Spring Energy - Nutrition Integrity and Transparency #226

Our Research for Essentials for Ultrarunning team discuss the recent Spring Energy debacle.
Access the Spring reports

Stephanie Howe-https://trainright.com/coaches/stephanie-howe/
Nick Tiller-https://skepticalinquirer.org
Jim Rutberg-https://trainright.com/coaches/jim-rutberg/

Join Coach Jason Koop, Stephanie Howe, Nick Tiller, and Jim Rutberg on this episode of the KoopCast as they discuss lab results that reveal significant nutritional discrepancies in Spring Energy products, the implications for consumers and retailers, and the company's widely criticized response. Covering detailed product assessments and broader ethical discussions in sports nutrition, this episode offers valuable insights into product development, crisis communication, and the importance of transparency and accurate nutrition labeling.

Introduction to the Controversy
The Nutrition Lab Analysis
Initial Findings and Reactions
Spring Energy's Statement
Reactions from the Running Community
Broader Implications and Discussion
The Path Forward

Additional resources:
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-
www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

trail and ultra runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the coop cast. As always, I am your humble host, coach jason coop, and this episode of the podcast is all going to be about the spring energy controversy, which I have found myself in the middle of and I guess you could say I put myself in the middle of very deliberately. I brought together the group of our research essentials for ultra running team to discuss this very topic because, ironically, we have a lot of experience in this area. We have experience managing crisis communications. We have experience in nutrition. We have experience partnering with nutrition companies to help them make nutrition products. All of these aspects that have come to light within this spring nutrition controversy we actually have lived and can lend authentic and expertise opinion on, and so I got the group together of Stephanie Howe, nick Taylor and Jim Rutberg and myself to discuss some of the aspects related to this, and our intent with this was to hopefully deliver a toolkit to you guys, the listeners, to kind of weed through as you're trying to navigate what to actually do with all of this, and so I hope you guys remember that as we are going through this. I want to start out with the facts. So several weeks ago I sent four different products off to a nutrition laboratory called RL Nutrition Labs in Washington. I sent off Spring's Awesome Sauce product, I sent off their Canterbury product, I sent off their Hill Aid product and I sent off their Goo Chocolate Outrage, as I sent off their Hill aid product and I sent off their goo chocolate outrage as kind of a poor excuses of control. And I got the results back several days ago and I started publishing them on social media and on my website as I got them in and I'm just going to run through them very factually to start out with. So, first off, we're going to start out with the awesome sauce product. So the off, we're going to start out with the Awesome Sauce product. So the Awesome Sauce product claims that it has 180 calories in the actual packet. That was analyzed by the lab at 75 calories in it and that's a difference of 58%. The Awesome Sauce product claims to have 45 grams of carbohydrate and it was actually analyzed to have 17.9. We'll round that up to 18 grams of carbohydrate for a difference of 60%. Springs Hill Aid claims to have 120 calories in the packet and the lab analyzed the Hill Aid that I sent over to the lab to have 48 calories in it, for a difference of 59.9%. Hill-aid claims to have 20 grams of carbohydrate and a lab analyzed it to have 10.29 grams of carbohydrate, which is 48.55% less than what is actually on the label. The Canterbury product claims to have 100 calories in the gel pretty neat, nice round number but the lab analyzed it to have 43.3 calories and that constitutes a miss of 56.7%. And finally, the Canterbury product claims to have 17 grams of carbohydrate in it and only has 9.66 grams. We can round that up to 10 for a miss of 40%. The goo chocolate outrage is what it says. It is Claims to be 100 calories, the lab analyzed it to be 112 calories. Claims to have 21 grams of carbohydrates, and we analyzed it, or the lab analyzed it to be 24 grams of carbohydrates.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Now I want to add a little bit more specificity to how this actually all came to light. I ordered all of these products as any other consumer would actually order them. I ordered them through the feed and through Spring's own website. I had those orders shipped directly to the lab. Do not pass go. They did not come to my house, they didn't go anywhere else.

Speaker 1: 3:55

The lab received them and they processed the whole thing. I contacted the lab as a normal consumer hey, I'm going to send you guys these products, go ahead and analyze them and let me know what your results are. And, as a strange twist of irony, the results were actually coming back a little bit delayed and I was getting a little bit frustrated with the lab because they promised it on one day and they weren't delivering it, kind of day after day. And finally the lab actually had to call me because they thought that there was something wrong with their analysis because the samples that they were running were so far off of the claims. So if anything tells us that something was awry, it was that you have a commercial grade food lab that receives product that's clearly marked to have a certain type, a certain amount of nutritional composition, and they are distrusting their own analysis. They are doubting their own analysis because what they are analyzing is so far off of the claims.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Now I'd like to also point out that the results of this are not surprising to me, because there have been several other attempts at doing this out in the community. We talk about this in the podcast. People have dehydrated these products and come down to a similar amount of carbohydrate content. Sport Hunger over in Germany did an actual lab analysis, which I asked for in advance, and they came out with a similar calorie and carbohydrate content for Awesome Sauce, and so none of this is actually surprising, and I'm actually the laggard in the entire group here.

Speaker 1: 5:21

So with that as a little bit of a backdrop, we're going to get into it with our entire team and go over the history of why we are where we are, all of the different home experiments, all of the different theories that have been out there, and then what I actually did, and then what we actually think about it, and we kind of divide this amongst three things. First off is just the outright nutrition myths across all of these products and what that actually means and what we can actually decipher from it. The second piece of it is how spring is actually handling this and how we can read between the lines, so to speak, in terms of what is actually going on behind the scenes, and can we actually trust them and should we actually trust them again. And another piece that is floating on the background is how do these products actually get developed in the first place, and I know a lot of you guys don't have an incredibly intimate view of this, and nor should you guys see people on Instagram. Hey, we went into this manufacturing plan and it looks amazing and here are all these products. But when products are developed correctly, there's actually a lot of people and expertise involved, and the four of us here have actually had a lot of that experience. There's probably over 20 different products represented, of which we have had various levels of involvement. Some of that involvement has been very intimate and very detailed, and other of it has been very superficial, and I think we can bring all of that expertise together and hopefully peel the curtain back a little bit on how this process actually happens. So that's it. I'm going to get right out of the way. We're going to go right into the history of it with the group. Here is more on our conversation all about spring energy and what we know and what we're going to take into the future Now that we've got the facts straight. It's kind of rewind with a really brief history lesson. I'm going to blow. I'm going to blow through this, so apologies to those who were tangentially involved if I don't give you a shout out several weeks ago.

Speaker 1: 7:16

The reddit community of all people shout out to the reddit community. They usually get a lot of shit because you can be like anonymous and there's a lot of degeneracy going on in the Reddit community and it's just fun for conspiracy theories and things like that, the ultra running thread of the Reddit community. One Redditor in particular started to postulate that awesome sauce. Very specifically, they couldn't really make sense of the calorie and the carbohydrate count compared to the ingredient deck, and so this person took it upon themselves to do some home dehydration experiments. So they bought some awesome sauce. They put it in a home dehydrator that you can go buy it. I was going to say Bed, bath Beyond, but where do we get these from? Now that company's out of business?

Speaker 3: 7:57

I don't even know. Look at me, I'm English. And just to fill something in, this guy was trying to reverse engineer the thing because it's like $5 per, which is quite expensive even in this market, this saturated market. So he was trying to reverse engineer the stuff and make it at home and he found it impossible to get the calorie and carbohydrate amounts from the listed ingredients right.

Speaker 1: 8:18

Exactly, exactly. So. Just a curious person out there in the world Shout out to them. Apparently they're a member of the ultra running community, coached by some ultra running coaches, and started and kind of posted their results on Reddit. Here are the products that I got. I dehydrated them. Here's what I got.

Speaker 1: 8:33

And then all of the people that you know think that they're scientific experts start to weigh in. Well, do the carbohydrates go away after you dehydrate things? And let me just be clear that process of taking a product with especially with a homogenous macronutrient source, dehydrating it and then weighing it and then multiplying it by the known amount of calories per gram of that macronutrient source, is actually a reasonable proxy. I'm not saying it's a perfect proxy because you have other things within that product, but when you have a product that's predominantly like a steak, right Piece of beef, if you completely dehydrate it, you're left with all the protein that's left. Same thing with a carbohydrate product like an apple or a gel. In this case, that's a reasonable proxy. Just to end that type of speculation. It's not a perfect proxy, it's a reasonable proxy. So then, based off of that one person's experiments there was, there were several others that started to do this just with this one awesome sauce product, and they all came in. They all kind of coalesced around the same amount of dried weight, right around 16 to maybe 19 grams of substance left in one gel after they dehydrated it. So you would think at that point there are 17, 19 grams of carbohydrates, since it's predominantly a carbohydrate product. This is a really big difference from the claimed carbohydrate content in an awesome sauce gel, which once again, is 45 grams of carbohydrate.

Speaker 1: 10:05

So then the good folks over in Germany from Sport Hunger actually decided to send it to a lab. They carry their kind of analogous to the feed here in the US and in other areas of the world where they have many different nutrition products, and they sell them all over Europe and personally I have used them for both me and my athletes over at UTMB. When we run out of product or we forget it or our luggage gets lost or something, this guy, jonas, is a freaking wizard, all of a sudden showing up at the last minute with the exact thing that you need and the quantities that you need, which are a lot for endurance athletes, and I am forever grateful for him personally and his company bailing me out and bail are a lot for endurance athletes and I am forever grateful for him him personally and his company bailing me out and bailing a lot of my elite athletes out when we run into these issues at the very last minute at one of the most high profile races on the planet. So his company decided to send it off to a lab in Germany and they did approximate analysis in this lab, which is kind of a light version of a nutrition analysis completely valid version that anybody can use. But they're kind of doing it from a cost savings perspective and I'll go through that in a second. So he sent that. He sent those in and he found about the same amount 18 grams of carbohydrate or 17 grams of carbohydrate I can't remember exactly what it was off the top of my head but right in line with what the Redditors were, were dehydrating the products too. And so he decided to pull that product off of his shelves and started issuing refunds, and this was four weeks ago. You know we're now sitting here almost in June, may 29th.

Speaker 1: 11:38

He started doing this three or four weeks ago, long, long, long, long time ago. And it takes time to do these lab analysis takes three or four weeks to actually get it done. So he was on the ball instantly and so I reached out to him, had some dialogue with him and I said hey, what's going on here? And he shared with me the results. As long as I wouldn't share them publicly and pass the document around, that's his right to do it. So I looked at the results and I was like, hey, this is like, this is legit.

