Running Gels Are Just Expensive Candy

Your $4 running gel costs about 15 cents to make.

The primary ingredient?

Maltodextrin.

We know what it is, put simply, its processed corn (actually from a paste) that costs roughly $2/kg at wholesale.

Mix it with water, a bit of fructose, some sodium, and a preservative.

Squeeze it into a foil sachet.

Sell it for $4 to $6 a pop.

That's a 25x to 40x markup on raw ingredients. For sugar water in a packet.

Welcome to the unit economics of "endurance nutrition".

900 Million Reasons

The global energy gel market hit around $895 million in 2024 and is projected to crack $1.4 billion by 2030, growing at nearly 8% per year.

GU Energy Labs alone holds around 18.5% market share.

Whats wild is the category barely existed before 1986 when a German company called 'Squeezy' (can't make this up) created the first commercial gel with the help of sports scientist Tim Noakes.

Forty years later, the entire category is still built on the same basic formula: fast carbs in a portable packet.

The science hasn't changed much.

The branding, packaging, and pricing have changed enormously.

Here in New Zealand, you're looking at $3.99 for a PURE Fluid Energy Gel, if you buy like 6 at a time, and $5.50 to $6.00 for a Maurten Gel.

A marathon runner taking a gel every 30 to 45 minutes across a 4-hour race will consume 6 to 8 gels.

That's $24 to $48 just in gel spend for a single race.

Add training runs and you're looking at $150 or more per training block.

I told my wife I ran because it was cheap, jokes on me (or her?).

And the product itself? Well, shit, lets flip the pack and take a look.

What's Actually In Your Gel

Pick up any organic Energy Gel and flip it over. The ingredients read: maltodextrin, filtered water, manuka honey (10%), sea salt, ascorbic acid, preservative. A GU gel? Maltodextrin, water, fructose, natural flavours, leucine, citric acid, sodium citrate, green tea extract.

Maurten, the Swedish brand thats what I see as branding along the line of Ferrari (gross) of gels, lists just six ingredients: water, maltodextrin, fructose, sodium alginate, pectin, sodium chloride. They call it a "biopolymer matrix."

I prefer sugar water with a gelling agent.

The primary active ingredient across all three is the same: maltodextrin.

It's the single most common ingredient in energy gels globally.

Maltodextrin is a chain of glucose molecules that your body breaks down rapidly. It absorbs 36% faster than straight glucose, requires far less water to be isotonic, and has almost no flavour. It's the ideal vehicle for fast carbohydrate delivery.

But here's the thing: maltodextrin is also one of the cheapest food ingredients on earth.

Bulk retail price is around $18 per kilogram. At food manufacturing scale, you're paying $1 to $2 per kilogram. A single gel contains roughly 20 to 25 grams of maltodextrin.

That's 2 to 5 cents worth of the primary ingredient.

Add fructose (another cent or two), water (freeish), sodium (fractions of a cent), preservatives (another cent), and flavouring (a few cents).

Your total raw ingredient cost for a single gel lands somewhere between 5 and 12 cents.

Packaging? A foil sachet at manufacturing scale costs around 5 to 10 cents per unit. Co-packing and filling adds another few cents.

Generous estimate: your gel costs 15 to 25 cents to produce.

You're paying $4 to $6 for it.

The Science Is Real (And Simple)

Before I make this sound like a scam, let me be fair.

The science behind carbohydrate fuelling during endurance exercise is solid. Your body stores about 60 to 90 minutes of glycogen.

Go beyond that without external carbs and you hit 'the wall'.

The International Society of Sports Nutrition recommends 30 to 60 grams of carbs per hour during exercise lasting more than an hour.

The clever bit in modern gel formulation is the 'glucose to fructose' ratio.

Glucose and fructose absorb through different intestinal pathways.

By combining both (typically at a 2:1 or 1:0.8 ratio), you can push carbohydrate absorption rates up toward 90 to 100 grams per hour.

