110 Brands, One Stomach: How to Choose Running Nutrition
- 2 days ago
- 14 min read
Article published August 2026
Energy gels, chews, drink mixes and recovery powders have exploded into a market of 140-plus brands. Has running nutrition become too much of a good thing, and how does a runner actually choose? Written from the UTMB expo in Chamonix.
Written and published August 2026 | Andy Hood, ultra and endurance runner, 25 years of running, cancer survivor
I'm writing this from Chamonix, in the middle of UTMB week, and the town is properly alive. Runners everywhere. Supporters everywhere. Shakeout runs spilling off every pavement at seven in the morning. And at the centre of it all, the UTMB Trail Village, an expo of hundreds of suppliers selling shoes, headphones, poles, vests, watches, socks, recovery boots, and nutrition. So much nutrition.
I counted more than twenty running nutrition companies in one walk around. Twenty-plus brands, all within a few hundred metres of each other, all trying to catch the eye of the same sunburnt, slightly under-slept runner wandering between stands with a tote bag. And here's the thing that stopped me: twenty is a lot in a concentrated space, but it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there.
How any of them find space in this market, break through the noise, carve out a niche and turn a profit is genuinely bewildering to me. And walking round sampling drinks and gels, some fine, quite a few frankly awful in taste or texture, I kept coming back to the same question. If I find this confusing, and I've been doing this for years, what chance does a runner three months into their first half marathon plan have of making an informed choice?
So, in my usual style, I've gone digging. Here's what's actually going on in the running nutrition market, whether the products are as different as the marketing suggests, and what to do if you're standing in front of that wall of sachets with no idea what to buy.
Contents
A quick word about the Maurten stand
Before I get into it, a special mention for the chap on the Maurten stand on the first day the village opened.
I've used Maurten. Drink mix, gels, bars. I've got Drink Mix 160 with me here in Chamonix. So when I spotted three 500ml bottles on the stand with flavour labels on them, I was interested. Maurten has never come in anything but that sweet candy-floss sort of flavour, so Cola, Apple and Menthol was news worth asking about.
The guy behind the stand was more interested in his phone than me. I had to actively get his attention to ask a question. Then, mid-conversation, and I mean mid-sentence, a young lady approached the stand and he simply cast me aside as though I'd never been there and gave her his full attention.
Ok, Mr Maurten Guy. I can see your game. And let me say it plainly here: that kind of behaviour only ever leads to one outcome. I won't be buying another Maurten product.
Small thing? Maybe. But it's actually relevant to everything that follows. In a market this crowded, where the products are far more similar than the branding admits, the tie-breaker is often something as trivial as whether a company treats you like a person. Brands spend fortunes on athlete sponsorship and lab-coat marketing, then hand the customer relationship to someone scrolling Instagram.
Just how many running nutrition brands are we talking about?
Here's a sample of the nutrition companies showing at UTMB Chamonix this year. Not all of them, just the ones I noted: SiS, Maurten, Tailwind, Naak, Meltonic, Baouw, Andros Sport, Overstim.s, Nutripure, Ta Energy, Apurna, Neversecond, Melli and 226ERS.
Now scale that up. XMiles, the UK retailer I order from regularly, stocks products from over 110 different manufacturers. Four years ago that figure was around 80. That's a 40% increase in brands, and I'd argue a 40% increase in runner confusion.
Industry analysis puts more than 140 brands competing globally in energy gels alone. Globally, sports nutrition is worth somewhere between $36bn and $77bn in 2026, depending on which analyst you ask, and that four-fold spread tells you something in itself: nobody can even agree what counts as sports nutrition.
The bit that concerns us runners is far smaller. Energy gels worldwide are worth around $2.17bn. Narrow it to genuinely endurance-focused gels and you're looking at roughly $715m. The UK gel market is about $100m. So we have 140-plus brands scrapping over a category that, globally, is worth less than a mid-sized supermarket chain.
That's not a healthy market. That's a knife fight. And we've already seen a casualty this summer: Tailwind Nutrition UK announced it was closing after eleven years, squeezed by tariffs on one side and a brutally crowded category on the other.
Why there are suddenly so many energy gel brands
To be fair to the industry, this didn't happen for no reason.
Fifteen years ago the standard advice was 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour. Today, elite runners and cyclists are routinely taking 90 to 120 grams an hour. Research by Viribay and colleagues in 2020 found seven of nine trained runners tolerated 120g/hour with no gastrointestinal problems, and the ceiling that everyone assumed was fixed at 90g quietly moved.