Speaker 1: 12:03

Well, in the background, what was happening with all the Reddit talk? We had our coaching conference in Arkansas. Ruddy was there, all of our coaches were gathered up and it was a topic of conversation and there was enough sentiment in the room and amongst the athletes that I worked with for me to look at that and say I need to figure this out. And so at some point, either during or just after that coaching conference I can't remember what it was I started to order products directly from spring and directly from the feed and have them sent to this lab up in Washington, uh, for analysis, all the while waiting for all these other, uh, all the all these other, all the all these other results to come back. And it just so happened that this week all the results belatedly have finally come back. So I got the first results kind of like last last week, I think around Friday, waited until the Memorial day weekend was over to kind of process it, and I got the second batch of results just today, on Wednesday, wednesday May 29th.

Speaker 1: 13:09

Once again, all these records are freely available, freely available on my website, and so here we are. That's the whole background of the story. I had products analyzed. Sport hunger over in Germany had products actually analyzed in a lab. There's another, there's another entity that gathered some GoFundMe dollars that are also doing proximate analysis across a little bit of a broader swath of nutrition products and we could talk about that just a little bit. Those results will probably come out right in line with this podcast comes out. So we're kind of blinded to them as we speak right now.

Speaker 1: 13:39

But this whole saga brings up a lot of different layers that I wanted to get y'all's take on. So in the room right now we got Steph Howe, jim Rutberg and Nick Tiller, who are all on my research group, and I thought you know what. We actually have a lot of expertise in the room to talk about this. We have people with nutrition backgrounds, people who have helped develop nutrition products at various stages of development and at various engagement levels of that development from very involved to not involved at all, and we can kind of go through that in that entirety. We we have a Jim Rutberg who's an expert in communication and can go through some of the crisis communication pieces and what we can learn from, from the public.

Speaker 1: 14:19

But I want to be clear that my goal with this is not, to you know, not to bash spring energy or not, to, you know, take down a company or anything like that. My goal is I want athletes to have the right information and the reason I sent these products off to a lab and this cost me a lot of money. This cost me four grand. You know that's I have to think about that. You know that's not something like flick it, flipping a nickel to be. I just wanted to know and I'm getting kind of choked up here because I'm thinking about it. I've had athletes, professional athletes use these exact products and I'm holding Hill Aid and Canterbury up right now.

Speaker 1: 14:57

These are two of the ones that I talked about and had absolutely horrible races and they would come into an aid station with nothing but empty wrappers so they'd nailed their nutrition plan as we had drawn it up, completely annihilated, slam a Coke and be great for 20 minutes and then come into the next aid station with all empty wrappers, all spring empty wrappers, and be completely annihilated. And after the race and after the failure of a race that several of those were I'm stylizing several stories kind of all at once, but I'm thinking of one in particular. We would go back to the drawing board and I would take responsibility for something and usually it's the programming, because that's what I'm an expert at. We got this wrong. We did these intervals wrong. This is the wrong load.

Speaker 1: 15:46

Something went wrong in the training to cause this poor result, and it makes me sick to my stomach that a professional athlete who's pouring their guts out every single day for months and years in training gets their races unwound because of a product that is not what it appears to be, and I own a little bit of that responsibility. I should have had a more clear vision and thinking that could have been a problem because everything else was good, the training leading up to the race was good, all these other things. I never thought for one second that the products that some of these athletes were consuming at the highest level, trying to compete at the highest level had half or 60% of the carbohydrate content which athletes absolutely rely on to fuel. It never even crossed my mind, and I feel like a freaking idiot for it, not earlier than now. So I wanted to find out that that whole story, that whole monologue, is just an elaborate way of saying. I just wanted to find out.

Speaker 1: 16:47

I wanted to get to the bottom of it because I wanted to know for sure yes, you can continue to take these products or no, let's switch over to something else. Because they liked them, they're good on their stomach, they could take in three or four per hour right To get their, you know, the correct carbohydrate content, as we thought it was. And I didn't want to switch from that because if you think you're taking in that much, that many calories and if it ain't broke, you don't have any GI distress, that's something that you kind of hold onto. So that's the background of why I wanted to do this, why I plunked down my own money to do it and why I wanted to get to the bottom of it. It's not to take down a company, it's to make things right for the athletes. So that's the backdrop.

Speaker 1: 17:27

I'm going to take a little bit of a breather right now, because I need to. I think the first thing that we want to talk about, outside of the lab results, once again kind of freely available on my website, is I want to go around the room a little bit before we get too tactical and I just want to know y'all's you've been following this through the content that's out there and also through our internal dialogue just some initial thoughts that you have on this whole saga and why we're here right here. Nick, we'll start with you because you're probably the biggest brainiac and have been able to process this the best out of all of us.

Speaker 3: 18:03

Well, even though I am not particularly shocked at the findings from the lab results, the fact that these products don't have the stated amounts on the label, but different to what was actually contained in the thing I'm not super shocked at that because there's little to no. I mean, my whole professional work over the last decade has been talking about how there's little to no regulation in health and wellness or in dietary supplements, and so something will only actually be closely scrutinized or taken off the market when there's evidence of harm, and in this case there probably is evidence of harm. So I'm not super surprised. But the fact that the discrepancy is that big, so I'm not super surprised. But the fact that the discrepancy is that big, you know, like in the US and Canada you have about a 20% tolerance up a lower limit. So whatever stated on the label, you're allowed to be 20% standard deviation of that, which I think is quite generous, but we're talking about 40, 50% difference here, which is really unacceptable. And I guess my first thought was.

Speaker 3: 19:22

My second thought was the performance thing was that athletes are potentially putting their lives on the line. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that people are putting their lives on the line when they go out and do these long trail races, and they're out there performing for hours and hours on end. And when people get their nutrition wrong, they end up in hospital often. And here you've got athletes who, with your help and with the help help of nutritionists, are nailing their nutritional strategy and they're getting half the amount of calories, half the amount of carbohydrate, and this is how you end up hyperglycemic. What if you have a diabetic runners, which is not uncommon. Small percentage of runners are diabetic. They rely, absolutely depend on their nutrition to keep them conscious.

Speaker 3: 20:05

So my second thought was the lost performances. My first thought was the risk to athlete health and welfare. And it's infuriating because whether this was deliberately undercutting the product or just a complete series of know, a series of systematic mistakes on behalf of the company, is completely unacceptable. So my so yeah, angry and frustrated, I guess, is my first response really well put nick.

Speaker 1: 20:35

That's why I wanted to start with you, and everybody has to follow that. Stephanie, you get to go next. I mean, I know you're gonna have a kind of a particular nutrition angle on this.

Speaker 4: 20:43

Yeah, I mean I echo what Nick said of I'm not surprised that it was low, but I was surprised it was that much different than what it showed on the package. That to me was wow, and even more so across the board with all three of the gels analyzed. That was really telling. And I come at it from a lens of both an athlete and as someone in the nutrition profession and I am shocked, I am frustrated, I am pissed and because of reasons you both already brought up, working with athletes dialing in their nutrition plans and not just in the race. That matters right. If they think they're getting 90 grams an hour by taking two gels and they're actually getting like 40, that's a big problem. That's half of what they think they're getting. And we know the recommendations for me Well for anyone who looks at like what are the recommendations for endurance performance 60 grams minimum per hour. So there's that piece. But then there's also the piece of training, the gut.

Speaker 4: 21:54

If you're using these products in your training and you think you can tolerate 90 grams per hour but turns out it's actually only 40, that's a big disconnect to if you get into a race situation and you're trying to take other products, maybe the race is sponsored by a different nutrition company and you know you can tolerate that upper limit.

Speaker 4: 22:15

So you think that's going to blow up. You're going to have GI issues and back to the drawing board of like what went wrong, to the drawing board of like what went wrong and it you know it's. It would be impossible to pinpoint that. So I feel very misled and, as an athlete like I personally don't use that product but like for other other peers, like I'm upset for them. I know people who use the product and have had like nutrition debacles and it didn't make any sense. But now, kind of you know, things are falling together and I think we need to be really clear and transparent with this and not try to tiptoe around. The issue of like this is a big oversight and we'll probably get into that a little more.

Speaker 1: 22:59

Yeah, I want to. I kind of want to like, come back to that big issue piece. Just a bit stuff before we go on to you ready. I'm not alleging that these products have the carbohydrate and the calorie content that I just mentioned at the beginning. I'm not alleging that at all. I'm saying that when I sent them to a lab they actually had that content. So don't get it twisted, don't get it twisted. Don't get it twisted. Don't get it twisted. Don't get it mistaken. I'm not thinking or whatever.

Speaker 1: 23:28

This is my friend's anecdote or my other buddy's story or whatever. I actually ordered these products as a normal customer, through normal means of purchase. That's why I bought them from the spring, from spring directly and from the feed, through normal means of purchase, and I had them sent to a professional nutrition chemistry lab with actual nutrition chemists there to analyze the results. And this is what actually came through. So if we hear any more hyperbole in the rest of the space around, well, allegedly this and allegedly that, listen, I had these products, I purchased these products just as a normal person.

Speaker 1: 24:09

This is not alleged anymore. Now I can't say for the entirety of Spring's existence, right, they've been a nutrition company for nearly a decade and who knows how their formulas kind of moved around over the years and things like that. But this is a really big miss. Let's be honest. Let's be honest with each other. These are not allegations anymore. This piece of it actual the analysis and the quantifiable macronutrient content of these products is an actual, not a theoretical anymore. Okay, you can go, you can take a different angle on this. Since we've talked about nutrition and science a little bit, yeah.

Speaker 2: 24:45

So from the communication standpoint, I've watched this with a tendency to give companies and brands the benefit of the doubt, as long as you can really, because communications issues like this are really problematic and touchy, problematic and touchy. You have the Reddit community or you have a population out there with thousands of people who all have comments and opinions and make statements, and you're one brand and have one voice and you have to try to answer all of that. So initially I was pretty forgiving of the fact that they were pretty quiet, because if you're in one of those situations, you really have to get your ducks in a row, not in the sense of getting your story straight, but in terms of figuring out what the facts are. You don't want to rush to a conclusion and say we made a mistake, this, we did that, and then have to backtrack. You do need to be patient a little bit.

Speaker 2: 25:40

But when they were continually quiet and they didn't do anything, they started to lose some of that credibility or you started to really wonder and think well, they're kind of making a communications error from a crisis standpoint and now they're in trouble. You know, I think that it's when you have more products that come out that are showing the same thing and there's no response from the company. It's problematic People, I will say, if there were errors and they were quick about finding it and correcting it and handling it from a communication standpoint. Consumers are pretty forgiving of brands that mess up. Consumers are pretty forgiving of brands that mess up, but they're not forgiving of brands that are either doing things purposely- and brands that are sort of negligent about taking care of their customers.

