Silver and Orange Anniversary

A little over a year ago, SAP Good Energy was a new idea manifesting as a bedroom floor covered in mailers. In September the London-based brand turned one, just days after launching SAP Mix, a drink mix built on the same principle as its original maple syrup sachets: fuel should be something you actually want to take.

In 12 months, those reflective silver and orange sachets have become a fixture of run crew photos across the UK. They’ve sold out three times, fuelled London’s biggest half marathon and turned up in coffee cups across Sydney’s marathon week. The story behind the brand begins with two 28-year-olds who couldn’t stomach the idea of taking another conventional energy gel.

James Warnock spent three years working in mergers and acquisitions at PwC before the sudden death of his father in 2022 made him rethink his path. He began posting on social media while completing a personal training course on weekends. After a career break, his following had grown enough that he handed in his notice and went full-time as a content creator.

Fitness was the starting point, but it didn’t stay the focus for long. “Fitness was such an escape for me that I didn’t want to document it all the time,” James says. “So I started switching to more mental health things, because I was going through the wringer a little bit with losing my dad and not really knowing what I wanted to do in my mid-20s. That resonated with a lot of people.” 

That openness built him a substantial audience, which sits at just under 380,000 today on Instagram, and it would become SAP’s launchpad.

Born and raised in Toronto (the Canadian connection matters), Conor McNamee promoted events at university and then moved into artist management, touring the US with DJs. When Covid upended the entertainment industry, he switched to product and UI/UX design in tech and crypto, work that let him live as a digital nomad for years. It was also when he took up running. In Berlin he fell in with run crew bpm just as social run clubs were taking off. “I just realised how amazing the running scene was,” he says. 

The pair eventually met through mutual friends in Cape Town, South Africa, on a run of about 20km. Neither had a gel in hand. “We were using bananas, dates, basically anything we could use that wasn’t processed,” James says.

Conor had been sitting on an idea for a while. “I was saying how maple syrup is a great source of quick carbs and I’d love to bring it to the UK,” he says. “And James is like, ‘You should.’” Two months of conversations later, they were building a brand.

It was Conor who came up with the simple, memorable name. “Sap is obviously what you get from the tree in the first place,” James says. “But it also has a ring to it. People now use the term ‘SAP’ instead of ‘gel’.” 

The positioning borrows from running shoes. Conventional gels, James argues, are the super shoes of fuelling: purpose-built for intense sessions and race day, but not something most runners want to reach for every day. “There’s nothing really on the market that you want to take every single day and look forward to taking,” he says, “like a versatile shoe that you can use in every environment.” 

Conor recognised the problem from his own cupboard. “I would have a ton of gels and I’d go for a long run, and I’d only grab one of the three that I should have taken,” he says. “Or I’d come home with multiple, just because I’d feel gross taking them.”

So SAP is simply organic Canadian maple syrup and Himalayan salt. Conor describes the goal as ticking three boxes at once: to create something healthy, high-performance and aspirational. Maple syrup’s familiarity helps with the first criterion. “Having a product people have used their entire life, like maple syrup on their oats, meant the barrier to acceptance was much lower,” James says. “People love the fact that they can just look on the back and know exactly what it is they’re putting in their bodies. 

“No one’s really going to follow a gel brand because it’s a gel brand. But the good energy element encapsulates everything we love about running – good energy moments before a run, after a run, during a run.”

As for performance, Conor argues that what happens in a lab matters less than what happens on the road. “All the lab studies will show you that the maltodextrin will oxidise the fastest, but that doesn’t mean that taking a gel is actually the best thing for you,” he says. “What really matters is: can you stomach three of them without feeling like you’re going to puke? We might not be the fastest carb on the planet, but we are fast enough. And will a person be able to stomach eight SAPs over eight gels any day? Yes.”

The aspirational box is where SAP really stands apart. The founders worked with Stockholm design studio Figur on a minimalist identity to match the minimal ingredients, an identity the designers say was inspired by the steel buckets used to collect Canadian maple sap. “No one’s really done a reflective silver, which looks really cool in photos,” James says. “And orange is, in our opinion, an overlooked colour.” 

SAP launched 14 months ago, leaning on James’s following and a circle of friends who happened to be running influencers. “It literally just started off with me in my room putting SAP into mailers and sending it to our friends in London and around the UK to try it and post,” Conor says. 

Within four weeks, SAP had sold out. The founders set aside 500 cases so subscribers wouldn’t go without. Fresh stock returned in early January, and within two months it was gone again, just as the pair set off on their Good Energy Tour: 10 cities in about 10 days, from Bath, Bristol and Cardiff to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle, hosting runs with local crews along the way. “Usually brands will only focus on London,” Conor says. “We wanted to go all over the UK.” 

The biggest moment came in May, when SAP was chosen as the fuel partner for the Hackney Half. According to Conor, around 18,000 of the more than 24,000 runners took a SAP on course, a take-up rate he puts at 75% against a typical 20–40%. James is clear that none of it would stick without a product people come back for. “You can have great marketing, but if your product’s not good, people won’t return,” he says.

Along the way, SAP has signed its first athletes. George Grassly was the first amateur across the finish line at this year’s London Marathon in 2:12:54, in only his second marathon, while former US college runner Inca Padfield made her marathon debut in London in 2:42.

SAP also found its way to Australia. For Sydney's marathon week, when Tempo Journal launched Issue 01 of our new magazine from a customised Coffee Supreme truck, one menu item stole the show: a cold brew topped with salted cold foam made with SAP Good Energy.

SAP Mix, released in mid-September, extends the same idea to liquid carbs. It contains three ingredients: dehydrated maple syrup powder, Himalayan salt and natural lemon flavour. A single scoop in a standard bottle delivers 40g of carbohydrates.

Drink mixes are a staple for cyclists and ultrarunners, and the founders hope more runners will discover them. “There’s nothing like it in the UK at the moment,” James says. “It’s also far less sweet than a lot of other products.”

It also fills a gap in the range. Until now, SAP has offered just two sachets, the SAP 25 and SAP 40, which meant customers often turned to other brands for everything else. Another product is currently in development, with the aim of covering nearly every fuelling need an endurance athlete has.

The next 12 months are about consolidation. The first priority, James says, is a supply chain robust enough “so we never sell out of SAP again”. The founders also want to work with nutritionists and scientists to study maple’s effectiveness in a running environment, and they hope that a full US launch is roughly a year away. 

For all the momentum, SAP remains a team of four: James and Conor, plus Ellie on operations and Lara leading events and partnerships. James is the first to admit there’s plenty still to figure out.

“We’re still so young, so there’s still so much for us to learn,” he says. “It obviously looks like things are going incredibly well from the outside, and they are. But it’s still a startup.”

One year in, the energy is good.