FTP Starter Stack Review: The Best £20 Way to Find Out If You're Done With Gels

The FTP Starter Stack is a £19.99 trial bundle from FTP Endurance Fuel — two flavours of their Energy Pastilles, a taster of their Power Fluids drink mix, and one of their reusable Adventure Pouches. It exists to answer one question: do you actually want to fuel this way?

Because the first thing to say about FTP is that they don't make a gel. That's not an oversight in the range — their strapline is "No gels. No nonsense." The absence of a gel isn't a gap. It is the proposition. So if you want a gel, this isn't the brand for you, and they'd be the first to tell you so.

So this review is less "are these good" — they are — and more "is this how you want to fuel?"

Quick Specs

Price: £19.99 for the Starter Stack (RRP £22.96)

What's in it:

• Mixed Fruit Energy Pastilles taster — 2 x 30g carb servings (apple, orange and strawberry)

• Tart Cherry Energy Pastilles taster — 2 x 30g carb servings

• Power Fluids taster — 60g pouch, up to 2 servings

• One FTP Adventure Pouch

  
  

Carbs: 30g per serving, from a 1:1 glucose–fructose blend

Serving size: Two pastilles, 15g of carbohydrate each, 116kcal per serving

Suitable for: Vegans. Dairy-free.

Allergens: Contains wheat starch, tested below 20ppm gluten. Packed in a facility handling other allergens, and the pastilles contain a colouring that carries the "may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children" warning. Check the label on the site before you buy if any of that matters to you.

Bulk pricing: 1kg pastilles (~30 servings) £42.99 one-time, or £37.83 on a monthly subscription (12% off). Power Fluids 900g (30 servings) £25.99. Adventure Pouch on its own £6.99.

These were sent to me by FTP for review. I've been using them weekly for over a month across easy runs, long runs and gym sessions. Nobody has seen this before you have.

What They Actually Are

Energy Pastilles are soft chews, sold in bulk rather than individual packets. You buy a 1kg bag, decant however many you want into the reusable pouch, and off you go. Two pastilles gets you 30g of carbs — the equivalent of one gel.

There's a coating on them that I can only describe as powdered sugar. It probably isn't, but that's what it feels like, and it's a big part of why they're so pleasant to eat. The texture is somewhere in the region of Turkish delight — they don't tastelike Turkish delight, but if you've eaten a good one you'll know the mouthfeel I mean.

The tart cherry is the one. I'd happily eat those when I'm not training, which is either high praise or a warning depending on your discipline. The mixed fruit gives you apple, orange and strawberry in the same bag, and having a bit of variety mid-session is genuinely nice — after two hours you get bored of tasting the same thing, and that's when people stop fuelling.

I've also handed them out to a few people I train with, and the feedback was consistent: they liked the taste and the texture. That's not nothing. Plenty of fuel is tolerated rather than enjoyed.

Eating Them On The Move

Right, the honest bit.

Taking a pastille while running is harder than taking one on a bike. Not hard — but it takes thought. You've got to unzip the pouch, get one out, get it in your mouth, and zip it back up, all while running. It's a sequence, and you want to have practised it before race day rather than discovering it at mile 18.

On the bike it's a non-event. We tried them during a spin session at the gym and it was completely trivial — though a spin bike is stationary, so I'd call that the easiest possible case rather than proof.

The counterweight to that fiddle is what you don't get: no sticky wrapper, no gel residue round your mouth, nothing to shove back in your shorts and find, congealed, in the washing machine. For an hour-long easy long run I took a single pastille — 15g of carbs, not the full serving — and had it halfway through. That's the bit I like most about the format. You aren't committed to 30g just because that's what the packet contains. You take what you need.

Environmentally, this is streets ahead of anything else in the category. Thirty gels means thirty foil sachets. This is one bag and one pouch you keep.

The Adventure Pouch

It's cute, it's light, and it holds far more than you'd think — FTP say up to 12 pastilles, which is six servings, and I'd agree that looks right. Six servings is more than enough carbohydrate for a marathon.

Two reservations.

The carabiner is weak. I clipped the pouch to my gym bag, and I'm not delicate with kit, and it felt like it could give up on me. I wouldn't trust it with anything I'd be upset to lose.

Second, and this is a runner problem rather than a product fault: you need somewhere to put it. I don't like carrying things in my hands, and clipping something to my shorts means listening to it jangle for two hours. I ended up shoving the pouch straight into a shorts pocket, which worked fine. In a vest, a belt, or a bike bag it's a non-issue. Cyclists will get more out of that carabiner than runners ever will.