You cannot hit 100 grams an hour using 2010-vintage 22-gram gels. You'd need five of them, plus water, plus a stomach made of cast iron. So the products genuinely had to change. Higher carb concentrations, dual-source glucose-fructose blends, hydrogels, drink mixes carrying 80g a bottle, chews delivering 50g a packet. Styrkr launched a chew this July with 50g of carbs and 267mg of sodium in a single pack. Precision Fuel & Hydration sell a 90g gel.
So part of this explosion is legitimate innovation chasing a real shift in the science. I want to be fair about that before I start throwing rocks.
What you're actually being sold before, during and after a run
Broadly, three buckets.
Before you run. Carb loading drinks like Maurten 320 and SiS Beta Fuel, caffeine, beetroot and nitrate shots, and increasingly sodium bicarbonate systems. Pre-workout is the single biggest functional segment of the wider market, around 35% by value.
While you run. Gels, ranging from about 20g to 50g of carbohydrate. Drink mixes. Chews. Bars. Rice cakes. Semi-solid pouches. This is where the arms race is loudest.
After you run. Protein and carbohydrate recovery powders, bars, collagen, tart cherry, rehydration mixes.
And running alongside all three, a whole parallel industry in electrolytes. Tablets, powders, capsules and concentrates from Nuun, Precision, LMNT, SaltStick, Active Root and dozens more, ranging from about 250mg of sodium per serving to over 1,000mg.
Sweat sodium concentration genuinely does vary enormously between individuals, which makes this the one category where the case for choice is strongest. It's also the category where the marketing has run furthest ahead of most runners' actual needs. If you're out for an hour in British drizzle, you are not losing 1,000mg of sodium and you do not need to replace it.
Notice how neatly that maps onto three separate purchases. Four, if they can sell you the electrolytes as well. Funny, that.
So are these energy gels actually any different?
This is the question I kept asking at the expo, and the honest answer is: less than they'd like you to think.
Strip the branding off and most gels are a glucose-fructose blend in roughly a 2:1 or 1:0.8 ratio, somewhere between 20 and 40 grams of carbohydrate, with or without sodium, with or without caffeine. That's it. That's the product. The meaningful variables are carb dose, ratio, sodium content, caffeine, texture and whether it comes from maltodextrin or from rice, honey and fruit purée.
Industry analysis backs this up rather bluntly. One market report notes high product similarity and limited sensory differentiation across the category, and found that more than half of brands struggle to innovate beyond adjusting carbohydrate concentration. Which is a polite way of saying most of them are tweaking the recipe and redesigning the wrapper.
There are genuine outliers. Maurten's hydrogel does something structurally different. Tailwind's all-in-one approach genuinely changes how you carry fuel. Real-food brands like Veloforte, Naak and Baouw are solving a different problem for people whose guts rebel against syrup. But between the fortieth and the hundred-and-tenth brand on that shelf? The differences are marginal, and often flavour-deep.
The case that running nutrition is oversaturated
The products are converging, not diverging. See above. When over half your industry can only differentiate on carb concentration, you don't have 140 solutions, you have one solution and 140 logos.
The psychology is against the beginner. The famous study here is Iyengar and Lepper's jam experiment from 2000, where a tasting table with six jams produced a 30% purchase rate and one with 24 jams produced 3%. Nice story, but the follow-up work is more useful.
A 2010 meta-analysis found the average effect across 50 experiments was close to zero, and a larger review of 99 studies pinned down when too much choice genuinely does damage: when people want a quick, easy decision; when the decision is difficult; when options are hard to compare; and when the chooser doesn't yet know their own preferences.
Read that list again and think about a first-time marathoner in a running shop. They hit all four. Every one.
This is the heart of my argument. The market isn't oversaturated for everyone. It's oversaturated specifically and precisely for the newcomer, and there's decent evidence explaining why.
The retailers are quietly admitting it. On 3 August this year XMiles launched a nutrition comparison tool, letting you compare products on nutritional and pricing metrics with best-value indicators showing which give you the most carbohydrate for your money. Their marketing manager's framing was that sports nutrition isn't always easy to compare. When the shop has to build a tool to help you navigate its own shelves, the shelves are too full.
The money isn't there. Science in Sport, the biggest name in UK endurance nutrition, saw revenue fall 17.2% to £51.9m in 2024 and was taken private for around £82.3m, delisting from AIM. The takeover documents referred to fluctuating revenues, a high cost base and losses over recent years. Rising brand count plus a struggling category leader is the classic signature of a market heading for a shakeout.
