This is a first-person opinion piece. I'm an age-group triathlete and co-founder of AiTrainingPlan. I used Spring Energy products during ultra training in 2024. I have no commercial relationship with Spring Energy or any gel brand mentioned here.
By Thomas Prommer · Updated April 2026
When the Awesome Sauce lab tests broke in August 2024, I was mid-block using it on long runs. Independent testing found roughly 80-100 kcal where the label said 180. I recalculated my sessions, switched protocols, and watched how Spring handled the fallout. Two years on: the brand responded better than most would have, the structural QC problem in small-batch real-food gels is still real, and my own race-day labeling policy changed permanently.
August 2024: A Forum Post That Wouldn't Go Away
I remember the exact context when the Awesome Sauce story broke into the feeds I follow. It was August 2024, deep in summer training, and someone in an ultra running community posted lab results showing Spring Energy's Awesome Sauce gel testing at roughly 80-100 kilocalories per packet. The label said 180 kcal and 45 grams of carbohydrates.
The post got screenshotted and shared widely enough that within 48 hours it had crossed from ultra-specific forums into general endurance media, then into the mainstream cycling and triathlon channels I follow. The community reaction was immediate and polarized. Some people were furious. Others were skeptical of the testing methodology. A vocal subset of Spring loyalists questioned whether this was fair to a small brand they genuinely believed in. It was messy in the way these things always are when a product with a devoted following runs into a credibility problem.
I had used Awesome Sauce regularly through spring and early summer that year. So this was not an abstract story for me. It was a question about whether the nutrition I thought I was eating for long training runs was actually what I was eating.
What Actually Happened, in Order
I followed this closely because I had skin in the game. Here is how it actually unfolded, as best I could reconstruct from the threads I was reading in real time.
The initial lab results came from independent testing, not from an organized takedown campaign or a competing brand. A runner sent packets for analysis and shared the results. Multiple subsequent tests by different people confirmed the finding: Awesome Sauce was coming in materially below its labeled calorie and carbohydrate content. The variance between the 180 kcal label and the tested values around 80-100 kcal was too large to explain as normal batch variation or measurement error.
Spring Energy's first public response was careful. The founders, Serafina and Ben, acknowledged awareness of the tests while questioning some of the specific methodology used. That was a reasonable position to hold for a few days while they got their own information together. It became less tenable as additional independent tests arrived at similar numbers. The gap between what the label claimed and what the product contained was real.
Over the following weeks, the company moved. They revised the labeling and committed to changes in production documentation. They set up a refund program that was accessible without significant friction. You didn't need to mail back product or navigate a bureaucratic customer service process. Whether you wanted to return what you had or just move on, they gave you a path.
The ultra community split roughly into thirds: a cohort that returned the product and left, a cohort that stayed loyal on the grounds that Spring had eventually done the right thing, and a middle group that kept their remaining stock and watched to see what would happen next. I was in that third group.
Why This Was a Bigger Deal Than It Looked
On the surface, "gel has fewer calories than it says" sounds like a product disappointment, not a serious problem. Plenty of food products carry inaccurate labels. The tolerance for labeling error allowed by the FDA for packaged food is plus or minus 20 percent, which means a 180 kcal label can legally describe a product delivering 144 kcal. Consumers generally shrug at this because the real-world impact at the food scale is minor.
Endurance sports nutrition is different. Athletes training and racing at high intensity for multiple hours are running genuine calorie deficit risk, and they calculate their intake based directly on label data. The math is tight because it has to be. If you are targeting 350 kcal per hour during an ultramarathon and you're eating two Awesome Sauce packets to get there, you believe you are consuming 360 kcal. If the product is actually delivering 180 kcal, you have spent the last four hours running at half your target calorie intake without knowing it.
The consequences don't show up immediately. Blood glucose doesn't collapse in hour one because your glycogen stores are buffering the shortfall. But by hour three or four, running on a persistent calorie deficit causes the kind of performance deterioration that is very difficult to recover from mid-race. Not a bad patch. A collapse. The kind that DNF logs get written about.
I am not saying everyone who had a hard day during an ultra in 2024 was experiencing the Awesome Sauce effect. I am saying that the mechanism is real, the math is unforgiving at race duration, and a near-50% calorie shortfall per serving is large enough to cause that outcome in athletes who planned their nutrition correctly and executed it correctly based on the information available to them.
