Trent Scanlen isn’t your typical wellness founder. He’s a cancer survivor, martial arts coach, dad of two, and co-founder of KURK—a plant-based supplement brand designed to fight inflammation and help people feel better, naturally. He launched the company with his best mate, Dr. Harry Weisinger, after navigating chemo, chronic pain, and a shared frustration with how many people rely on painkillers just to get through the day. Backed by big names like Tom Hardy and Tinie Tempah, KURK is quickly making noise in the wellness space—but it’s still deeply personal.
In this conversation, Trent talks about his 4am routines, how they cracked the code on curcumin absorption, and why everything he’s building comes back to one thing—helping people stay active, recover faster, and live with less pain.
How do your mornings usually begin these days? Any rituals or routines that help you start the day feeling clear and energised?
My mornings have now changed with a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old boy. I’m often woken by the sound of “Daddy”. It then gets into my strict routine of being a Daddy whilst having a bulletproof coffee with KURK – This is a combination of black coffee, a C8 derivative of MCT oil, and a little bit of butter blended up with vanilla Kirk. It tastes amazing, high fat, really putting a lot of quick energy into the body.
If it’s a training day I’ll also have some eggs. If it’s not a training day I’ll usually fast until lunchtime. I prefer a diet loosely based on the slow carb technique made famous with Tim Ferriss in The 4-Hour Body book. It usually consists of either a big Mexican fajita or burrito without the bread or steak or sushi for lunch. Dinner is always some form of meat with vegetables.
In terms of the physical side of it, three times a week I’ll do strength and conditioning (45 minutes or an hour of heavy lifting or high-intensity interval training). Three times a week I’ll train in jiu-jitsu, training hard once or twice and doing technique the other times. Ideally, I want to try to do some steady-state cardio as well, depending on the rest of the routine and time permitted.
One of the things I want to get back into is meditation. It comes and goes in my life based on my sleep patterns. If I get good sleep, I remember to meditate, and often when I have bad sleep is probably when I need it most, so that’s something I’m actively trying to get back into.
KURK was born out of a very personal journey — you and Dr. Harry supporting each other through cancer and treatment. What was the turning point where it went from a personal remedy to a business idea?
During chemo, I wasn’t able to really train martial arts or really train with people, and I missed it a lot. That was one of the motivations for starting my gym, Elevate Martial Arts, in Richmond, London.
One of the key parts of my understanding of the future is I wanted to be as strong as I could and train hard, high-intensity, to be able to show my children how to train combat sports, like MMA, Jiu Jitsu, and Kickboxing.
Because of that, I knew I’m going to be in a painful sport. A sport that revolves around me pushing through pain but dealing with pain in recovery. So creating a solution for that is always a big motivation and having the experience of Dr. Harry and a lot of other high-level PhDs that really understand pain training.
Creating a solution for myself was a big motivation, but knowing this is a common problem out there—everyone’s overtaking ibuprofen, they’re taking too much of it; it’s bad for them. I could see a massive use case if I could just get the science right and put the team together. It’s cost us a lot of money, we’ve done a lot of research and development in our lab, but we’re really proud of what we’ve got.
That’s a very common phrase “do what you love and you’ll never work again”. I’m fascinated by people’s stories, their health journeys, the health pivots they have.
In my gym, I’m often really taken aback by some of the feedback we get from people about how it’s changed their life. We always knew that whole old adage ‘health is wealth’. It is and it’s true. I’ve devoted my life, my career and my business.
Curcumin has been part of your own health journey, particularly with chemotherapy recovery. What was your experience with it, and why did you believe in its potential so strongly?
I’ve always taken different supplements throughout my life, even as a teenager, starting to do bodybuilding and boxing and all that. Protein powders are always a part of it, obviously on and off with different compounds. I’ve taken creatine for a long time in my life.
The big thing with curcumin, we could notice early on the trace trends in medical research. We could see it being used in chemotherapy. We could see that there were a lot of university hospitals around the world consistently increasing their studies of curcumin. So we knew scientifically and medically, it was a real compound.
But the big thing facing everyone is that it’s a crystal that doesn’t dissolve in oil or water. So it was really hard to get into the body. A lot of study studies that really showed the most promising outcome as an anti-inflammatory were actually injecting curcumin into the bloodstream. And that really was interesting.
We started going down a rabbit hole of how we could use new science and all the emerging fields of new science to solve that problem, but to do it naturally.
There’s some serious firepower behind KURK — Bill Moss AO, Andrea Horwood, even Tom Hardy. What do you think resonated most with them about what you’re building?
I think successful people in whatever field they’ve been successful in, they follow a common trait in my experience: they can cut through the noise, understanding real impacts and real people as opposed to marketing gimmicks and fads.
So I regard myself as very fortunate to meet such high-powered, yet thoughtful people who help encourage us and obviously help us understand the impacts we could have on the world.
Micelle+ technology has solved the absorbability issue with curcumin. Can you break down what that means in practical terms for everyday users?
