Aptonia Salted Butter Caramel energy gel

On first sight, Aptonia Energy Gel immediately sets itself apart from most other gels in that it comes packaged in a toothpaste-like tube, instead of the usual plastic wrapper. To consume it, you simply twist the plastic end off and squeeze. While certainly different, this packaging design has both its merits and drawbacks.

On the negative side, once bitten off, the plastic end is destined to be dropped onto the road as no one is realistically going to fuss about trying to stuff it back into a pocket in the heat of the moment. Having said that, the design of the tube itself ensures that the remaining gel doesn't leak everywhere when you put it back in your pocket, providing you place it with the hole facing upwards. This should encourage more people to hang on to their empty gels once consumed, reducing the amount of litter on the roads. If Aptonia could just find a way to ensure that the plastic nub doesn't come away completely from the tube, then it would be a great design, environmentally speaking.

Each gel provides around 19g of carbohydrates, or 75kcal of energy, from a combination of glucose syrup and maltodextrin. Apart from that, the gels don't provide a whole lot, but then they aren't intended to be nutritious; their role is to fuel the fire. Working from the generally accepted maximum carbohydrate absorption rate of 70g/hour, you should be looking to take around 2-3 of these gels per hour, depending on whether you're also taking on energy drink.

The Energy Gel is available in a variety of fruit flavours, but also an interesting salted flavour — salted butter caramel — which was the flavour tested. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the caramel flavour turned out to be more sweet than salty; a little too sweet I found, and the flavour did start to cloy after the first couple of gels.

To make matters worse, the texture is very thick, which, combined with the sweetness meant that each gel had to be followed by large slugs of water — not ideal when on the limit in a race.

Where the Aptonia Gels do score well is on value. Though they are only available in packs of six which makes experimenting with flavours a bit more of difficult, each a six-pack of most flavours will set you back only £2.99. This works out to be around 60p per gel which is pretty cheap as far as gels go. At £4.59 for six, this caramel flavour is unusually expensive by Decathlon standards.

Unfortunately though, in the case of the salted butter caramel flavour at least, the overly sweet taste and thick texture mean that it's too difficult to get down and, no matter how cheap, it's not a gel I could recommend.

Verdict

Good value, but too sweet and too thick to be easily consumable