Speaker 1: 26:35

I want to clarify something just for the sake of transparency. We're going to come back to the communications piece of it just in a second, but once again, we're recording this on Wednesday, may 29th. This will probably come out on Friday or maybe even the following Monday, depending upon when my post-production gets to it. There's always a delay because I always do post-production results to the CEO of Spring directly, telling him the exact storyline. This is what I did. This is where I bought these. Here are the results.

Speaker 1: 27:12

He has now had that for at least a day and I'm not going to blame people for not jumping on emails. I've got 400 emails in my inbox and it takes me a few days to respond, but I wanted to make that part crystal clear. At this point. He does not have the Canterbury and the Hill Aid email. I have not sent that yet, as we are recording this right now. So I want the audience to understand that for perspective, that between the time that we record this and we actually release it, some part of this communications piece might have transpired and be just a little bit different. So please keep that timeline in mind, as you guys are all listening to this.

Speaker 2: 27:49

Sure, but the issue started coming up four, four plus weeks ago, if not longer longer than that.

Speaker 2: 27:56

So if you're a brand, you're, you have your ear to what the market is saying and what is being said about your company and there should have been a. They knew something was happening at that time and you have to decide as a brand and there are certain things that, as a brand or as a company, that you do let slide, that you know, if it's a an issue that people have with your company or something like that, that really isn't core to the values of the company and what you're trying to do, etc. And it's just something tangential. Yeah, sometimes just let it slide, let it fade away, but when it's core to what you do, you have to pay attention.

Speaker 1: 28:35

Like the core carbohydrate content of three of your most popular products. I hate to laugh at it, but I mean, that's really what it is.

Speaker 2: 28:44

If the values of your company are to fuel performance and there's a problem with fueling the ability of your product to fuel performance, then yeah, here the problem is striking right at the core of what you're theoretically, what your values are as a brand.

Speaker 1: 28:58

Okay, we're going to come back to the PR piece, right? I appreciate that from your perspective because you've definitely lived it over the last several years. I want to start with one piece of our collective kind of expertise that we can throw on the table, and that's how do products get developed. None of us are in the trenches, so to speak, owning a nutrition company, right? However, all of us have had experience helping nutrition companies develop product, and that experience ranges from just a little bit I gave him an idea and I taste tested it to a whole heck of a lot, doing all the scientific background, research, kind of getting in the trenches with the registered dietitians and the sports nutritionists and the food chemists and things like that.

Speaker 1: 29:44

And, stephanie, since you've got, like, the most experience here, I kind of want to go over first, like what is your experience, so that the we can kind of set that table correctly, because what's going to happen because of this is what had happened, right, what actually happened. How did this mistake actually kind of kind of get unrolled? And I want the listeners to kind of understand what goes on behind the scenes in order to kind of process that a little bit more when information does come out. So, steph, I'll turn that kind of the floor back over to you and your experience. Let's just go over that and then how these products actually end up coming to light.

Speaker 4: 30:23

Yeah, I had experience working with Clif Bar for about a decade and I worked with them as an athlete and then also I had a professional contract with them as an independent contractor to do research. Anytime they wanted to learn about, like specific nutrients or what the current literature was in sports nutrition, they would contract with someone in the field. So I was that person for and not just me there was like a cohort of us for a few years where they would say, hey, we want to find out about these five micronutrients. Can you come back with a deep dive on the literature? And this would be a project that would take usually they'd give me three months to do it and so I would like dive through all the literature, come up with a summary, put it all in a spreadsheet and then we would go through it. It wasn't just like a quick turnaround, so it was very detailed and this wasn't necessarily like product development. This was just them gathering information about the sports nutrition literature.

Speaker 1: 31:24

Like what you wanted in the product, the sports nutrition literature. Like what you wanted in the product Like do you want like a branch chain amino acid in it, or do you want sodium citrate versus sodium chloride? That kind of stuff, right.

Speaker 4: 31:33

Exactly so. It was like all of those things that were just like hot topics, buzzwords, things that were coming up, like branch chain amino acids or one of them, caffeine, was something they would revisit beetroot, when that was kind of a thing. So it was like looking at all of these things that may potentially impact performance that you might want to include in a product and then reviewing, like the sports nutrition literature, like what are the guidelines for carbohydrate? What is the peer reviewed literature on this topic, and so that was, like you know, a really cool experience to be on the professional side and then on the athlete side, I was also involved and that was more of a taste test, like these are some sample products we have created based on that. Like you know, there's a chain of events and how this starts like, with the you know, learning about the literature and what's out there, to the internal team meeting, to research and development, starting to play around in the lab, to getting these sample products, and this isn't on the tune to days to weeks, this is months to years.

Speaker 4: 32:39

And, as an athlete, the product development piece looked like tasting a bunch of different products. Usually they were like, I mean, sort of blind taste tests of like. You know, all in a white package. You rate them on many different things. We would take videos or meet on a Zoom call and go through all of it Like what do you like? What do you dislike? What about the taste? What about like? It was very intensive and usually by the end of that that information was taken back to RD and sometimes it may be translated into in a product, but this again was months to years down the line.

Speaker 1: 33:14

And how many, like with the taste testing piece of it. You kind of described your academic cohort right. It's several people, like we all need to figure out if we're going to put brand change amino acids in this Right, but with the taste testing cohort, cohort like, how many people are actually involved in that?

Speaker 4: 33:29

so in the group I was in there were, I think, eight athletes like within that the couple year, it was like a three-year period that we did this, and I mean there were other groups that did different types of products, so this was like the endurance group, so several of us and is there anything else like within that whole like product development timeline that, like, I mean, the thing that strikes me as being like really remarkable is just the length.

Speaker 1: 33:56

Right, there's like several steps, there's multiple steps, there's multiple teams involved, there's multiple people within those multiple teams and, you know, chain after chain eventually kind of gets linked together and at the end of the day it might hopefully gets turned into a product.

Speaker 4: 34:10

Yeah, to me it was just like really behind the scenes of like how much work goes into developing a product, from gathering the research to like creating a product with like numbers, turning numbers into food and then turning it into something that's going to help performance and that's going to taste good and be presentable. Like that is not an easy process and there's redundancies on redundancies to make sure that there's good quality control across the board.

Speaker 1: 34:39

So, nick, you've had some experience in this as well. You want to chime in on any of those pieces?

Speaker 3: 34:43

Well, there's something I want to just touch on, just with regards to the product development stage, because I wasn't involved at all with product development.

Speaker 3: 34:53

The experience that I have was for two years, during and just after my master's.

Speaker 3: 34:58

This is going back some years now over a decade I was involved in research related to sports nutrition products, specifically the development of carbohydrate products for two different companies that shall remain nameless for now, but so I'll talk about my specific experiences actually doing applied research and publishable research on these new products. But there's just a couple of things just in terms of like, just basic deductive reasoning that relates to the development process of these products. So, number one, the fact that we've based on the data that you got back from the labs, it's not just Awesome Sauce that has the calorie and carbohydrate deficit, right. There are multiple products within from the same company that seem to have the same issue, which shows which suggests to me that there is a systemic problem with the way that they're developing their product. So clearly they use the same carbohydrate formula. Everything comes from the same big, you know, soup bowl or whatever of of carbohydrate goo, and then they and then it's not like they're developing awesome sauce separately, right, so everything's being developed centrally.

Speaker 3: 36:06

They have core ingredients that the products share the core ingredients and the core process is obviously the same, and then they're adding the flavors and the colors and everything else to make the different products. So there's obviously a systemic problem there. And the other thing is that there are a bunch of other red flags, like lab results aside. If you go into the detail on the Reddit thread, you notice that people were saying that they weren't as full after having two or three gels, when normally, if they were getting 90 grams of carbohydrate an hour, that would keep them going, both energetically and in terms of satiety, they'd be fine. And they were finding that they could take in much more than they otherwise could.

Speaker 3: 36:46

And the fact that the stuff is quite watery like it's almost like a water-based gel. And actually for something that is 45 grams of carbohydrate per 54 grams of gel, you'd expect it to be very viscous, almost like toothpaste or frosting. In England we'd call it like icing sugar. It would be very thick and some gels are very thick. Goo, chocolate outrage. Goo's a thick gel, right, exactly Because it's got a high carbohydrate content.

Speaker 3: 37:13

So for something with this kind of carbohydrate content, you'd expect it you wouldn't expect it to be as kind of watery and as liquidy as it is. So that's like another red flag, and it's just amazing that people in the development phase of the product weren't thinking these things through. I mean, spring claimed to be scientists and nutritionists and athletes first and foremost right. Well, if you read the Reddit thread, you have athletes who are highlighting these red flags for themselves and that's what, yeah. And people with PhDs for themselves and that's what, yeah. And people with PhDs, and so it's things that are. This is why they decided to test the product themselves to begin with, because they were noticing these inconsistencies. So there's obviously a systemic issue with the way that this product is being developed.

Speaker 1: 38:00

So, nick, what you just articulated, that whole run of show, is basically why I wanted to send it off to a lab, because all of these different points kind of just didn't make sense to me. I mean, I remember being at this coaching conference talking with several coaches and they were just yeah, I had this athlete that nailed their nutrition plan but frigging bogged here, and I've noticed that from this batch to this batch of this one, you know, gel, there's inconsistency just within the texture, right, you know, there's just something that they had, something that they had noticed.

Speaker 3: 38:33

All of those things, spring has noticed this.

Speaker 1: 38:37

Assumingly. I mean you know they make a bit. They make a really big deal on their social media about how rigorous their testing is and things like that, Not indifferent to any other company. But maybe they need to kind of rethink that. There's this other element of product development, and the picture that I'm trying to paint is, normally when you do this product development stuff, there's all these different pieces of it, and Ruddy and I have been involved to this in varying degrees. And, ruddy, actually I pulled up a list for us and you're going to have to double check me as I go through this. So Ruddy and I have both been in the endurance space for 25 years now. So when you've been doing it for that long, you kind of have worked with everybody. And so along the way we have worked with the following nutrition companies in varying capacities power bars, endurance and recovery drink, osmos drinks and hyperhydration drinks.

Speaker 1: 39:29

Secret drink mix before it became scratch labs, I actually used that during the only year that I ran bad water. I got a little batch of it. I was so proud I you know this is a new flavor for us. It had a little foil package on it with the red X and so anyway. So secret drink, mix and or scratch labs, we could take care of that if we wanted to. Pro bars, both on their bolt line, which still exists, in their fuel line, which sadly doesn't exist anymore. I thought that was a good product. Goo, specifically with their rock tank drink product and their chomps product as well, and then fluid hydration on both our hydration product as well as their recovery product, and I'm probably missing a few more, but that's a lot of nutrition companies and I'm going to give the whole range of involvement and then running. I'm going to throw it over to you from kind of the most intimate level of involvement to the least intimate level of involvement. So the most intimate level of involvement was with Power Bar. So this is when Asgard, juke and Droop was working over there, working for Nestle in fact, and they did not have a product in this space, they did not have an endurance, they did not have like an endurance drink, nor did they have a recovery drink, and so they contacted us kind of with a twofold premise is one, we want you guys to help us come up with the formulation of the drink and then two, we want you, cts, as a company, to help endorse the drink simultaneously, which is a cool storyline. Right, we're going to help you come up with it. We don't have it before.

