BICARB.NET started because a bottle of the good stuff cost more than I made in a week. So I built my own — and it worked.
I race bikes. If you ride hard enough, you eventually run into a wall that has nothing to do with your legs and everything to do with chemistry: your blood turns acidic, your muscles stop firing cleanly, and you slow down whether you want to or not.
There's a fix the pros have used for forty years — sodium bicarbonate. Baking soda, basically. It buffers the acid so you can hold a hard effort longer. The catch is that drinking raw baking soda makes most people violently sick, so the premium brands wrap it in a hydrogel that protects your stomach.
The best one, Maurten's Bicarb System, works incredibly well. It also costs $17.50 a serving. As a high school student, that math doesn't work. I'd burn through a month of allowance in a week of training.
Turns out the science is public. The mechanism is published in peer-reviewed journals. The ingredients are food-grade and available in bulk. What you're really paying for with the premium brands is R&D, brand, distribution, and retail margin — not some secret molecule.
So I started mixing. Maltodextrin and fructose for the carbohydrate matrix, in the same 2:1 ratio the research uses. Xanthan gum as the hydrogel agent — the thing that turns it into a protective gel in water. Sodium bicarbonate as the active buffer, dosed at exactly 0.3 grams per kilogram of body weight, straight from the studies. Freeze-dried mango so it's actually drinkable.
It took a lot of failed batches. Too much xanthan gum and it's a brick. Too little and it doesn't gel. The bicarb has to be weighed to the gram or the macros drift. But eventually I had a powder that mixed into a clean gel, tasted fine, and — most importantly — didn't wreck my stomach.
I'm not interested in selling something that doesn't work, so I tested it on the only subject I had full access to: myself.
Over two months of using it before my hard sessions, my FTP — the maximum power I can hold for an hour, the single best number for a cyclist — went from 3.8 watts per kilogram to 4.2. In cycling terms that's not a rounding error. That's moving up a category.
I'm honest about what that means: I was also training hard, and you can't perfectly separate the supplement from the work. But the sessions where I took it consistently felt cleaner in the back half — exactly what the buffer is supposed to do.
Then my friend Jacob, a sophomore on the track team, tried it before a practice mile. He'd been stuck at 5:00. Two days later he ran 4:35. A 25-second PR. He said his legs didn't die in the third lap the way they always had.
I made 100 bags in my kitchen, weighed every single one to the gram, registered an actual LLC and an FDA food facility, and brought them to the Paly track. Five dollars a bag — basically my cost plus pennies.
They sold out.
That's the whole thing, really. Not a startup with a pitch deck. A cyclist who got tired of paying $17.50, figured out he could make the same thing for a fraction of the price, proved it on his own body and his friends', and decided other athletes deserved that too.
Batch one was a hydrogel powder you mix yourself. It works, but the mixing step is friction. So 2.0 is moving to enteric-coated pellets — no mixing, no gel texture, just take them. Same buffering science, delivered the way the best products in the world deliver it.
It's in development now. If you want to know the moment it drops, get on the list below. That's the only way orders open back up.
Orders are closed while we build the pellet version. Join the waitlist and you'll know the second it launches.
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