The Story Behind Our Coffee Cacao Gel
From our founder Markus:
A bit of a background story to our new flavor, the Coffee Cacao Energy Gel. It is truly the world's first energy gel made from Robusta Coffee and Cacao. How did we get here?
When we launched our first two flavors, Passion Fruit and Banana, we realised that Energy Gels are the way to go for us. Real food energy is a thing.
Quite early on, there were requests to make a caffeinated gel. Energy from carbohydrates isn't enough; caffeine is needed to get another boost.
Being a Vietnamese-born company, using Vietnamese coffee makes sense. Dark, strong Robusta it got to be. Something that really kicks in when you take it.
The first recipe tests with cacao were quite intriguing, and we received good feedback from our community of testers and athletes.
Just like the other gels, we opted to use brown rice syrup, as its darker, richer flavor works well with coffee and cacao. Also, we added lots of water (#1 ingredient) and cane sugar to make it gel-like.
We experimented with many different coffee powders, and then settled on one that vibes well with coffee and sugar.
Lots of salt was added to bring out flavors more. Basil seeds and pumpkin seed butter are good to tone down the sweetness and make it more creamy. Rounded up with vanilla extract, a tiny bit of highly concentrated caffeine powder, magnesium and potassium.
So far, so good. Feedback was positive. Let's do it.
The packaging, as usual, was the challenge.
Our packaged gels go through a high-temperature, high-pressure sterilisation/pasteurisation process (imagine a pressure cooker) in order to make them shelf stable. Side note, Napoleon invited canned foods.
Turns out, coffee cacao needs to be sterilised at higher temperatures than our other gels. Those high temperatures let the gel expand inside the bag and, boom, the gel explodes during the process.
We probably had over 2000 exploding gels at the beginning... not pretty. The sealing of our packaging material wasn't strong enough. Our factory staff grew very impatient...
We learned a lot about the sterilisation process, how to manage different ingredients and our packaging. It is a much more sophisticated process than our other gels. Meaning, our coffee gels are much more valuable and rare.
The good news is, once a gel has survived the high-pressure process, it is VERY shelf stable. Great quality control.
So, what you see now is the result of loads of testing and fine-tuning. We probably went through over 50 recipes, over 50 different sterilisation cycle experiments and have tested 10 different packaging suppliers.
I keep joking that I have learned more about packaging processes than food in building Lecka
It always comes down to packaging!
Anyway, we hope you enjoy our new products as much as we do.
It has 90mg caffeine, so please don't have too many at once.
Thank you team Lecka for creating such a unique product.