And there's the rubbish. Over 500 million single-use gel packets are binned every year. Around 38% of consumers say that bothers them. Go and look at the ground after any aid station and tell me it shouldn't.
The case that I'm wrong
I promised balance, so here it is, and it's stronger than I'd like.
Runners genuinely vary. Gut tolerance, sweat rate, sweat sodium concentration, flavour fatigue over a 30-hour race, dietary requirements. A brand that works for you may be unusable for the person next to you at the start line. A market of six products would fail a lot of people. That's the real argument for variety, and it's a good one.
Underfuelling is the far bigger problem. Research cited by SiS found non-elite marathoners take in an average of just 21.7 grams of carbohydrate per hour on race day, against a recommendation of 60 or more. Somewhere between 70% and 90% of distance runners report stomach problems in races, mostly because they never practised. Most beginners aren't paralysed by choice in the shop. They're taking nothing at all, then wondering why mile 20 felt like wading through wet cement.
But the high-carb push may itself be overreach. Marathon Handbook published a good sceptical piece on this, pointing out that the evidence for clear additional benefit above 90g/hour is weak, and that elite athletes may simply be physiological outliers rather than a template for the rest of us. They highlight a personalised fuelling study where athletes achieved similar carbohydrate utilisation on 28% less carbohydrate, with lower perceived effort and less gut discomfort. Their landing point is 60 to 90 grams an hour for most people. Which means the industry may be selling us an escalation we don't need.
And recovery is the softest sell of the lot. That 30-minute anabolic window you keep hearing about is largely marketing. Glycogen replenishment continues for four to six hours, and muscle protein synthesis stays elevated for 24 to 48. Unless you're racing again within about eight hours, your total daily intake matters far more than sprinting to a shaker bottle. A proper meal will do.
How to actually choose your running nutrition
If you're new to this and standing in front of the wall, here's the filter I'd use.
Under 75 minutes: you need nothing. Water. Maybe not even that. Eat normally beforehand. The industry would very much like you not to know this. Between 75 and 90 minutes you're in a grey zone, if the session is hard, a single gel towards the end won't hurt, but it isn't doing much either.
90 minutes to around two and a half hours: one product type. A gel, or a drink mix. Not both. Aim for around 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour and start early, within the first half hour, rather than waiting until you feel empty.
Marathon and beyond: 60 to 90 grams per hour, from a glucose-fructose blend. Build up to it in training over weeks, not on race day. Ignore 120 unless you're chasing a time that genuinely warrants it and you've done the gut work.
Pick two brands. Test them. Stop shopping. Buy singles, not boxes. Most decent retailers sell individual sachets and mix-and-match packs precisely so you can do this. Test at race pace, not on an easy jog, because your gut behaves completely differently at threshold. Once you find something that works and doesn't make you gag at hour three, buy it in bulk and stop looking.
Check what's actually in it. Carbs per serving, sodium per serving, caffeine or not, price per gram of carbohydrate. Those four numbers tell you more than any amount of packaging.
Ignore the other 108 brands. Genuinely. They are not keeping a secret from you.
What I actually use
Since I've spent 2,000 words telling you the industry is confusing, it's only fair I tell you where I landed. And before anyone asks: I have no affiliate arrangement, sponsorship or commercial relationship with any of the brands named in this article. I pay for all of it myself, which is rather the point.
Gels are Precision Fuel & Hydration, mostly the PF90. One sachet, 90 grams of carbohydrate, which covers an hour at the top end of the range I recommended above. It's a big dose and it took some gut training to get comfortable with, but the simplicity is the appeal: one thing in my vest per hour instead of three, and no maths at 3am on a mountain.
Drinks are Infinit. Their :SPEED mix for anything between 90 minutes and three hours, and :GO FAR for anything beyond that, which includes protein in the blend — genuinely useful once you're into ultra territory and the effort has gone on long enough that muscle breakdown starts to matter.
That's it. Two brands. Four products between them. I've tested a lot of other things over the years and this is what my stomach tolerates and my head can face at hour eleven.
And here's the part I find telling: neither Precision Fuel & Hydration nor Infinit has a stand at the UTMB Trail Village this year. The two brands I actually spend my money on aren't in the room. Twenty-plus companies are competing for attention a hundred metres from where I'm writing this, and not one of them makes what's in my vest.
