Hydrate + Go is here. Here's how we built it.

Hydrate + Go is here. It's our first product, a pre-training fuel for developing athletes, built
around how hard they train and compete today.

The carbohydrate

Hydrate + Go uses two carbohydrate sources, rice syrup solids and maltodextrin. Both are
glucose based, the fuel your muscles actually run on. Together that's 24g of carbohydrate with only 7g of sugar, enough to fuel a pre-training window without the sugar load of a soft drink.

No stimulants

No caffeine. No taurine. No guarana. There are a lot of drinks out there built on stimulants, but nothing made as pre-training fuel for a developing athlete. Paediatric guidance is that
developing athletes should avoid stimulants. When you train, your body runs on glucose, and carbohydrate is the most direct way to get it there. So that's what the can is built around.

Made for developing athletes, not adults

This was the part that mattered most to me. The serious products were all formulated for adult bodies. The rest were children's products, not made for sport at all. There was nothing built for an athlete who is still growing and takes their sport seriously. We set the three electrolytes, sodium, potassium, and magnesium, and the amounts, for a developing athlete, not by shrinking an adult formula.

We made it with the food science team at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT). The rule was simple. If something didn't have a reason to be in the can, it didn't go in.

Jen Koo, Founder

Sources 

- Canadian Paediatric Society, "Energy and sports drinks in children and adolescents."
https://cps.ca/en/documents/position/energy-and-sports-drinks