A note for anyone who has searched for their usual drink mix and been offered six flavors, three serving sizes, two user-submitted misspellings, and one entry that appears to have been created by a person who has never seen a bicycle.
Generic food databases collect products. FTW curates the sports nutrition products endurance athletes actually use, organized around the differences that matter.
Most food trackers do a reasonably good job with ordinary groceries. An egg is an egg. A banana is a banana. A packaged granola bar usually has a barcode and a nutrition label.
Sports nutrition gets weird fast.
It is 6:15 am, the fast group leaves in 20 minutes, and you are standing in the kitchen wearing one shoe while dumping powder into a bottle. You do not care whether the lemon-lime and fruit-punch versions have different UPCs. You care whether you grabbed hydration mix or high-carb mix.
Later, you pull a crumpled Maurten wrapper out of your jersey pocket. Regular gel or caffeinated? That distinction matters. The flavor usually does not.
At an aid station, the table is covered with gels, chews, powders, bars, and at least one product you have never seen before but eat anyway because the Columbine climb is staring you down. This is not a niche edge case for endurance athletes. This is Saturday. (Or Leadville 100. You do you.)
Skratch Labs makes no-carb, medium-carb, super-high-carb, and recovery-carb. Maurten makes 100s and 160s, with and without caffeine. UCAN makes Edge, Energy, Hydrate and Hydrate+Aminos (not to mention the +caffeine and +electrolytes versions, come on man). Some brands make an extra-salty version of a product. Some make six flavors with identical macros. Some make five flavors the same but that watermelon-lime one has an extra 15 cals. Manufacturers care about barcodes because that is how capitalism works. We care whether the thing in the bottle has 80 calories or 400 calories, or caffeine, or extra sodium.
Those are our questions.
FTW starts with the foundational USDA FoodData Central for ordinary non-branded foods and layers on the best-in-class FatSecret database for broad branded-food coverage. Then it adds a hand-built sports-nutrition database with more than 1,000 products selected for endurance athletes. More than 3/4 of these specialty products do not appear in the other datasets at all.
The curation matters as much as the coverage. If six flavors of the same hydration mix have the same macros, FTW gives you one result: all flavors. If the caffeinated version is meaningfully different, it gets its own entry. If the extra-salty version changes the answer, it gets its own entry too.
A different barcode is not automatically a different food.
A different macro profile is.
The point is not to build the world’s largest food database. The point is to make the bottle on your bike easy to log correctly, so you can maximize your performance and crush your next PR with the best fueling advice.
References and rabbit holes
- USDA FoodData Central. The ordinary-food foundation beneath FTW’s generic food lookup.
- FatSecret Platform API. Broad branded-food coverage used alongside FTW’s endurance-specific database.
- FTW Sports Nutrition database documentation. More than 1,000 curated products, macro-relevant grouping, and specialist product coverage.