Speaker 1: 41:00

Power Bar had a great legacy at the time. You guys remember the gold foil bars that people would stick on their handlebars kind of back in the day, and they were impossible to eat and would tear out your fillings and things like that. They were trying to move away from that into something a little bit more scientific and so we jumped at the opportunity. One of our coaches who has a great science background, dean Golich, kind of led up this program and he met with Powerbar endlessly to determine all the things that Stephanie was just going through with their research group what kind of carbohydrate we wanted. What kind of sodium content content we wanted at 8% carbohydrate solution, because at the time 8% was all of the rage and now we've morphed from that to other percentages or more specific use cases.

Speaker 1: 41:41

What was the right protein to carbohydrate ratio that we wanted in the recovery product specifically, and where did we want that protein? What type of protein did we actually want to put in that? Then we would get samples and then we would test those samples and we distributed them to our athletes at our camps and how did they taste? And we'd roll that you know taste testing kind of back up and then go back to the formulation game. On and on and on. And well, we can't take credit for every single step of the process. That was an intimate relationship because it took like 12 months, maybe 18 months from, from my memory, and we had multiple people involved, multiple coaches involved at kind of like multiple steps obviously not all of the steps, because their chief science officer was the renowned Asker Jukendrup, but something that I think we can kind of say listen, we lent a pretty big hand in actually developing this. The opposite of that and I'm not saying that these are good and bad, but I'm saying the kind of polar opposite of that level of involvement was what I'll say. What we had with Goo is a fantastic partner.

Speaker 1: 42:43

I always loved working with Brian Vaughn, their CEO, and he's like the second in line founder at the time. He's just a really great guy to work with. Before Magda took over the operations, he's just as fantastic. And they were just trying to come out with their Roctane product at the time. So we signed this whole nutrition deal with them. We had access to all of their products, which at the time was primarily gel and what they called goo to oh, remember that name way back in the day, their electrolyte drink, and they were trying to come up with a higher carbohydrate drink product that they were going to call rock Tane, which would be analogous to their kind of super jet fuel gel at the time, a rock Tane gel.

Speaker 1: 43:22

And so during this entire nutrition partnership, they sent us some initial batches of Roctane to our offices, probably 200 or 300 cans worth, and I specifically remember the fruit punch tasting like battery acid because they were trying to cover up. They couldn't figure out how to cover up the amount of caffeine that they were trying to do it. So that was our feedback, that we rolled back into it, but we so anyway. So that was a partnership that was predominantly based off of taste testing and distributing it to our athletes through our camps and things like that. And ready, I'm actually going to pull up. Which is how we found out that it wouldn't dissolve in water either, exactly, which is exactly how we found out it wouldn't dissolve in water. Not easily Like it, would? It clumped, and all that kind of stuff, for the same kind of reasons as I do that, ruddy, buy me a little bit of time and can you kind of like re-encapsulate some of these other relationships that we have mainly from like a breadth standpoint?

Speaker 2: 44:39

Yeah, I mean a lot of them were straight endorsement deals in the sense of we were able to give a brand reach to our athletes, do some taste testing. We knew that the products fit the philosophy that we had from a nutrition standpoint and, as you said, from a taste testing standpoint. We had enough coaches and enough athletes coming to camps that we could achieve taste testing at a scale that was difficult at the time. The coaching profession wasn't what it is now, back then in the sense of you didn't have organizations that had as many athletes and as many camps and things like that. So we were a good resource for companies to be able to get to coaches and athletes at a reasonable scale to use products long enough with a high enough volume. I mean you can't taste test something or product test something that's a nutrition product by giving somebody two gels and having them say yay or nay, it has to be used for a period of time, it has to be used at a camp that's a week long, those kinds of things. So we were a good resource for that.

Speaker 2: 45:46

And then, as you're going to bring up, we were always careful about the language that we agreed upon for how that was going to be described. We weren't making, oh, we weren't. Not only were we not making outlandish claims about what the thing could do, but we didn't allow the companies and it was not allow. But we didn't allow the companies and it was not allow. It was more of the mutually agreed upon language, wasn't putting us in a position of claiming something that we shouldn't claim. Nor was the company that the nutrition company putting word in our mouth and saying you know, cts says this about it. Like there was a good communication back and forth with what we felt comfortable with him saying and what we were comfortable with the product delivering, so I'll read.

Speaker 1: 46:36

I'm just going to read one paragraph of this press release, just to save the audience. Ruddy, this is your handiwork, by the way. Maybe I should make you read it, just so it's in your voice. I'll let you off the hook.

Speaker 1: 46:45

So, here's the one paragraph that Ruddy was alluding to and then I'll expand upon that. The two companies will work together to maximize opportunities to educate athletes and proper sports nutrition. Goo, the market leading energy gel manufacturer, will provide products to all CTS coaches, camps and clinics for their growing array of sports performance nutrition offerings. These include original goo energy gel. Rock taint, ultra endurance energy gel. Goo 2-0 electrolyte drink that's how I could remember that name and the soon to be launched chomps energy chew. So this kind of dates the press release right Before they actually came out with chomps and they didn't even mention the rock taint drink.

Speaker 1: 47:25

And my point with kind of like bringing this part of it up and using Steph's example as part of the lead in, is coaches and athletes will piggyback on this process of product development in varying capacities. Some of those capacities are very intimate, where they're getting in the weeds, like Steph just mentioned. We're going to go and we're going to do the research and things like that, and some of them are taste testing, which is a lot of the, a lot of the product. Ambassadors are kind of utilized for that very specific purpose. We have this big, broad array of product of ambassadors. We're going to send them out new flavors and ask them what they think about it and they're part of the development curve and one of the storylines kind of along this is I do think that we need to be very careful as coaching professionals and athletes as professional athletes stating how they work with various companies and being honest and authentic in those statements, because there are many and multiple people involved in it.

Speaker 1: 48:27

And whenever I've had an athlete and I have had athletes that have been through this process and they go through some version of creating like a signature product, it doesn't have to be a nutrition product, it can be a pack. You guys remember the packs that ultimate direction actually made in the day and I just now remember this is a good example where it's literally their signature on the deal. You better be as intimately involved in that as possible and shout out. It all comes back to Tony Kapryczka, who's the original person to do this with a pack. We're going to bring it out in nutrition. He was actually in ultimate direction every single day, saying I want this and I don't want that, and I want this and I don't want that and I hate this and make this orange and things like that, and sure he probably didn't get a hundred percent what he actually wanted. But the reason that pack ended up like it was, and why I think this is a great example of an authentic relationship, is because he was so invested in the product and making it exactly for him.

Speaker 1: 49:21

Now that has drawbacks, because once you make something for one person, it's hard to then sell it to tens or hundreds of thousands of people. But I'm using it as an example. That is outside of the nutrition world where some of these partnerships can be really intimate and authentic. So I think a learning lesson with all of this is during this development process, the public needs to realize that there are multiple people involved at multiple steps and no single one of them can kind of claim credit for the origin of the product. And it still is kind of remarkable to me, to Nick's point, that there are still these drastic errors considering how product development should go in the first place.

Speaker 2: 50:05

However, you know. Coming back to some of the partnerships that we had over the years with all those nutrition companies, we didn't, as part of those partnerships, send their products off to an independent lab either. Yeah, that's true At the time. So we never sent goo off, to admit, to verify that they had what they said they had. However, as part of the product testing that we were doing for them, if the performance that people had while taking it, if we noticed that something wasn't going as predicted, we're giving people the recommended amount and the performances are not coming up to how we would expect, that would have been feedback that we would have given back to the companies.

Speaker 1: 50:48

Yeah, well, and actually that's a really important part of the feedback loop, right, like when you're tied to it, and part of being in a partnership is rolling that feedback up, right. So if you're continually testing it and you're continually using it amongst your athlete group which we had a big athlete group to work with at the time, we had over 2000 athletes, over 500 athletes coming through our camp. Products which destroyed these products, I mean, ruddy, you remember like how many just hundreds and hundreds of gels and cans of drink mix and things like that that we blow through during these seven day long, really intensive, you know, endurance camps.

Speaker 2: 51:25

We had a lot of product testing and that's why it was so effective for the companies Exactly At the time there was really very there was not as an opportunity to do that. You couldn't. People say, well, you could do taste testing at races, but not in the same way. Like, you're not going to get feedback from the people it's not as we weren't a scientifically controlled group but if you have athletes for a week using tons of the product and you're getting the feedback from how they performed during the week, especially when the the hyper hydration one, when we did, when we were using that, it was in Torre California one of the years that it was extraordinarily hot and we got some good feedback on for athletes for whom it worked, athletes for whom it didn't work, what conditions it was. A good use case for all of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 52:14

Well, and the companies won it. I just remember this great example. So the one year we're now past, memorial Day weekend famous Western States Memorial Day training camp goes on, and one of the things that makes this training camp so iconic is that they set up all the aid stations just like they would, or at least close to the actual race. And at the time that I did this the only time that I did it Goo was our nutrition partner, and Goo was also the nutrition partner for the Western States 100. And I was running the Western States 100. So perfect, right, I get my race day nutrition out on the course and I get to practice it during the training camp on the course with the actual aid stations Like what a great setup.

Speaker 1: 52:56

And I went through the camp and I was going to use their blueberry pomegranate electrolyte drink because I really liked the flavor and that's what they were going to have on course. So everything is lining up. So I go out there and I go through the first couple of aid stations and I'm like this just tastes weird, it kind of like tastes like it tastes light. And then finally, on the very last day, we go through three days of this, all the same drink, all the same flavor. At the very last aid station, I asked one of the volunteers, why does this taste so light? And she goes well, we mixed it at half strength and I was like, well, well, why? And she said, well, the instruction manual told us to.

Speaker 1: 53:36

They actually had a volunteer instruction manual and I read it right there at the aid station blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, mix this at half strength. This goo you know they come in the big bags when you're using them for like eight stations and things like that, as opposed to the cans that you can buy in the store. Mix this into five gallons instead of two, and instead of two for five gallons, mix this one, five gallons. Very deliberate instruction, and I was absolutely floored, and so I, immediately after the camp was over, I called Brian Vaughn, their CEO, and I told him that story and he was totally irate.