A Myocell is basically a tiny little oil envelope (plant oil envelope) that helps hold the curcumin in a form that can be absorbed into the cell walls. Nanotechnology, nanoemulsion, and all those words are used intermittently to describe something really small that the body can absorb. Myocells are used in numerous formations, and we found it incredibly effective with our curcumin.
Building in the wellness space is competitive — and often noisy. How do you ensure KURK stays focused, credible, and connected to its original mission?
Wellness as a category is the hot topic; everyone wants to feel good. I think there’s a real common thread. We like to think we’re a little bit different from most because we’ve done all the expensive research and development, we actually do all the formulation research, and then we do the production and retailing and delivery. We’re fully vertically integrated, which means we can just have feedback loops to improve constantly. We talk to our customers, we spend a lot of money on science trials and blood work just to understand how we can get everything better.
Once we study the chemistry and have that working, we work on taste, then we work on feedback, and we’re currently working on use cases – where do people take KURK, where do they want to take it, how can we make it better? There’s no way that we could do that without that full vertical integration, and that’s why we’re different to anyone else. I know why most people don’t do it – it’s expensive and it’s hard. But traditionally in the supplement industry, you have two groups of companies:
- You’ve got the formulation people that make the formulations and sell business-to-business to some marketers.
- That usually belongs to the second category, where they’ll have a brand but they don’t really know how to make the product or what goes in it. They just know how to get people to click and purchase.
The problem is the people that are doing the marketing don’t really understand the product, and the people making the product don’t really understand the customers. That’s simple.
I spent 14 years working for an amazing company, Specsavers, which has single-handedly disrupted the optical industry in Australia back in favor of the customer. It’s reduced the cost of glasses significantly, which has allowed people to have more eye tests more frequently because that’s a big health screening check.
One of the key parts of Specsavers’ success is a detailed focus on the customer. They’ve set a full vertically integrated model so that they don’t get pushed around with supply chains and have all the various suppliers trying to push products that end up costing the customers more. We’ve held true to that mission with KURK.
You’ve had to juggle serious health challenges alongside startup life. What has that taught you about leadership, resilience, and building a brand with purpose?
Staring death in the face taught me many things. It gave me a bit of peace to understand the bigger picture, which is tough in stressful times. The bigger thing that it actually did is just really enforce the fact of what I want to work in something meaningful. I want to create something that outlives me, my children are proud of, and if we can focus on creating the best natural anti-inflammatory and natural thing for pain management that’d have a significant impact on the world.
I suffer from chronic pain a lot of the time; it’s from old sporting injuries and also radiation nerve damage from radiation. So I know I’m always going to have to deal with pain and inflammation more than anyone else. But there’s millions of people out there like me, and some of the times they will stop activity and they’ll stop pushing their bodies harder because the pain gets worse and their pain signaling gets worse, and then they reach for some bad painkillers that has a significant impact and it has a knock-on effect on their body. I need to stop that.
You’re now expanding with KURK Sport and other SKUs. What’s next on the roadmap, and where do you see the biggest growth opportunity?
We designed KURK in liquid form to help ourselves and others with joint pain and related issues associated with aging. What we found is a huge use case in sporting activity.
Dr. Harry’s an avid cyclist and is deeply involved in the professional cycling community. I’m very deep into combat sports (MMA, Jiu Jitsu), so we can see a use case for this in helping people recover from sporting progress and training.
We set about designing KURK Sport because we need electrolytes while we’re training, and we knew that active recovery and fast recovery is a key component of rapid skill development. Whether it’s a professional athlete or just a competitive amateur trying to progress their sport, especially in the pain sports (combat, cycling, CrossFit, high rocks, ultra running, marathons) that require you pushing through the pain barrier, we knew this could help.
It took us a long time, but KURK Sport was a natural fit for us.
We are always looking at research and development. We spend a lot of time in this area.
We’re looking at a few compounds now that are very exciting that we think we could innovate and bring in to help ourselves and our customers. But we’ve got a very rigorous program for what we work on and we’ve discarded so many previously promised compounds. We’re really proud of that because it allows us to focus on what really works.
Finally, what advice would you give to someone who’s been through a health challenge and wants to turn that experience into something impactful — whether that’s a business, product, or platform?
Poor health is something we all experience from time to time. But when you get that health pivot and the low is deep enough, the rock bottom is deep enough to scare you to make change, all you need is a 3-4 week plan of just solid progression, just pushing yourself through something when you don’t want to do it. Whether it’s a new business idea, whether it’s a new fitness regime, whether it’s pushing yourself harder to do the things that you’ve always wanted to do.
All of this is resilience. All of this is just something that we all possess. But often we don’t focus on it enough and we don’t stick at it long enough.
So if you’ve been through a health challenge, you know what I’m talking about. But most people haven’t hit that yet. And the ones I most admire can get active change without having to hit rock bottom.
So whether it’s in business or product or platform or even a new relationship. We’ve got to be clear with ourselves and we’re going to set ourselves just a 3-4 week goal and we just got to get it done.