Maurten's entire marketing proposition is built on 'dual transport' mechanism plus their hydrogel encapsulation. It works. Research backs it.

But here's what the marketing doesn't tell you: this dual-transport carbohydrate delivery isn't exclusive to gels.

It's just chemistry.

Any food that delivers glucose and fructose together does the same job. Which brings us to the interesting part.

The Candy Aisle Alternative

A sports dietitian named Meghann Featherstun pointed out something that went semi-viral in running circles: for 25 grams of carbs, Nerds Gummy Clusters cost about 50 cents.

An energy gel delivering the same 25 grams costs $4 to $5.

The macronutrient profile? Almost identical. Corn syrup (glucose), sugar (sucrose, which is glucose + fructose), dextrose. You're getting the same dual-transport carbohydrate hit. Without the sports branding.

Runners everywhere are catching on. Gummy bears, Swedish Fish, Jelly Belly Sport Beans, and the current cult favourite, Nerds Gummy Clusters, are showing up in running vests where GU packets used to be.

And as a New Zealander, I have to throw my hometown pick into the ring: Mayceys Sour Feijoas.

These beauties deliver 85.6 grams of carbs per 100 grams. That's sugar, glucose syrup from maize, and modified maize starch. The same raw materials as a gel, essentially, just shaped like tiny feijoas and a sour punch. About $3.95 for 100 grams. That gets you roughly three times the carbs of a single gel, for the same price.

Plus they taste like actual heaven, shout out Mayceys.

Hi-Chews are another solid pick. Soft enough to eat while moving, glucose-fructose delivery system built in, and a hell of a lot more enjoyable than sucking brown paste out of a foil packet at kilometre 30.

The DIY crowd has taken this even further, though this is messy.

Homemade gels using maltodextrin powder, honey, a pinch of salt, and water cost about 30 cents per gel. Same ingredients. Same delivery mechanism. A fraction of the price.

So Why Do Gels Cost What They Cost?

If the raw ingredients cost 15 cents, how do we get to $4 to $6 retail?

This is where the unit economics get interesting.

Packaging and format. The foil sachet is engineered for tear-and-swallow-while-running. That engineering costs money up front but pennies per unit. The real cost here is format lock-in. Once you've trained runners to expect a sachet, you own the delivery mechanism.

Electrolytes and extras. Many gels add sodium, potassium, caffeine, amino acids. These cost cents per unit but create differentiation and justify premium pricing.

Distribution. This is the one I know well. Getting product into specialty running stores, event expos, and online channels costs real money. A gel company selling through a distributor to a retail store is giving up 40 to 60% of the retail price in margin to the supply chain. Your $6 Maurten gel? The brand probably sees $2 to $3 of that.

Marketing and sponsorship. This is where the real money goes. Gel brands sponsor races, athletes, events. They pay for shelf space at running stores. They pay for influencer partnerships. The Maurten brand story ("biopolymer matrix," "hydrogel technology," "used by Kipchoge") IS the product. The gel is just the carrier.

R&D and testing. Legitimate. Formulating for palatability, shelf stability, and gut tolerance during extreme exercise does take work. But this is amortized across millions of units. It's not the reason your gel costs $6.

Brand premium. Maurten charges 50% more than PURE for essentially the same ingredients because they've built a brand that says "this is what elite runners use." That positioning has real value. Whether it has real performance value over a $4 PURE gel is... debatable.

The honest breakdown:

Roughly 5 to 10% of your gel spend is ingredients. Another 10 to 15% is packaging and manufacturing. Maybe 5% is R&D and testing.

The remaining 70 to 80%?

Brand, distribution, marketing, and margin.

You're not paying for maltodextrin. You're paying for the story around the maltodextrin.

The Waste Problem Nobody Talks About

Here's where it gets genuinely ugly.

An Ironman race with 1,500 competitors generates an estimated 30,000 gel wrappers.