What I Was Doing at the Time
In the months before the controversy broke, I was using Awesome Sauce on longer training runs as part of a real-food fueling approach. I liked the taste. I liked that the ingredient list was short and recognizable. At the time I was running at lower intensity than race pace, so GI issues were minimal and the whole-food format sat well.
When the test results started circulating, I pulled the packets I had left and started recalculating the sessions where I had used them. The honest answer is that I cannot tell whether the runs where I felt flat in hours three and four were related to the gel issue or just normal training fatigue on high-volume weeks. That ambiguity is maddening but it is also the reality: you cannot run a controlled experiment on past training sessions.
I stopped using the old-labeled stock within a week of the first credible test results. Not dramatically. I didn't throw them out in a public gesture. I put them in the back of the cabinet and switched protocols. For the rest of summer training, I moved to a combination of conventional gels with verifiable carbohydrate specs and homemade rice cakes, which at least gave me direct control over what went into them. I knew the calories because I had weighed the ingredients myself.
This was probably overcautious. But when you are building a training plan around specific nutrition targets, product uncertainty is something you want to eliminate, not manage.
Did Spring Fix It?
Current Spring Energy products carry revised specifications. Awesome Sauce still lists 180 kcal and 45g carbohydrates on the updated label. Long Haul, their larger ultra gel, lists 240 kcal and 54g carbs. Canaberry and PowerRush sit at the lower end at 100 kcal and 25g each. These numbers reflect the product line as it stands in 2026, and they come after the production and documentation review that followed the controversy.
Do I trust them? Partially, and I think that is the honest answer rather than a diplomatic one.
The issue with real-food gels isn't intent. I believe Spring's founders want accurate labels. The issue is structural. Pureed fruit, nuts, and oils have natural variation in calorie density depending on the source, ripeness, and fat content of specific batches of raw material. Standardizing that at scale without either significant reformulation or consistent third-party testing batch by batch is difficult. The post-controversy changes the company described were production-process improvements and more rigorous documentation, which is meaningful. Whether those changes close the variance problem entirely is something only ongoing testing would confirm.
For day-to-day training, this level of uncertainty is manageable. For race-day nutrition planning where I am calculating to a specific hourly target, I build in a 15% margin below the label on any real-food product. That's my personal policy now, regardless of brand.
The Broader QC Problem in Endurance Nutrition
Spring was the highest-profile example of a problem that exists across the small-batch real-food sports nutrition category.
The FDA's labeling requirements for packaged food in the United States allow for significant variation. The plus-or-minus 20% tolerance applies to macronutrients. For sports nutrition specifically, there is no federal mandate requiring third-party verification of label claims before a product reaches market. A brand can formulate a product, run internal testing, publish a label, and ship. The honesty of that label depends on the quality of their internal process.
Large brands with industrial-scale production have quality control infrastructure that makes gross label inaccuracies rare. The output of a Maurten or a GU is highly standardized because it is produced on equipment designed for precision and tested at volume. A small brand making real-food gels in a commercial kitchen with variable raw ingredients is working with much larger inherent variance. This is not a moral failure on their part. It is a structural feature of what they are making and how they are making it.
The Spring controversy was unusual only in that the gap between label and reality was large enough to surface through independent testing. There are almost certainly other products in this category where the gap is smaller but still real. Nobody is running organized independent lab tests on artisanal gels as a routine matter. We find out when the gap is large enough to be noticed.
What I took from this, beyond the specific Spring situation, is that real-food sports nutrition deserves the same critical engagement I bring to any other piece of race equipment. The "natural ingredients" framing can create a halo effect that leads to less scrutiny, not more. A product being made from recognizable foods doesn't make its label more accurate.
What I Use Now
My current on-bike fueling is built around Maurten for most of my Ironman training, with Neversecond C30 gels on longer efforts where I'm carrying a lot of product. The reasons are primarily about calorie accuracy and predictability under load. Both companies use precisely specified carbohydrate compounds that are standardized at industrial scale. I know the numbers are reliable within normal tolerance because the production process is designed for that.
