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Eco-mode vs products

What it is. There are two ways to hit an athlete’s fueling targets. The kitchen route mixes a bottle from staples: table sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose or fructose for carbohydrate, and salt, sodium citrate or sodium bicarbonate for sodium. The products route uses branded gels, drink mixes and chews matched from Saturday’s curated database. Both routes hit the same prescription. The dial decides which sources fill the gap; it never moves the carbohydrate, sodium or fluid totals. What changes is cost per hour, how precisely the blend lands, and how much mixing the athlete does. When to change it. Toward the kitchen for budget-conscious athletes, or anyone happy to mix their own. Toward products for athletes who want plug-and-play convenience or a specific tuned blend. The question it answers. “Do I need to buy gels, or can I mix my own?”

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It is a spectrum, not an either-or

Underneath, this is not a binary choice. The athlete’s app presents five positions running from kitchen to products: The two ends split further for athletes who want them: Ultra Eco past Super Eco, and Purist past Products Only. The setting can also be overridden per activity type, so an athlete can run kitchen mixes for long rides and products for race day without changing their default.
No position is preselected. An athlete who has never touched this runs Saturday’s standard behavior, where the kitchen fills whatever the products do not cover. Picking a position is an opt-in override, so an unset dial is a real state, not a missing one.In the coach portal this currently appears as a single on-and-off control rather than the five-position spectrum. If an athlete has set a specific position in the app, adjust it with them rather than from the portal.

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What you do as a coach

  • Read where the athlete sits before changing anything, since the portal control and the app’s spectrum do not line up one-to-one.
  • Let Saturday surface products. When products are the right call, Saturday matches specific options against the athlete’s targets and ratio from its curated database.
Never improvise a brand. Product recommendations come only from Saturday’s product matching, which accounts for the athlete’s targets, their ratio, and what is available. Do not hand an athlete a brand name from memory; let Saturday surface the matched options so the recommendation is grounded in their plan.

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See also