. He’d concocted the formula in the food lab he’d built in his garage in Centerville. It wasn’t until he sold it at a Bountiful High School fundraiser that he discovered the public liked it as much as he did. He and Jan mixed up 2,000 pounds for the charity event, sorted it into 2-pound containers and, at $10 each, sold all of it in less than a day.
Stephen sold his cocoa company in the early 2000s when he was behind yet another hit. He helped develop juice from the morinda citrifolia plant found in Polynesia that became the Tahitian Noni drink, a product that resulted in a multi-level marketing company that at its height was doing more than $500 million in annual sales in 70 countries.
After Stephen retired from Tahitian Noni, he and Jan planned to go on a senior mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But not until Allison, their youngest, graduated from Lone Peak High School.
Which brings us to Stephen Story’s latest creation.
Similar to the light that went on with the hot cocoa years earlier following the Bountiful High School fundraiser, after Allie and Emma’s tennis success, Stephen could see the little protein balls had far-reaching potential that went well beyond tennis.
He and three of his sons, Nathan, Aaron and Ammon, along with Jarakae Jensen, Stephen’s food chemist classmate from their days at BYU, formed a company, refined the formula, set about figuring out a cost-effective way to produce and package the product, and gave the protein balls a name: Modballs.
They spent the better part of three years test-marketing Modballs. They first handed out thousands of samples by traveling to sporting events — from marathons to pickleball tournaments to the crossfit world championships in Wisconsin. Then they set about getting them in the hands of everyday people looking for a functional, healthy food snack.
“We were taking our tent and putting it up just about anywhere we could find,” says Ammon Story. “Getting feedback and spreading the word.”
Their pitch: “Get off caffeine, get on to Modballs.”
“Caffeine is a stimulant, we’re not a stimulant,” says Stephen. “When you drink those high, high caffeine drinks, it makes you feel like you have energy. The problem is there’s no nutrition, you’re not putting any wood into the steam engine, you’re just putting dynamite. It makes a big explosion and then it dies because there’s nothing to sustain it.”
As opposed to something that is “a burst of nutrition and sustainable energy, all natural, all wholesome, no stimulants, nothing artificial, sweetened only with cold-pressed honey that comes from Utah and Idaho mountains.”
Until recently, Modballs were only available online (modballs.com), but in the past couple of months, two Costco locations, in Salt Lake City and Lehi, started stocking the product. Costco stores in Murray, Saratoga Springs and Orem are also scheduled to carry Modballs. The pingpong ball-sized protein snacks have come quite a ways since Jan’s kitchen. And they’re no longer in baggies.