On long training runs, I mix conventional gels with homemade rice cakes. The rice cakes give me the real-food texture and palatability advantage that made Spring attractive in the first place, but I control the ingredients and the math. This is more preparation time than buying off the shelf, but for race-specific training it is worth the control.
For race-day fueling strategy and target calculations, AiTrainingPlan's nutrition calculators are where I start. They let me work backward from event duration and intensity to per-hour targets, which I then match to specific products I have already verified in training. The tool is useful precisely because it makes the dose-response relationship explicit, which is what makes label inaccuracy so consequential when it exists.
I have experimented with other real-food brands since the Spring situation. There are good products in the category. I am simply more deliberate now about either knowing the production provenance in detail or running my own spot-checks on products I'm going to rely on for A-race nutrition planning.
Would I Come Back?
This is the question I kept deferring while writing this, because my honest answer is neither a clean yes nor a clean no.
Spring handled the aftermath better than I expected. The refund program was real. The label revision happened. The founders engaged publicly rather than going quiet and hoping it passed. For a small company, those choices have real costs, financial and reputational, and they made them anyway. That matters to me more than a brand's first-day response to a crisis, which is almost always imperfect regardless of how things eventually resolve.
The product itself is still appealing in concept. Real food, short ingredient list, flavors that hold up through long efforts better than synthetic gel sweetness. These are genuine advantages, not marketing language. On a long training run at low intensity, Awesome Sauce is a more pleasant eating experience than most of what's in my gel rotation.
What I won't do is use it as the primary calorie source in a race where I've calculated my nutrition to a specific target without independent verification of the current formulation. That isn't specific to Spring. That's the policy I've landed on for any small-batch real-food gel where I can't look at an independently verified certificate of analysis for the production run I'm buying.
Two years later, the lasting effect isn't that I think Spring is a bad brand. It's that I think about label risk differently across the whole category. The Awesome Sauce situation happened to a product made by people who clearly cared about what they were making and had every reason to want their label to be accurate. That's what makes the structural point so important: care and accuracy are related but not identical. Knowing the difference, and building your race-day fueling accordingly, is just part of the job now.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the Spring Energy calorie lab tests find in 2024?
Independent lab tests — most notably circulated through ultra running forums and then picked up by endurance media — found that Spring Energy's Awesome Sauce gel tested at roughly 80-100 kcal per packet versus the labeled 180 kcal. Carbohydrate content was similarly below the stated 45g. The gap was significant enough to matter for athletes who calculated race-day calorie targets from label data.
How did Spring Energy respond to the calorie mislabeling controversy?
Spring Energy's initial response was cautious — the founders disputed some of the methodology in the early tests. Over the following weeks, as more test results surfaced, the company revised its labeling, offered refunds to customers who had purchased the old product, and updated manufacturing practices. The refund program was broadly accessible, not buried behind a customer service wall.
Did Spring Energy fix its calorie labeling?
Yes. Current Spring Energy products carry revised labels that are more conservative. Awesome Sauce now lists 180 kcal/45g, but the formulation review that accompanied the controversy was meant to make that number more reliable. Whether post-revision batches consistently hit the revised numbers is harder to independently verify, but the label change itself was not cosmetic — it came with production process documentation changes.
Why does calorie label accuracy matter so much in endurance sports?
Athletes racing or training at high intensity for multiple hours calculate their nutrition intake based on label data. If a gel says 180 kcal and you're targeting 350 kcal/hour, you take two gels. If the gel actually delivers 90 kcal, you're running at 50% of your fueling target without knowing it. The result isn't immediate — blood glucose doesn't crash in the first hour — but at hour 3 or 4 of an ultramarathon or Ironman, a sustained calorie deficit causes performance deterioration that's very hard to recover from mid-race.
Are real-food endurance gels less accurate than conventional gels?
Generally, yes — though it's a spectrum. Conventional gels like Maurten or Gu use measured volumes of precisely specified carbohydrate compounds (maltodextrin, fructose, sodium alginate) that are easier to standardize at industrial scale. Real-food gels using pureed fruit, nuts, or oils have natural variation in ingredient calorie density, and small-batch production has fewer automated quality controls. That doesn't make real-food gels inferior as a product category, but it does mean calorie accuracy carries more uncertainty.
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