Speaker 1: 54:04

So, once again, it's an example of partnering with a company that has a big footprint, that's at all of these types of events, going through these things, gathering feedback about how their products are actually being used, and this is no disrespect to the volunteers or Western States or anything like that. I don't know how this error kind of happened. But that's the feedback that the companies actually want from their indoor, from the people that are endorsing their product, the people that partner with them and the coaches and the athletes that actually use them. They want to be out in the field to see how it's actually going in real time.

Speaker 4: 54:37

One thing you were mentioning that I think is a good place to make a distinction is the difference between an athlete who is developing a product and someone who is a professional in the field and working with athletes. Because I think when you are a professional, you have to in some ways be brand neutral in terms of like recommending what's best for your athletes, and you have to have integrity. So, partnering with specific brands, you can use that for your personal self as an athlete, but when you are recommending products to brands, you can use that for your personal self as an athlete, but when you are recommending products to athletes, you have to be sure what you're recommending is based on science and not based on personal opinions.

Speaker 1: 55:19

It's. We were talking about this kind of offline, the scientific. Nick, I kind of want you to chime in this, since you're close to the scientific community, much closer than I am. They're kind of having an issue with this right now because the science communicators that have really big platforms they're starting to take endorsement deals from mainly from supplement companies and it kind of puts them they can make a lot of money from it. Let's be honest, like they, if they have a signature product or a signature constellation of products which is really popular right now with, like the huuberman Lab and things like that, that's a really lucrative opportunity for them. But to Steph's point, there's still some scientific integrity that a lot of the people in the academic community kind of have viewed. It's not sour grapes, but they're viewing it with a very kind of critical lens. So so, nick, I wonder if you can kind of opine on that aspect a little bit well, industry has been funding scientific research for decades.

Speaker 3: 56:13

I mean there are a couple of really big analyses now more recently that have shown that sports nutrition, that funded sports nutrition research, is much more likely to produce statistically significant results. The nutrition research that isn't industry funded, right? Well, no shit, I mean that makes sense because there's an internal bias there.

Speaker 3: 56:34

We wish that there weren't, but there is. That's just how the world works and industry has been funding nutrition research for decades. But it's happening more and more now and I think we've got to be realistic because if there were no industry funding at all, then there'd be very little research. I mean, if you just look at how many clinical trials that drug companies fund, and that doesn't inherently mean that the results are flawed or invalid. You just have to have safeguards in place so that you can do the study the way that your lab, the way that you and your lab want to do the study, that you can do it independently and that you pre-register the trial and then publish the results. Whatever the results say, and in most cases, certainly in the clinical world, there are safeguards in place so that even if you do a study and the results are relatively unfavorable for a particular drug, the study still gets published and then, okay, well, the drug doesn't work, let's move on and look at something else, right? So in most cases there are safeguards in place With sports nutrition research. The vast majority of these studies, because they're done in exercise science labs and sports nutrition labs, they're not pre-registered. So if you do a study and you find you know, maybe it's an expensive study and you find that a particular product doesn't work, you don't have to publish it. You should. And if you have good scientific, good intellectual integrity, you'll still publish the thing and you'll just present results as they are. But a lot of the time it's not uncommon for industry to try and suppress particular results because they're unfavorable. And this is what we call the file draw problem. It's this idea that results that are not statistically significant are just put in the file drawer and then they close the drawer and you forget about it and it's never published. And there's more and more analysis showing this sort of publication bias, in that there's a lot of studies being, there's a lot more positive studies being published than you'd expect to see if there was no bias, if you understand what I'm saying. So I think that's an important thing to remember.

Speaker 3: 58:46

And just a couple of anecdotes. Look, as I said, when I was doing my master's and just following my master's, I worked with two different sports nutrition companies, neither of which was spring. So I just I hasten to add that they're nothing to do with this, but that there were two quick anecdotes that I want to share with you. One of them was we were doing a very basic study to test this new carbohydrate formulation that had been developed by this company, and this was back in 2007, 2008. So this was right at the beginning of the two to one carbohydrate ratio.

Speaker 3: 59:17

This is when most of the research on two to one glucose fructose formulations was sort of coming out in 2004, 2005. A lot of it was done by Asker Ukendrup and some of his colleagues, and so around 2005, 6, 7, you got a lot of nutrition companies who were jumping on the bandwagon to get their product out there, and so we were testing this relatively new two-to-one carbohydrate glucose-to-fructose carbohydrate sports drink, and we were testing it against the closest competitors in the field. Again, I'm not going to tell you which company it was, so I don't think it's fair, but we tested it in six individuals only and we were like halfway through we were trying to recruit 12 because we were using isotope labeling. It was a very invasive, very long study, so it was difficult to test it in dozens or hundreds of people, and out of the six people that we tested, there was one individual who performed about 50% better on this new carbohydrate formulation than on the closest competitor. Now it was clearly an anomaly, right, you don't perform 50% better.

Speaker 3: 1:00:22

There was obviously done something differently because you get these kinds of statistical anomalies. Maybe the guy had a really good night's sleep before one trial and not another because it was a repeated measure study. Maybe he had a different breakfast, maybe there was just obviously the stars all aligned for this one, but it was definitely anomalous, and so we were kind of thinking, okay, well, how do we is is clearly an outlier here. You know to include it in the analysis. The next week, this nutrition company had taken out a full a4 advert in a very well-known triathlon magazine and the headline was perform up to 50 better than the now closest competitors. Right now, this was this research wasn't published, we hadn't, we hadn't done the statistical analysis, and the fact that they'd said perform up to 50 better was sort of they thought that was they get out of jail free card and in the end, they ended up going to court because there was a length of court case, because you can't make those kinds of claims.

Speaker 3: 1:01:26

So so that was one instance. Another one that I wrote about in my book, the Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science, was around the same kind of time. Another company was developing a different product that contained it was again, it was a two-to-one glucose fructose formulation and it had caffeine in it and a few other bits and pieces. And they were convinced that it was this new sort of high powered performance supplement. And just for marketing purposes, they wanted to test this product with a professional cyclist. They just wanted to get one very well-known professional cyclist, you know relatively famous guy, and they wanted to do two lab sessions. On one session they wanted to give him this new product, and on another one they would give the closest competitors. And I remember very clearly in this meeting the CEO of this nutrition company said listen, you know you could go ahead and do the lab trial. We'll have two lab trials, maybe three or four days apart. So he's not fully rested when you give him our product. We really want you to encourage him, give him lots of motivation. I want you to tell him how great he's going to perform. Tell him that this is a cutting edge product. You know really, gm up and yell at him and make sure he performs really well, and when you give him the other product, just leave him alone and just let him get on with it. Okay Now they were obviously convinced that he was going to perform better with their product, convinced that he was going to perform better with their product.

Speaker 3: 1:02:48

But they were in their minds, they were leaving no stone unturned and making sure that he was going to perform better with their product. And I'm pleased to say that I declined to do that kind of quote unquote study and I didn't want to be involved with it. And they went to somebody else. So I don't know whether or not they did it and I'm just glad to say that I declined to do it because I could see that it wasn't, that it was disingenuous and I'd have to sacrifice my intellectual integrity.

Speaker 3: 1:03:13

I guess the point of the anecdote is that you know, from the stage of, from the various stages of product development, from conception of the product to the development, the taste tests, all the way to the end, where you're doing the scientific research on which you want to market the product, there is room for bias and there's room for error, and that can happen at any stage of the process, and you need people who work at the companies and the scientists who work with them and the scientists who are taking grants from industry to make sure that they are rigorous, that they abide by the science, that they have good processes in place and that they retain their intellectual integrity, because if you allow any of that to slip, then you end up with circumstances where you have manufacturers that are making claims that are not supported by the evidence 100%.

Speaker 1: 1:04:00

We presented a lot of skepticism. Before we go on to the communication pieces of it, I kind of have a question for Steph. So everybody's going to start playing conspiracy theorist and saying, oh my God, we got to test everything. I can't believe anything. That's why I kind of why I sent a goo to the lab as well, just to quelch a little bit of that. Should we start sending everything to labs? I can't plunk down much more of my capital to do this. So your answer is we can find another solution. But like what's the landscape here, Steph? Should we be reasonably skeptical of this stuff, or what?

Speaker 4: 1:04:38

It's a good question, and it does open up the door for more questions about the quality and the you know, the integrity of other manufacturers of sports nutrition products.

Speaker 4: 1:04:42

But in my opinion this isn't an across the board issue in the industry. This is a really isolated issue within a certain company, and I don't know that for sure, but I do know that most well not most the companies that I have had communications with have a much more detailed process, and for it to come out that far different there would be a big oversight. And so I think we know that there are differences in products and there is a 20% allowance on the RDA with the calorie and the carbohydrate content, but that isn't a massive difference from what is shown on the packaging. And when we're thinking about engineered food generally, there's a recipe and a formula and a weight that is going into this recipe, and for it to be that far off would take a lot of mistakes, and so I'm not overly concerned about testing every single product out there. But I think when there is skepticism about something being too good to be true or just it doesn't seem to add up, that's when we start to look into it a little further.

Speaker 1: 1:05:53

So just to bring in the Redditors? Golly, I can't believe I'm giving them so much credit after I've given them so much shit for years. They have already done the initial dehydration experiments with other gels, and those other gels they basically pan out, pan out right, I mean to the precision of how you can dehydrate something in a kitchen dehydrator or something like that. So to back up your point, steph, there's no reason to be kind of like skeptical of it, in the same way or the same origin, with the same origin story that we were skeptical of the springs product there are other examples, though, of where this kind of a controversy or instance has led to an industry-wide kind of change in the supplement industry.

Speaker 2: 1:06:36

It was the nsf and certified for sport, where certain you know companies have said hey, if we want to be credible in an unregulated industry, we're going to have third-party testing and show that our product is what we say it is.

Speaker 2: 1:06:53

And then, way back when on a benchmark, crisis comms kind of situation was when Tylenol was tempered with was when Tylenol was tampered with, and that led to the development of tamper-proof packaging and things like that, because they had to figure out a way to have people trust the product and rebuild trust in the fact that they were going to be safe. So obviously this is very different than something that's tampering with medication or tainted supplements a batch standpoint to send our stuff to a lab and publish the results on our website, just so that people can have a level of trust that we're doing what we say we were doing. It wasn't something that they needed to do five years ago because this hadn't come up yet, so I'm not blaming anybody for not doing it in the past, but this is the kind of thing that can cause a little bit of a sea change within industries.

Speaker 1: 1:08:07

Yeah, I mean, I can absolutely imagine that being one of the steps, Should Spring survive this. I think that's an if at this point they're such a small company and it affects a big part of their product line.

