Field notes · 6 September 2026 · Alastair McDowell
Why POWTREK is a bag, not a sachet
The sachet is the most convenient way to sell carbohydrate and the least sensible way to buy it. Here is the arithmetic that made me build the range the other way round.
A gel sachet does one thing brilliantly. It gets about 23 grams of carbohydrate into your hand, mid-effort, with no thought required. The industry has spent thirty years perfecting that, and it works.
It is also the most expensive way to buy sugar that exists outside a petrol station, and every one of them ends up in landfill. POWTREK exists because I did the arithmetic on my own season and did not like it.
What a season of sachets costs
Take a fairly ordinary committed athlete. Eight fuelled hours a week, taking 75 grams of carbohydrate an hour through the long sessions and races. That is 600 grams a week, or a little over 31 kilograms of carbohydrate a year.
Across eleven brands at New Zealand shelf prices, sachet gels average $19.25 per 100 grams of carbohydrate. Thirty-one kilograms at that rate is roughly $6,000 a year. Even a lighter season, four hours a week at 60 grams, is well over $2,000.
The carbohydrate inside those sachets is maltodextrin and fructose. Bought in a bag, the same 31 kilograms costs a few hundred dollars. The difference is the foil, the filling line, the shipping of water, and the marketing.
What a wrapper is
A gel sachet is a laminate of polyester, aluminium foil and polyethylene. That construction is why a gel keeps for eighteen months in a hot car, and it is a genuine piece of engineering. It is also why New Zealand’s soft plastics scheme will not accept it: the layers cannot be separated, so it cannot be reprocessed. Australia’s equivalent scheme collapsed in 2022 and has not come back at scale.
A committed athlete gets through 120 to 250 of them a year. One POWTREK GEL bag, about a kilogram of carbohydrate, stands in for about 42.
The self-supported version
Everyone who fuels seriously has, at some point, tipped a few sachets into a soft flask to save the faff of opening them one-handed on a climb. The flask is already in your vest. The only thing the sachet is adding at that point is the wrapper.
So the bag skips it. Maltodextrin and fructose at 2:1, pectin and calcium lactate to set it, electrolytes and a flavour. You weigh 200 grams into a shaker with 150 mL of hot water, shake it hard, let it cool, pour it into the flask and leave it in the fridge overnight. By morning it has set into a real gel with about 180 grams of carbohydrate in it. Thicker or thinner is your call.
It is a few minutes of work the night before. In exchange you set the dose, you know exactly what is in it, and the bag goes back in the cupboard instead of a bin at an aid station.
Why the whole range is dry
Once you have made your own gel, the same logic runs through the day. The middle of a long day wants real calories in a form you can drink while moving: carbohydrate, protein and a little fat, scooped to whatever bottle you are carrying. That is ALL-DAY. The stops want real food, grains, seeds, nuts and fruit, ready to eat without a stove. That is REAL-FOOD, which follows the first run. All of it is dry in a bag for the same reason the gel is.
Self-supported is how I go to the hills: plan the line, carry the gear, get myself home. POWTREK is fuel made the same way. You do a little of the assembly, and you keep most of what you were spending.