Which rather makes the point. Expo presence is a marketing budget, not a quality signal. The loudest brands at the biggest race of the year are not necessarily the ones you should be buying, and the ones you should be buying may not be shouting at all.
The bottom line
Is the market oversaturated? I think the more accurate charge is that the industry has built a brilliant solution to a problem most runners don't have yet, and is selling it, hard, to people who need a banana and a water bottle.
There is real science behind the modern fuelling boom, and there are real physiological reasons for variety. But 110 brands on one retailer's shelf, up 40% in four years, competing over a category worth a few hundred million globally, is not a market serving runners. It's a market serving itself, and hoping you'll keep buying sachets until you find one you like.
Find your two. Stick with them. Go and run.
Frequently asked questions
How many running nutrition brands are there?
There's no official register, but the best estimate is 150 to 200 brands worldwide with a meaningful endurance range, and industry analysis counts more than 140 competing in energy gels alone. For a UK runner the practical number is around 110, which is how many manufacturers XMiles currently stocks, up from roughly 80 four years ago.
Do I need energy gels for a 10K or a parkrun?
No. For anything under about 75 minutes your muscle glycogen stores will cover the effort, provided you've eaten normally beforehand. Water is enough. Between 75 and 90 minutes it's optional and makes little difference either way; past 90 minutes it starts to matter. Gels for a 5K are a solution to a problem you don't have.
How many carbs per hour should I take when running?
For runs over 90 minutes, 30 to 60 grams per hour. For a marathon or longer, 60 to 90 grams per hour from a glucose-fructose blend. The 120 grams per hour figure you see quoted comes from research on elite athletes, and the evidence for extra benefit above 90 grams is weaker than the marketing suggests. Whatever number you choose, build up to it gradually in training.
Are all energy gels basically the same?
Mostly, yes. Strip away the branding and the majority are a glucose-fructose blend at roughly 2:1 or 1:0.8, delivering 20 to 40 grams of carbohydrate, with optional sodium and caffeine. One industry analysis found more than half of brands struggle to differentiate beyond adjusting carbohydrate concentration. The genuine exceptions are hydrogel formulations, all-in-one drink systems, and real-food gels using rice, honey or fruit purée for runners whose stomachs reject syrup.
Are expensive energy gels better?
Not reliably. The useful comparison is price per gram of carbohydrate, not price per sachet, because a 40g gel at £2.50 is better value than a 20g gel at £1.60. Beyond that you're paying for texture, brand and sponsorship budgets. The best gel is the one you can swallow at race pace without gagging.
How do I stop energy gels upsetting my stomach?
Practise. Between 70% and 90% of distance runners report gut problems in races, and most of it traces back to trying something new on race day. Take gels at race intensity in training, not on easy jogs, because your gut behaves completely differently when you're working hard. Take water with thicker gels, spread your intake rather than taking two at once, and build your hourly carb target up over several weeks.
What's the difference between isotonic and high-carb gels?
Isotonic gels, such as the SiS GO range, are diluted to roughly the concentration of body fluids so they can be taken without extra water, at the cost of a lower carb dose and a bigger sachet. High-carb gels pack 30 to 50 grams into a small packet but are more concentrated, so most need water alongside them. Isotonic suits runners who don't want to carry fluid; high-carb suits anyone chasing 80 grams an hour or more.
Do I need a recovery drink after every run?
No. The 30-minute anabolic window is largely marketing. Glycogen replenishment continues for four to six hours after exercise and muscle protein synthesis stays elevated for 24 to 48 hours, so your total daily intake matters far more than how fast you reach a shaker bottle. Recovery products earn their place when you're training or racing again within roughly eight hours. Otherwise, a normal meal does the job.
Which nutrition brand should a beginner start with?
Any established one, and it matters less than the industry wants you to believe. Buy single sachets rather than boxes from a retailer that lets you mix and match, pick two or three products across different textures, and test them on long runs. The goal isn't finding the best gel on the market, it's finding one that your stomach tolerates and your palate can face at hour three.
Lace up and enjoy your miles.
Written in Chamonix, UTMB week 2026, with a bag full of gel samples I'm probably never going to use.
Disclosure: I have no affiliate, sponsorship or commercial relationship with any brand mentioned in this article. Nobody paid for a mention, and nobody was given a chance to review it before publication.
About the author: Andy Hood is an ultra and endurance runner, cancer survivor, and unapologetic advocate for men's health and Runna Ambassador. Follow his runs, read his race reports, and grab a pair of Check Ya Balls at runningwestwardho.co.uk.
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