Speaker 3: 1:08:18

So Coop, does Spring have the informed sport endorsement? No, because one thing that informed, well informed sport do two very important things. So anybody who's not familiar with informed sport or informed choice, it's the third party sport supplement testing protocol and they test for two different things. First, they test for contaminated substances, so they check for banned substances and they third party test them at various stages of the manufacturing process to make sure, or to reduce the risk as much as possible, that there's going to be any kind of supplement contamination with a banned substance. So you you it.

Speaker 3: 1:08:56

By by using something that has the informed sport stamp, you minimize the risk of inadvertently doping. They also test that the products contain what is stated on the label, and they do that with pre and post certification testing. So again, at various stages of the manufacturing process and post certification as well, they're testing the products to make sure that they contain the amounts that are stated on the label. So I think, if you're in any doubt, I don't think it's realistic to be sending off every single supplement that you intend to or every single product that you intend to use, sending it off to an independent lab and paying thousands of dollars. But if you're in any doubt, just use something that is endorsed by informed sport, because that's kind of what they're there for. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:09:41

I mean there's like what he said, there's a reason these third parties exist, and that's to kind of, first off, keep some checks and balances, but also offer some consumer confidence, and I've spoken with other nutrition companies on this. They kind of love it and hate it at the same time. I mean it's expensive, let's not get that twisted right. It's expensive for them to do that. It's an extra step. It increases the cost of the product. We're talking about $5 gels start out with, though Come on, I mean this is the premium product to start out with, but at the end of the day, the consumer has the confidence that what is listed on the ingredient deck and the composition of the actual product is what it stated. And then, from an elite athlete perspective, it's a non-starter. I don't have any of my athletes use any supplement products, not food products, but supplement products that don't contain either, that are not either NSF certified or informed choice. That's just a very simple non-starter. There's just too much, as you have studied, nick there's just too much contamination in that, in that world, to even remotely take that risk. Let's pivot to communications, because this is part of the storyline and what I kind of want to get out of this. Once again, it'd be really easy to throw Springs PR team I think I mentioned on my social media posts we're going to send them to the same Island for sending the UPR team. It'd be very easy to cheekily do that, which they kind of deserve it. But I do think that one of the things we can offer the users you know, listeners is how to read through some of the comms to figure out what is actually going on, because I do think that there are patterns that develop and things that companies should do and things that companies shouldn't do. That If you've got a little bit of an attuned ear, not only can you just kind of call BS on it, but you can also like read between the tea leaves or read between the lines and figure out what kind of what, what is actually going on. So I'm going to set the timeline up a little bit on this because I think that's important.

Speaker 1: 1:11:35

So first off, we'll go back to the Redditors dehydrating stuff, nothing right, no, no communications kind of anything. Some of those Redditors would reach out to spring and the response that those Redditors would reach out to Spring and the response that those Redditors would post back on the Reddit forums was. We stand by our products. Essentially People internal to Spring, their athlete ambassadors and close to the company, things like that. Hey, what do you think?

Speaker 1: 1:11:59

Kind of the same storyline that went on Sport Hunger over in Germany. Has lab results, they pull the products off their shelves. Spring still doesn't really do anything. The momentum builds and builds and then all of a sudden, over Memorial Day weekend, on a Monday, they issue a statement to their customers, which was weird because I'm a customer and I didn't get it. So I don't know whether they intentionally redacted me from the list. We could leave the conspiracy theorists to figure that out. But it's been widely distributed and I'm going to take 30 seconds here and just read this really quick for the audience. There'll be a copy on the website, but I'm going to use this as the lead in because this is one inflection point, and then I'm going to go through a couple of other pieces. This statement, which is sent to Spring's customers, states the following Spring Energy was created by athletes and for athletes.

Speaker 1: 1:12:48

We are deeply connected to our community and understand the importance of nutrition and always strive to create high quality, whole food based sports nutrition products. Despite being a small business, our products have been instrumental in empowering athletes globally in their quest for excellence. In early May, we submitted Awesome Sauce for third party caloric and biomolecular analysis. Although the results indicated that, on average, our products delivered the designed nutrition value, we have recognized weaknesses in our processes and ingredients which can introduce unwanted variations in some batches. I can barely get through that paragraph without laughing, I'm sorry. To mitigate those variations in our small batch production, we decided to modify some of the reformulate, modify some of the re, some of the formulations, sorry revise and innovate processes and re-evaluate ingredient sources. These changes will bring higher quality and more consistency to our products.

Speaker 1: 1:13:46

Enhancements of our products aimed to stabilize the nutrition values are on the horizon and within the next few weeks you'll see the results of our efforts. A new and improved version of Awesome Sauce will soon be available. We are confident that these adjustments will elevate the quality of our efforts. A new and improved version of awesome sauce will soon be available. We are confident that these adjustments will elevate the quality of our products, further supporting athletes at all levels achieving their peak performance. Nature offers the optimal blend of nutrients and real food consistency, providing everything necessary for outstanding performance. So a little bit of a several paragraph statement there. So that was sent out on Monday and just today, so the so in the meantime, operations.

Speaker 3: 1:14:25

I had to say the word salad of equivocation, but basically they're saying that nothing's really wrong because it comes out exactly how we intended. But also we're changing the product so that it does better. It's like, well, which is it?

Speaker 1: 1:14:41

okay, well, so an important point in the background, before we start to tear this apart ready, you're going to take the lead on this one is operations are as is, so I can go and buy this at the feed up until today. I can go buy it on spring's website and go buy it from any other third-party distributor. Miraculously, just this morning, somebody sent me an image of awesome sauces page on spring's website and it conveniently has the nutrition label missing. You can still buy it, but the nutrition label, the nutrition facts, the calories and the carbohydrate and things like that is missing from the description. There's literally a blank space. Cue up Taylor Swift's blank space. There's literally a blank space on their screen. Five minutes later the product is gone.

Speaker 1: 1:15:27

So take that for what you will within the sequence of events, but the big thing is nothing happened. Everything's cool to Monday, monday this week, memorial day press release gets sent out. To Wednesday, when we're recording this, various parts of their website and I can't claim to know all of it, but parts of their website are attracted, and then this product is now pulled from their website and I haven't scoured the rest of the internet quite yet to see if you can buy it anywhere else, but that's the sequence of events. So, okay, in Nick's words, roddy, what do you think of the word salad? And you just have a real day with this. I'm going to step out of the way for a second.

Speaker 2: 1:16:06

I mean perfectly honest. I'm less critical of it than than Nick is, and I think some of that is because, having been in the trenches of having to create some of those things or try to figure out how to navigate some of those things, it's never perfect, it's always a mess. And even when somebody comes into that process with the intention of we're going to be clear, we're going to be honest, we're going to live our values, it gets messy because you have a lot of pride mixed up in it and it's really. It is difficult to say we messed up. And if there's, if it's a mistake, if it's something that is fraud, it's even harder for a communications person or somebody who is now an intermediary because whoever's writing that didn't do the thing, that was fraudulent to get the company or the person, whoever else, to agree to say what happened. I mean, companies aren't going to fall on their sword.

Speaker 2: 1:17:05

The other component of this is that the statements are always. The statement is the easy part in a lot of ways, because you can be, you know, you can look to your values, you can tell the truth, you can, you know, state the facts, you can tell people what you're going to do, all of those things. But that's not the expensive part. The expensive part is the consequence that can now. You have to deal with, refunds you have to deal with. How are we going to get this stuff off the shelves? How are we going to deal with wholesalers and dealers that may not want to work with us anymore? How is this going to affect all of our other products?

Speaker 2: 1:17:41

Like, the statement part is the easy and inexpensive part, and now is the really difficult part that comes after. Commiserate with the communications folks or even with the brands, because even when they do things incorrectly or the brand is struggling through those things, it's. You just have to recognize that it's never easy and it's never there's no good way to get through it. It's very easy to say, oh, you know, be honest and say the facts and do exactly what is the right thing to do, and you're trying to. I think most people are trying to give you the benefit of the doubt for that, but none of this ever comes away very simply or easily or as clear cut as it seems. Here's what.

Speaker 1: 1:18:30

I can't get over and this gets. This is before the communications piece, but it's kind of part of the non-communication piece of it at the same time. If I were running a nutrition company and somebody dehydrated my carbohydrate product down to 17 to 19 grams when it should be 45 grams, if I saw that, I'm aware of it, let's be honest, they knew about that component of it. There's no way it didn't kind of pop up on the radar Immediately, immediately. I would have recreated that experiment because it's not hard. All it costs you is your own product. You can run over to Home Depot or wherever else, williams-sonoma, and buy a kitchen dehydrator and you can do it in a matter of hours, if not days. It would be very easy to recreate that if you were operating this company Now, I'm not saying every company should like chase down every conspiracy theory were operating this company.

Speaker 1: 1:19:18

Now, I'm not saying every company should like chase down every conspiracy theory, right, but this is, let's face it, it's an ultra marathon Reddit forum, like these people are into the sport. They're not here to like take down big whatever, big carbohydrate, big sugar, whatever, not. That spring is a big company or anything like that. They're not here. Nefariously, I guess, is what I'm saying, and so what I can understand is why wouldn't you at least take the low cost, low effort step of verifying this initial thing that happened as a basis for the truth, and then you can go okay, we're going to send all of our stuff to a lab and then you can determine when do we actually pull it off the shelves, when do we communicate with our customers and things like that. But the whole, what I can't get over in this whole non-communication piece, is the horse blinders piece of it, and that's what I'm having such a hard time wrapping my head around that both Ruddy and I we have been in the trenches of small business for a long time and when those businesses are going really well and we got to freaking, pull stuff out of pull quarters, out of our cat, out of our couch to like make payroll and stuff like that, I get it. I totally, I totally get it. But if somebody were saying something like that about a product that I created, it would be very easy to recreate that experiment and actually verify, and then if it's verifiable, then okay, you can go. And then if it's not, you can say hey, listen, I did the same thing and I found a different result. Let's figure out why we have the different result.

Speaker 1: 1:20:44

I just can't. I can't understand that piece of. Excuse me, I can't understand that piece of the whole communication timeline, outside of the things that actually came out afterwards, and that, honestly, is what makes the things that come out afterwards so weird. It's like why would you? Initially? There's no plausible way. If you like, are a smart person and you have a PhD in these areas that this company apparently has, you can look at these home dehydration experiments as reasonable proxies for finding out the nutritional composition of your products. I don't understand why you just don't look at that and go okay, we're going to figure it out ourselves.

Speaker 4: 1:21:25

Especially when the product is your company. It's not just like a little part of what you do. That is the foundation of what this? Company is.

