Why I Made Bhone: The Founder Story Behind Our Bone Broth Protein
Why I Made Bhone: The founder story behind our bone broth protein
When I was pregnant with my daughter Sienna, I started reading the back of supplements. Diligently. Not just protein. It was almost everything. Every label, every ingredients list. And the more I read, the less comfortable I felt with what I'd been putting in my body without really looking.
That was the moment everything shifted.
The search that didn't work out
I'd actually been making bone broth from scratch for a while. I knew what it did. The functional medicine doctor I was seeing was recommending it for gut recovery, and I was already convinced. I was reading The First Forty Days, learning about how Asian cultures had built postpartum recovery rituals around it for generations. Living in Hong Kong, it wasn't abstract. Bone broth there isn't a wellness trend. It's medicine. It's breakfast. It's what you make when someone needs to recover.
Bone broth was already the answer. What I couldn't find was a version of it I could actually trust long-term. Making it from scratch was intense and I couldn't keep it up. And everything on the market had something that put me off... not wholefood enough, not designed with women's specific needs in mind, or just collagen in isolation without the other pieces that make it actually work. Nothing brought everything together in one thing, properly sourced, with nothing on the label I'd have to question.
So I stopped looking and created it.
What was happening at the time
This needs some context.
I was six months postpartum, newly moved to Hong Kong, no friends yet, no family nearby. The burnout diagnosis came around this time. HPA-axis stage 3 (burnout). Very low beneficial gut bacteria. However, I didn't feel like I was falling apart. It more more just tired and wired all the time - but something deeper was going on.
My recovery plan was holistic. Sleep, stress management and getting my diet right. Bone broth was a central part of it. My practitioner was working with patients who had extreme leaky gut and they were on two or three cups a day. That was the moment I understood what bone broth was actually doing. Not as a wellness trend. As a serious gut-healing tool.
We now have the research to explain what those traditions understood intuitively. A healthy gut wall needs specific amino acids to stay strong and intact. Bone broth is one of the richest sources of them. It wasn't new knowledge. It was old knowledge with new evidence behind it.
Why New Zealand
When I decided to make Bhone, sourcing was the first decision and the most important one.
Grass-fed, free-range New Zealand beef bones. That wasn't a marketing choice. It was the only source I was comfortable with for something I was going to drink myself, give to my mother, make for my daughter.
New Zealand has some of the strictest animal welfare standards in the world. The farming is pastoral. Animals graze year-round on open land. And for bone broth specifically, what those animals ate and how they lived directly affects the quality of the collagen and amino acids you end up with. The source is not a detail. It's the whole thing.
Every batch of Bhone is independently tested for heavy metals. Not the ingredients going in. The final product. That costs more. It was never a question of whether to do it.
What I actually wanted to create
I wanted something that felt like a sanctuary in the day.
Not a supplement you secretly dread taking Not another product on a shelf full of things you half-understand. Something warm and nourishing, with nothing in it you'd have to question. Something you'd make because you wanted to.
That's where the hot chocolate version came from. That's where "your go-slow moment in the day" came from. Not a marketing line. A genuine belief that how you take care of yourself matters as much as what you take. That the ritual is part of it.
I also watched friends struggle to get enough protein. Whole, clean protein from a source they actually understood. And I watched them buy four or five separate supplements and abandon half of them within a fortnight. That's why the 4-in-1 mattered to me. Not as a product feature. As a genuine attempt to simplify something that had become needlessly complicated.
A full shelf of supplements causes anxiety. I know because I had one. The answer wasn't more. It was less, from a better source, consistently.
Where things are now
Bhone is a family business. My husband Simon is part of it. My daughter Sienna grew up with it. My 67-year-old mother has a Bhone hot chocolate most evenings and has told me more than once it's the first supplement she's ever actually taken consistently.
I'm pregnant again now. And that full-circle feeling of reading labels, asking the same questions, being deliberate about what goes in my body — it's exactly the same as the first time. Except now I know what I'm reaching for.
If you want to know more about what's in Bhone and why you can read about the benfits here.
And if you're somewhere in the middle of the search I went on, reading labels, feeling like nothing quite fits, wondering if you're asking too much... I don't think you are. I think you're asking exactly the right things.
I didn't set out to build a supplement brand. I set out to create something that matched how I wanted to feel inside. A sense of calm, of being certain about what was going into my body. That inner feeling was the starting point. What I was actually taking to get there had to be something I completely trusted. When I couldn't find it, I made it instead.
Renei x
