We recently had the opportunity to attend the Fall/Winter 2014 Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, Utah. The show serves as show-and-tell for next year’s gear and a giant celebration of the outdoor industry in general. We had a great time checking out the new clothing and gear that will be making its way to your favorite outdoor shops in the near future.
One of the highlights of the show was checking out the new running shoes that are making their way into the market; everything from minimalist track spikes to decked out trail running shoes. While walking the booths, talking to sales reps and seeing each shoe company’s latest line we were struck by how complicated picking the right running shoe has become. Buzzwords like “honeycomb EVA”, “stabilization bar” and “zero drop” left us feeling almost disoriented and more than a little out of our element. In the wake of the minimal running movement that arose after Born to Run was published we were surprised that shoes are more gimmicky than ever. On the trails we want our shoes to simply work. The shoes that impressed us the most were not the ones with the fancy colors or catch phrases, but the shoes that took a simplistic approach and stuck with it.
Unfortunately, the performance food market isn't immune to similar gimmicks. We checked out samples from the bigger “performance food” companies and saw everything from meaningless, but impressive sounding marketing lingo, to the use of labeling tricks hiding the fact that products are loaded with undesirable ingredients. While we don't believe there's a magic number of ingredients, one of the products we picked up had an ingredient listing so long that it read like the phone book. We stopped counting at thirty ingredients, many of which were unpronounceable
We take pride in the fact that the average person can pronounce and knows what each ingredient in Enduro Bites Real Race Food is. We have only included ingredients we want when hammering out the last twenty miles of a 100 mile ride or starting the last climb of a thirty-mile run. In these moments the last thing you care about is fancy marketing jargon. You want nutrition that will allow you to perform your best. This is why Enduro Bites were created. All-natural, performance nutrition that works. No gimmicks.
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