Our Pharmacists
Vegums was founded by GPhC-registered pharmacists. Not advisors or consultants: the people who developed the products are the same people who have spent careers advising patients on nutrition, medication, and preventive health.
Why Pharmacist-Founded Matters
Most supplement brands are built by marketers. Ingredients are sourced from commodity suppliers, doses are set to hit a price point, and claims are written to sound compelling. Pharmacist input, if it exists at all, is a consultant note at the end of the process.
Vegums was built the other way round. We started with the clinical problem — the patients we kept seeing with preventable nutritional deficiencies — and worked backwards to the supplement. What form of iron is gentlest on the gut without sacrificing bioavailability? What form of B12 is most bioavailable? Does the evidence actually support using flaxseed oil as a DHA source? (It does not, and we formulate accordingly.)
That clinical rigour is the difference. It is not a marketing message. It is the reason the products are formulated the way they are.
The Team
John Rushton
Co-Founder & GPhC-Registered Pharmacist — MPharm
Community pharmacy background with a specialisation in clinical nutrition. John's work directly with patients was the founding insight behind Vegums: the same nutritional deficiencies keep appearing in vegan patients, and the supplement market was not doing enough to address them properly. His clinical focus areas include iron deficiency, vegan nutrition, pregnancy supplementation, and paediatric vitamins.
The Clinical Motivation
Iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency worldwide. Vegans are disproportionately affected because plant foods contain only non-haem iron, absorbed at 2-20% compared to 15-35% for haem iron in meat. B12 is only reliably found in animal products; without supplementation, deficiency is essentially inevitable on a vegan diet. DHA, the omega-3 that matters most for brain and eye health, requires direct marine or algae sources because the ALA-to-DHA conversion from flaxseed is too inefficient to rely on.
These are not edge cases. They are consistent, predictable gaps in vegan nutrition that we saw repeatedly in clinical practice. Vegums exists because the supplement options available were not good enough: poorly tolerated iron forms, inadequate dosing, ALA being sold as a meaningful DHA source. We built what we would have confidently recommended to our own patients.