Power Fluids

The drink mix is carbohydrate plus electrolytes plus tart cherry, and it dissolves easily — especially in their own bottle.

The taster is a 60g pouch and the suggested serving is 30g. I went down to 15g and found that plenty. I'm sensitive to strong carb drinks after years of training, and at 15g I got everything I wanted without the syrupy weight; I was even topping it up with plain water at points, diluting it further, with no ill effect. I'd struggle with 30g in one sitting. Your mileage will absolutely vary here — but the fact that you're scooping from a bag rather than tearing open a fixed sachet means you get to find your own number. That's the theme of this whole range.

Flavour-wise, it's sold as tart cherry and I get watermelon. Not a complaint, just an observation.

Now the genuine criticism, and it's the biggest one in this review: the electrolytes make me thirsty. That's the design — electrolytes encourage you to drink more, which is the point of them — but I don't love the sensation, and I'm someone who doesn't much mind being slightly dehydrated. For me it made that worse rather than better, and it happened every single time. That's how I experience electrolyte drinks generally rather than a fault unique to FTP, but if you're the same, know it going in.

The other runner-specific wrinkle: you have to mix a drink before you go. Fine on a bike, where the bottle lives in a cage. Less fine on foot, where you're either carrying it or planning a loop past your front door. For a long run I'd use a hydration vest with two collapsible bottles — one with Power Fluids, one with plain water. If I were better, I'd have someone hand it to me. I was never that good, and I'm too precious to carry it, so vest it is.

What I'd Like Them To Make

A caffeinated pastille. Caffeine works, it's one of the few supplements with the evidence to back it, and having a couple of caffeinated pastilles to take at 30k of a marathon — or the back half of a half — would be brilliant. You don't want everything caffeinated, but a targeted hit late on is exactly the use case chews are good at.

To be fair to them, the range has grown since I first looked: there's now a Power Fluids Core with carbohydrate and caffeine in it, and cherry electrolyte tablets at £5.99 for anyone who wants electrolytes without the carbs. I haven't tested either, so I can't tell you if they're any good — but it's the right direction, and having electrolytes available separately from carbs is a genuinely useful option.

Price & Value

A kilo of pastilles at £42.99 sounds like a lot until you do the arithmetic. That's roughly 30 servings, so about £1.43 a serving — and £1.26 if you're on the monthly subscription. Typical gels sit around £1.50 each. Precision Fuel's PF 30 Chews, the closest direct comparison, run around £26.99 for 15 packets at third-party retailers — near enough £1.80 a serving.

So you're getting equivalent carbohydrate for less money, in less packaging, with the ability to take half a serving if that's all you want. If you're heading into a marathon block and you're going to be fuelling every long run for sixteen weeks, the subscription genuinely makes sense.

Alternatives to Consider

Precision Fuel PF 30 Chews — 30g of carbs in two 15g blocks, vegan, no electrolytes. Excellent product, well tested, individually packeted. More expensive per serving and you're back to wrappers. Choose these if you want a chew but prefer the certainty of a sealed packet per serving.

Clif Bloks — 24g of carbs per three blocks with sodium built in, which the FTP pastilles don't have. Widely stocked and worth checking current pricing. Choose these if you want your electrolytes and carbs in the same chew.

Any decent gel — SiS, Maurten, Precision. If you genuinely prefer gels, you prefer gels, and FTP aren't trying to convert you at the pastille end. You could still use their Power Fluids alongside your gel of choice.

Final Verdict

This is a very good fuelling system and an unusually honest one. The pastilles taste better than most things I've eaten mid-run, the bulk-and-decant model is cheaper and vastly less wasteful, and the freedom to take 15g instead of 30g is a bigger deal than it sounds.

The catch is that it asks slightly more of you than a gel does — practise getting one out on the run, remember to load the pouch, mix the drink before you leave. None of it is hard. All of it is a change of habit.

My recommendation: If you're gel-loyal and happy, stay where you are — FTP aren't for you, at least not the pastilles. If you're a runner or cyclist who's fed up with sticky wrappers, wants to spend less per gram of carbohydrate, and is willing to spend a couple of long runs learning a new routine, buy the Starter Stack. At £19.99 it's the right way in — you get both flavours, the drink and the pouch, and you'll know within three sessions whether this is your thing. If it is, go bulk, and take the subscription if you're in a marathon block.

Fuelling is one of the three things that most often unravels a marathon — the other two being pacing and the weeks of training you didn't quite do. If you'd like a plan that addresses all three, and a coach who'll make you rehearse your fuelling long before race day, take a look at our coaching packages