Built on the idea of making real food from scratch and using a properly designed sports drink to fuel your rides, even Skratch Labs realizes not everyone has the time or desire to make all their on-bike snacks themselves.
For those folks, they offer their new Fruit Drops. They’re made with glucose and fructose as the carbohydrate sources, with sodium, pectin and real fruit as the primary contributing ingredients. Missing from the list are any artificial flavors and carnauba wax, a common ingredient in other gels. Here’s why…
Flavors, sweeteners, waxes and added vitamins have the potential to cause gastrointestinal (GI) issues, which many athletes are already on the verge of experiencing during intense efforts anyway without outside help. So, Skratch kept those out and balanced the carbs in favor of glucose plus a little fructose coming from cane sugar and tapioca.
Then they added more water than usual to make them softer and less sticky than other gel chews.
Wax is typically used both for structure and to keep them from sticking together. Here, they used sugar crystals coated with fumaric acid (from apples), which should also make your mouth water just thinking about them.
Each pouch has 10 drops for 40g of carbs and 160 calories, which they say is the upper limit of what the fittest athletes can ingest in an hour when combined with their sports hydration drink. Technically, each pouch is more like two servings, and its up to you to space out the ingestion to maximize performance while reducing the likelihood of upsetting your stomach.
There’s a lengthy blog post on their website that details their reasons for the ingredients, usage guidelines and much more here. Retail is $2.45 per pouch, or get a box of 10 for $24.50.