Speaker 2: 1:21:35

Well, that and I key in a little bit when they say we are athletes and we're made for athletes, et cetera You're putting your brand, you're embedding your brand in the community, you're saying your brand is part of the community. If the community is therefore responding to the product and saying, hey, there's a problem, you can't then stand aside from the community that you were supposed to be part of. I mean, it's that, to me, is that whole thing about. When the problems occur, you look first to the values of your company. If the value of the company is that we are here for athletes, to help them perform at their best, and there's something coming up that is being brought up by the community saying, hey, there's a problem with your product, that's one of the things that you take seriously. And then you do something about.

Speaker 2: 1:22:23

And there's a tendency, especially now with social media, how quick, fast it is that there are competing viewpoints on either you have to be first and you have to be fast and you have to tackle things absolutely immediately. And then there's the wait a sec. You have to. You don't want to chase tags, you can't play whack-a-mole and address every single person and waiting a little bit until you have your facts straight and know what your facts are is important so that you can speak with clarity. You don't want the brand. If I were in the brand, if I were in the brand's shoes or have been in brand shoes, you don't want to flip-flop. You don't want to say, you know, proclaim, we're, we have it, we're right and we have everything fine, and then a week later go oops, sorry, we're wrong, it's like. So I give them some grace with not reacting immediately to the first redditor who came up with you.

Speaker 1: 1:23:18

you know the dehydration study, but there was a few, I mean, let's not get let's remember the facts here, there was at least three, but I think maybe even four, like people in their freaking kitchens.

Speaker 2: 1:23:29

It's been replicated? I think that it may be and again I it's hard to put myself in. I don't want to put myself in their shoes, that not knowing all of the things, but you would think that at that point it may have been wise to at least acknowledge that they knew that there was discussion happening and that they were taking it seriously and were going to take a look at it. They didn't have to have an answer at that point. They just had to have been able to say we understand there's questions and we're going to take a look at it.

Speaker 3: 1:24:00

Yeah, which, which is why I'm sort of frustrated and surprised at their first official statement about the whole thing, because they just equivocate. You know, if there's an error and you've made a mistake and there's an error in the formulation, then you just say sorry, we've made a mistake in our formulation and we've changed it, or we're changing it and we're going to make sure that we do better going forward. But what they've actually said is this product has been designed as per the formulation. However, we realized that there are some errors here and that we're going to change the formulation going forward. It's like, well, you can't really have it both ways. Yeah, I think if there's an error, you have to nip that thing in the bud. You have to be very clear, very transparent. Nip that thing in the bud and do better going forward.

Speaker 4: 1:24:45

And if we've learned anything from the UTMB drama, it's that being transparent and an apology goes a long ways.

Speaker 1: 1:24:53

Yeah, I mean sometimes if you just say, hey, I'm sorry I screwed this up, I said that to all of my athletes that had this in their nutrition plan. I never recommended it, but if it worked for them I'd let them do it. I want to be clear about that. But all my athletes that have used this within their nutrition plan I'm going back to them all I'm sorry I screwed up. I should have seen this, and so I just the whole. It's just kind of incredible to me the obtuseness of the all of the communication in terms of taking responsibility for anything and just saying, listen, we screwed up, that's all.

Speaker 2: 1:25:32

You know. Going back to something that Steph said earlier about, you know you're a nutrition professional versus a, an influencer versus a coach or a brand that's endorsing or recommending a product. One of the things that we did when we had partnerships with the nutrition companies, we never told. We always said to coaches and believed from the beginning that we put athletes first, put the athletes interest first, and if that meant that the product, the nutrition product that we had an endorsement with or had a partnership with, wasn't working for the athlete, we didn't say use it anyway. Yeah, level, we used nutrition products that were appropriate for the athlete, whether based on taste or based on ingredients or formulations or whatever the case may be.

Speaker 2: 1:26:27

And I think that part of. Again, I don't know if this is necessarily the case, but one of the things that is different now than was happening when we were doing endorsement deals with nutrition products back in the day is the influencer culture, and the influencer culture is an ambassador culture is somewhat different in that people want to maintain their positions as influencers with companies and ambassadors and whatever. So they will. I think there's an incentive to recommend products, whether they, you know, work perfectly for everybody or not. The incentives are different, I think, for influencers and ambassadors now than they used to be.

Speaker 1: 1:27:08

Well, here's how I come at it from a coaching perspective. If you're a coach, your constituents and your customers are athletes and you should be looking out for those constituents and customers from the get-go with the utmost amount of focus. Your constituents are not the brands, they're not the people who make shoes, they're not the people who make nutrition products and things like that. If you are a coach, you are there to serve your athletes. They're your customers and your constituents at the same time. And it becomes really conflated when you have people who are in the influencer space that are both coaches and athletes. Steph has kind of got that right. She experienced that when she was, when she's over at Cliff and still has a lot of that, has a lot of that today where you've got to like wear these kind of, where you've got to wear these, these multiple hats. But if you are a coach and you're a professional coach and that's all you do for a living, I do think that we need to reevaluate, as a coaching profession as a whole, how we handle these endorsements and partnerships, because we've been through the whole thing and it was always a company endorsement thing, ruddy. I mean we always sent press releases and content and things like that out on the behest of the company, but it was never our individual coaches and I honestly still to this day kind of conflicted about it. And just to be transparent with the audience here, I was part of the team at times that would help go out into the space and find some of these endorsement deals that I just mentioned. Some of them were VIK deals, some of them were VIK plus cash. None of them were pay for play, meaning we would make money off of the sale. We would always make money off of the endorsement and then the content that was wrapped around it and things like that. But because I was a little bit I don't know whether conflict is the right word but just because the nature of everything changed when I became a freelancer and independent contractor, I just said I'm not dealing with this anymore. It's not part of my business model. I don't want to do it. I don't want to deal with the potential conflict or the real conflict or anything of the sort. I'm going to serve athletes and athletes first.

Speaker 1: 1:29:19

It's been very, it's been very relieving that I don't have to manage that, that that push pull that is inevitably there. Nobody's trying to do and we certainly weren't trying to do anything nefarious ever, but there still is a conflict between man. I really want you to like a goo energy gel, you know, because they're my boy. I just talked to you know. Just talk to Brian on the phone Like they're your people, you know, and it's not working for you.

Speaker 1: 1:29:37

We want to try to make it work, like there still is that little bit of internal conflict, and so I guess what I'm trying to say is I get it for the athletes out there that are also coaches and do have these partnerships, that there is some sort of conflict there that's hard to wrestle with. And I don't have the I honestly don't have the best answer for everybody. I have the best answer for me, which is I don't do it, and I do think that coaches if you are out there as a individual coach should try to avoid these almost at all costs, if avoid them completely. But I'm not going to profess to say that's the right answer for everybody.

Speaker 3: 1:30:08

Well, I guess the most important thing is just to be transparent with any potential conflicts that you have, whether that's as a coach and going very quickly back to what you asked me earlier on about how these products are developed in the scientific space.

Speaker 3: 1:30:20

Anytime you publish a study as a scientist that has industry funding, you have an ethical obligation to state that the thing was funded by a particular company. You have to put it in the in a separate section at the bottom of the paper that says conflicts of interest, and you have to state any potential conflicts that you have. If you do any consulting with any external companies if you have, if your lab is funded by any grants from any particular companies, that all goes into potential conflicts of interest and I think it's the same across the board. Whether you're a scientist or whether you're a coach or whether you're an athlete, you should have to be transparent with any of these business relationships that you harbor so that anybody that you work with has the information that they need to make an independent judgment as to whether they want to work with you or not.

Speaker 1: 1:31:04

It's tricky because, as we went through with staff, the level of involvement is so different at every step, right? So some of these athletes and ambassadors they just endorse the product and there are going to be athlete ambassadors of spring that are going to get caught in the crossfire here and I feel horribly for them. They got duped just like everybody else did, let's be honest. But when you're part of the team and this is where I really kind of struggle when you have either positioned yourself or you are actually part of the team that helped develop it at any one component, there is responsibility there and it might not be a hundred percent who knows where the percentage lies, and things like that. But at a certain point, if you have your name on it, if you've professed to be involved in the development process, if you have professed to create it, if you profess to whatever vocabulary that you want to use to create a product, and that product goes north or south, either way, you can take credit for it. When it goes north and you got to take the blame for it to go south, you can't do both right. You can't cheer. Coaches have a really actually big problem with this, with their athletes across the board. We take way too much credit when things are going well and we don't take nearly enough responsibility when they don't. And I'm saying that as a profession and I'm and I am included in that.

Speaker 1: 1:32:22

But with the sponsorship thing, we, with these levels of involvement that stuff was going through earlier, I do think the people that were involved in these particular products, irrespective of how much they were involved, you have to own part of it because you can't like say it's an awesome sauce name. You can't say it's awesome and amazing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and everybody should just be using it and look at this great product and then, when it turns South, be like, ah well, what really happened was I just did this or I just did that, not, you can't get, you can't get away with that. It's going to react to that. But you know that I it's going to it's.

Speaker 1: 1:33:00

But I guess what I'll say with it is it has to go both ways. If you've promoted it for years and it turns out to be something that it's not, you've got to look at it and say, listen, guys, my bad, I got screwed with the rest of you guys. Or here's what my real level of involvement was If it was different and kind of pay amends for that. But all that stuff is coming and I think that everybody kind of needs to use this to look in the mirror a little bit and reevaluating how authentically they are presenting themselves in terms of their impact, of the development of these various products, whether it's in nutrition or gear or shoes and things like that.

Speaker 4: 1:33:33

I 100% agree with that and I think when you have your name associated with a product or a brand, you are tied to it and you do need to be able to stand behind it, because the brand is gaining from using your name 100% they are.

Speaker 4: 1:33:47

So it should be a reciprocal relationship. But then also, if you're going to put your name on something, you need to stand behind it. I'm just thinking of, like you mentioned, the pack. I had a pack experience with Nathan, a hundred percent stood behind it and was involved in it across the board and could proudly, you know, say, like you know, I knew what the product was, and I think that's an important thing for any athlete considering sponsorship. Any coach, um, that's working with brands, whether it be, uh, podcast endorsement, sponsorship, any coach that's working with brands, whether it be a podcast endorsement, sponsorship, like article, like, if you are attached to a brand in some capacity, you are responsible for that.

Speaker 1: 1:34:29

It's tricky when it's your name. I remember that my wife loved that pack. By the way, I think I bought her like two. Yeah, good, great pack, two or three of them.

Speaker 2: 1:34:36

To some extent there's a, especially when it came to the endorsement deals and things like that. There's also a sense of staying within your scope of expertise. So when we endorsed power bar products and goo products and things along those lines, part of those endorsement deals were content generation for them, but we weren't producing content around. Here's the science of the drink or the this or the that, or telling that story of how it was produced.