Thirty thousand.

The average road race produces roughly 5 pounds of waste per runner. After the 2025 Vancouver Marathon, one man spent hours cleaning up hundreds of gel packets littered through Stanley Park. The cleanup videos went viral.

Those foil sachets? Metallised plastic. Effectively unrecyclable.

A single gel wrapper takes an estimated 80 years to decompose.

Let that sit for a second. Every gel packet ever consumed in every race since the category was invented in 1986 is still sitting somewhere. Every single one.

Some brands are trying. GU partnered with TerraCycle to repurpose used packets from major races into things like bike racks. The London Marathon trialled seaweed-based water pods in 2019. A handful of companies are exploring biodegradable packaging. The plantable seed paper movement (packaging embedded with flower seeds that grows when composted) is gaining traction in adjacent categories and feels like an obvious fit here.

But for now, the default is: rip, suck, toss.

Repeat six to eight times per race. Multiply by thousands of runners. Multiply by thousands of races globally per year.

That's millions of tiny metallised plastic packets entering landfill or littering trail systems annually.

A $900 million category generating an enormous volume of waste for products that contain less than 25 grams of sugar each.

If you're a packaging startup reading this, you're welcome for the idea.

Where Gels Actually Win

Alright. I've been hard on gels. Let me give them their due.

Convenience is real. No chewing. No slowing down. Rip, squeeze, swallow. At race pace, this matters. You can eat a Mayceys Sour Feijoa at an easy training pace but you're not chewing candy at 4:00/km marathon pace without risking choking. Or worse, the sour sugar hits the back of your throat wrong and you're coughing for the next 2km.

Dosing is precise. A gel delivers exactly 22 to 30 grams of carbs. With candy, you're estimating. In a race where nutrition strategy is the difference between a PB and a DNF, precision has value.

Electrolytes are included. Most gels add sodium, potassium, sometimes caffeine. Candy doesn't. You'd need to supplement separately. An extra thing to carry, an extra thing to remember.

Gut tolerance is tested. Gel formulations are specifically designed to minimize GI distress during high-intensity exercise. Candy is designed to taste good on your couch. Different engineering problem entirely.

Portability. Flat foil sachets fit in running shorts pockets, cycling jerseys, and race belts. A bag of Sour Feijoas does not have the same pocket-friendly profile. Trust me. I've tried.

These are legitimate advantages.

If you're racing competitively, dialling in your nutrition plan with tested gel products that you've trained with makes total sense. Spending $30 to $50 on gels for a race you've spent months and hundreds of dollars preparing for is rational economics.

Nobody sets a PB and thinks "but I overspent on gels."

The Breakdown

The energy gel category is a masterclass in sports nutrition economics.

The raw ingredients are commodity-priced. The formulation is simple. The science is well-established and freely available.

The real product is the packaging format, the brand story, and the distribution lock-in.

If you're training casually?

Save your money.

Make your own gels for 30 cents each, or grab a bag of Hi-Chews and a couple of salt tabs. The carbs don't know the difference.

If you're racing seriously?

Use gels.

Test them in training.

Dial in your favourites.

The convenience, precision, and gut-tolerance engineering are worth the premium on race day.

If you're building a consumer brand in any category, study energy gels closely.

This is a $900 million market built on $0.15 of raw ingredients, strong brand positioning, and a delivery format that creates repeat purchase habits.

The maltodextrin doesn't care what logo is on the packet.

But your wallet does.

Shout out to all the legends I've ripped info from for this piece:

ResearchAndMarkets | FutureMarketInsights | Fellrnr | PURE Sports Nutrition | Maurten NZ | The Running Store NZ | Supwell | TrainingPeaks | Healthline | Khushbu Shah / Substack | YearRoundRunning | Nick Walker DIY Gels | Irontwit | Marathon Handbook | Vancouver Is Awesome | FedFedFed | Mayceys via Lolly Lab NZ | Pik n Mix NZ