The banner across the front of the expo hall in Berlin read: HELLO, WORLD — WELCOME TO BERLIN.
The BMW Berlin Marathon is one of the six World Marathon Majors, and its expo in the days before the race is one of the densest concentrations of serious runners on the planet. Tens of thousands of people, from first-time marathoners to sponsored athletes, all in one hall, all thinking about exactly one thing: what they're going to put in their body on Sunday morning.
We took a booth, brought our products, and asked people to try them.
Why an expo is a harder test than it sounds
Handing samples to runners at a marathon expo is a genuinely unforgiving format, for three reasons.
They've already got a plan. Anyone racing on Sunday has rehearsed their fuelling in training and is extremely reluctant to change anything 48 hours out. If they try something new at an expo, they're evaluating it for next time — critically.
They've tried everything. The expo hall is wall-to-wall with gels, drinks, bars and powders. Runners walk the floor sampling all of it. Yours is being compared side by side with every established brand in the sport, within about ten minutes.
They're strangers. Nobody at a Berlin expo has any reason to be kind to a brand they've never heard of.
What came up again and again
The feedback that surprised us wasn't about energy or ingredients. It was about texture.
One runner — wearing an Ironman Klagenfurt 2025 finisher shirt, so somebody with a fairly developed opinion on fuelling — summed up the reaction that came up most often across the weekend:
"The viscosity of this gel is just right."
If you've ever tried to swallow a thick, claggy gel at 30km with a dry mouth, you know why this matters more than the marketing on the sachet. A gel that's too viscous needs water you may not have. One that's too thin doesn't feel like it's doing anything. Getting that consistency right was one of the longest arguments in developing the product, and it turned out to be the thing runners noticed first.
The other recurring theme was the drink format — the ability to mix and take on fluid and carbohydrate together, rather than choking down a gel and then hunting for a water station.
The unglamorous part
Not everything was praise, and it would be dishonest to write this up as if it were.
The most common piece of critical feedback was straightforward: nobody had heard of us. In a hall where runners are choosing between brands that have sponsored the sport for decades, being good is not sufficient — being known is a real barrier, and one we can't test our way out of.
That's part of why we're writing this at all, and part of why we went to Iten in Kenya as well: we'd rather build a reputation on runners actually trying the product and saying what they think than on advertising spend.
What we're doing with it
Two things came out of Berlin that changed how we work.
The first is that we stopped leading with ingredient lists. Runners at the expo consistently cared about how it feels to take before they cared about what was in it — so that's how we describe our products now, with the specifications available for anyone who wants to dig in.
The second is that we committed to third-party testing. In a hall full of brands making similar-sounding claims, the only differences a runner can actually verify are the independent ones — which is the reasoning behind our Informed Sport certification.
Frequently asked questions
When was the BMW Berlin Marathon 2025?
The 2025 race was held on Sunday 21 September 2025, with the marathon expo running in the days beforehand at Olympiapark Berlin.
Was Ultimate Potential an official sponsor of the Berlin Marathon?
No. We exhibited at the marathon expo, where runners could try our products. We are not an official partner or sponsor of the event.
What products did runners try at the expo?
Our running energy gel and our hydration drink. The most consistent feedback concerned the texture and viscosity of the gel and the convenience of taking carbohydrate and fluid together.
Where can I buy these in Singapore?
The range is available directly from our shop, with delivery across Singapore and PayNow accepted at checkout.
Read next: what happened when we took the same gels to Iten, Kenya.