Speaker 1: 1:35:06

Because Asker did that. He was a better authority to appeal to than we are. I mean, he had the most credible authority in the world at the time.

Speaker 2: 1:35:13

so of course, Right, but we were providing content on the application of general sports science knowledge of how do you hydrate, how do you use nutrition products in general, how do you eat during events, how do you train and fuel your training, and things along those lines, which was within our scope of expertise, not the molecular weight of this material that was in the gel. So if people are going to have relationships with companies, I think it's similar to going into those relationships thinking of what can I authentically contribute to that brand and in through this endorsement? And if it's something that you're being asked to contribute that is beyond your scope, admit that or, you know, put the brakes on there and go. Yeah, that's. I'm not comfortable with doing that because that's outside my scope.

Speaker 1: 1:36:14

Scope of expertise and coaching is like another big topic that we could spend another couple hours on. Okay, let's wrap it up. I got one question for you guys. I'm gonna put you on the spot. What could transpire for you? Can? I'll give you two venues for this, just to make it easy. What could transpire so that you could recommend these products, these spring products, to your athletes or take them yourselves and it could be, I'm taking them in right now because I know what's in them to never. That's the scope, so ready, we could start with you.

Speaker 2: 1:36:45

Put you on the spot first I think if they were to, you know, to either reformulate or publish the data on some sort of certification of what's in the product, if I still liked the taste and they still worked for me and whatever else, then I could see people continuing to use them. I think the biggest problem that I would have in that sense right now, though, is they're not that different than anything else that's out there, so if, putting things side by side and now I have a doubt about this one why bother giving them a second chance? I've got 14 other choices that I haven't had that problem, so you know fool me once, shame on me.

Speaker 1: 1:37:33

Fool me twice. Shame on you. There's been a lot of fooling going on, so don't blame you. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me. All right, steph, you get to go.

Speaker 4: 1:37:42

I will echo what Ruddy said about there being so many other products on the market that are the same or better, and I guess for me personally never, but for an athlete I would consider not recommending it, including it as part of a fueling plan If the company were to set the record straight on how this happened because I can't trust the company otherwise and I don't know exactly what that would look like but how this big oversight happened and issue an apology, be really transparent with that, I don't. That would go a long ways, I think, with this community and then you know, people would maybe understand and that could be remedied in the future so that their product does not have this big mismatch.

Speaker 3: 1:38:30

Yeah, I mean, for the time being, we don't know what's in this stuff because, according to their most recent statement, they're updating the formula and they're changing things. So the actual formulation is in a state of flux to begin with. So we don't know if it has 20 grams of carb, if they're increasing it to 40 or 45 or what. So we have no idea what the actual ingredients are going to be and what the nutritional content will be.

Speaker 3: 1:38:54

I kind of agree with Stefan that they either needed to make a statement to the effect of we realize there are some concerns and problems, we're going to investigate this and get back to you, which they haven't done or they need to refute the claims that have been made, saying we've done our own internal tests and what you're saying is not true.

Speaker 3: 1:39:15

Or the third option is to state unequivocally sorry, we effed up and we're going to make some. Or the third option is to state unequivocally sorry, we effed up and we're going to make some changes, in which case they need to publish their own internal findings and, instead of just saying that the nutritional content fell short or whatever, whatever phrasing they used, tell us by how much it fell short and tell us what was wrong. Just be transparent because, again to echo what you guys have said, this is an oversaturated space that you've got to give good reason why we should choose your product over the dozens of others that are available, and so you need to be very proactive and and nip this thing in the bud, state what errors were made, what changes you're going to make, and then be transparent with the data that you have going forwards.

Speaker 1: 1:39:59

I think we're all kind of coming to the same conclusion here. The thing that I'll add is kind of on the beginning. So, first off, these are only three products in their entire product line. They have other products that you can make into a drink mix. They have other products it's kind of more of a snack, you know, oat-based product and things like that.

Speaker 1: 1:40:15

Right now I would not only not recommend any of their products in their lineup, but I would dissuade anybody from taking them If I just I went and bought these from the runner's roost downtown, shout out to those guys I've liked them for a long time and I told them the whole deal. I'm like listen, just so you guys know this is what's happening with this product, just to let the retailer know. Right, because they're friends of mine and been in the community for years and I feel obligated to at least let them kind of peel the curtain back a little bit. But I would dissuade athletes from using these products across the board. I don't trust them at all. Speaking to our earlier point that if you're using kind of the same ingredients across a lot of your product lines, most likely those product lines are going to also be affected. That's an allegedly statement right now, right, but it's a logical one. But certainly we know that these three products are effective. And even if an athlete wanted to say, you know what I wanted to get, what did I just say this Hill 8 has 10 grams of carbohydrate. Let's say I wanted to get, you know, 40 grams of carbohydrate per hour from this one product. I really liked it, you know, let's go ahead and do it.

Speaker 1: 1:41:21

I would still dissuade them because I don't have enough confidence in the consistency. Sure, the batch that I sent to the lab and just to clarify, the lab gets eight or 10 gels, depending upon the weight. They combine them all and then they take a sample from that. It's not like they're squeezing out one gel into a machine and, you know, while on it actually happens, they're taking several of them and taking, kind of an average of, or take, taking that entire seven as a whole sample. I don't have the, I don't have the confidence that these products are consistent either, because they're just so far off. So even if an athlete wanted to get all 60 grams of carbohydrate through six of these at the tune of what's six times five, $30, $30 an hour to fuel your next ultra marathon, I would still, even though the resources to do that outside of the cost, I'd still dissuade them.

Speaker 1: 1:42:05

So, going forward, I'd kind of have my two things are on or my things are on two pillars. First one is how it happened. Show me the data, show me where in the process it got awry. Show me, yep, these products started here and they ended here and this is how it happened. You have to be able to show me that. Second thing once all this reformulation actually happens, get third-party testing, not your own stuff, some third-party organization of which there are many that can release the results without you having to interface with anybody. I have to have kind of those components before it's even part of any, even part of in the dialogue. So that's where it is for me right now, and I don't know not to try to overread the sentiment and the community as a whole, but I'll go out on a limb and say that's going to be relatively consistent across the community and when you paint that picture out it's kind of a bleak one.

Speaker 2: 1:43:00

But what do you think from the? There's another layer in there, though, in terms of there's direct to consumer, so you have to have consumer trust. But there's a business layer wholesalers and dealers and people were buying these in bulk to resell, and are they going to be willing to take the risk on a product that they're?

Speaker 1: 1:43:22

unsure of? Yeah, probably not. I mean one of the things, one of the things kind of lurking in the background that we didn't talk about so much, is the awesome sauce specifically, which is kind of the first product in question. It was spring's bestselling product, or at least spring put it on their website as their bestselling product, and I and you know you can kind of roll that forward that it was probably a good moneymaker for a lot of a lot of specialty retail, small run stores, as well as the feed, any sort of other online retailers like running warehouse and things like that. They're selling through this product. It's always sold out, right, so they're making money off of it, just like sport hunger. Those points of purchase are holding part of the refund bag, and maybe not all of it, but certainly part of it, depending upon how they actually want to deal with spring in this capacity, and they have an agreement to distribute this and I don't want to try to unwind in any of those. But to your point, roddy, there's still risk involved with those distributors. Who knows what their sentiment is. Personally, I wouldn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole Like come on, you're going to buy, you're going to put a product up on your website knowing that you know a hundred percent of it could be returned. I'm kind of shocked that, at least as of this morning, I could buy it on the feed, because I sent the feed, the results as well, because they were the point of purchase. I'm trying to be transparent here. Right, I sent it to everybody that was involved, I sent it to the Roches, I sent it to the CEO of Spring and I sent it to the feed, where I bought the product, and it'll be the same with the other products that I buy. So, anyway, I don't know I mean, certainly the direct to consumer model is really hard here. Right, you've got to have other distribution networks in order to kind of scale up your business, and I can imagine that's going to be part of the storyline is the trust within the other outlets, whether they're physical break of mortar outlets or online outlets.

Speaker 1: 1:45:07

Dang covered a lot. Good job, team. All right, thanks you guys for coming on. I know it's hard. I know it's kind of hard to level out some criticism.

Speaker 1: 1:45:13

I think we did it in a fair and reasonable way. We intellectualize the things we need to talk about. We didn't speculate all too much, brought the facts to the table and I think I can kind of speak for the group here is we just want people to have the best information. That's why we have this research newsletter. We try to cut through the clutter. We're not trying to offer up any sort of hyperbole or hype it up or anything like that. We just want people to have information and informed opinions based on our experiences and our education backgrounds and our professional backgrounds, and I think this is something where we could all kind of come to the table and bring a little bit to it from academia, from communications, from coaching, from nutrition, from an athlete perspective. Kind of got it all here.

Speaker 1: 1:45:55

So, thank you guys, thank you, yeah thanks, all right, folks. There you have it. There you go, you guys, thank you, yeah, thanks, all right, folks. There you have it. There you go. What do you think we I tell you what we are not done with this.

Speaker 1: 1:46:04

There is going to be a few further dominoes to fall in this whole chain of events. Like I said, just keep in mind when you're listening to this we recorded this on wednesday, may 29th, and it is going to come out or actually hit your ears sometime later, and there probably have been things that have transpired since then, since a lot of this is moving so quickly, but I hope the content that we discussed with our group here remains evergreen, because some of these lessons are actually timeless. How you actually partner with companies to create products that's actually timeless. How nutrition companies function and how one error can become multiple errors across a nutrition line those things are actually timeless and, I think, can extend far beyond this one single controversy.

Speaker 1: 1:46:50

Throughout all of this, I've tried to be as transparent as possible and I hope you guys the audience appreciates that. All of the documents that I've collected have always been for free on my website, with no email registration or anything like that. I'm never going to kind of track you down. I've provided these documents to anybody who's asked for them. I have absolutely zero to gain here and I've already lost a whole heck of a lot.

Speaker 1: 1:47:13

This has cost me a lot of time and money and things like that, but ultimately I wanted people to have the truth, because one thing that I did learn throughout this entire process is it does take a lot of pressure for change to actually happen. I was a laggard to this. Hunger Sport had already done their thing. The fine folks over in the Reddit community had already done their thing and yet nothing had actually changed.

Speaker 1: 1:47:35

And I know a lot of you out there have criticized the intensity with which I delivered a lot of the messaging on social media, and for that I don't have a whole lot of apologies. To be quite frank with you, because the needle clearly was not moving in the direction that it needed to get moved to with just data. All of the data was actually already out there. The whole thing needed a little bit more emotion behind it to propagate it forward. So remember that. You want to throw me a little bit of criticism? Fine, I have thick skin, but at the end of the day, look at where we're at right now compared to where we were at about a week ago and when this whole thing started. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.