You've probably landed here one of three ways: an ad showed up in your feed, a friend handed you a stick, or you went looking for a hydration mix without a pile of sugar and artificial dye in it. Either way, you've likely never heard of us — so the fair next question is what is burbo, and why should a brand you don't recognize earn your money over one you do? Here are straight answers to the questions we get asked most.
What is burbo?
burbo is a hydration drink mix in single-serve stick packs. Tear one open, drop it into a bottle of water, and it turns into a lemon-berry drink that delivers electrolytes plus a handful of supporting vitamins and minerals.
The more useful answer: burbo was built for everyday hydration — the school run, the desk day, the yard work in August, the long drive — rather than elite endurance racing. That focus drives nearly every formulation decision we made.
Who's behind burbo?
A small, family-run team in the United States. Not a private-equity roll-up, not a white-label brand spun up on a dropshipping template, not a celebrity licensing deal.
burbo started the way a lot of good consumer brands do — with a household problem and no product that solved it well. We wanted something our family could drink daily: clean enough that we didn't wince reading the label, mild enough that it didn't taste like seawater, and good enough that people actually reached for it instead of leaving the box in the pantry. What was on the shelf was either loaded with sugar and artificial color or engineered for ultramarathoners and unpleasant for everyone else. Being small is exactly what lets us be this particular about ingredients — and this transparent about why each one is in the stick, which is most of what this blog is for.
What we test for
burbo is third-party tested for heavy metals. That matters in this category: electrolyte powders are built on mineral salts, and salts are a mined or harvested raw material, so contamination risk travels with them. Independent screening is how you know rather than assume. To be precise about what it covers — because "third-party tested" gets used as a catch-all — ours is a heavy-metals screen, not a nutrition or label-verification audit. We spell that out so the phrase actually means something on our label.
What's in it, and what isn't?
The electrolytes
Sodium, potassium, and magnesium — the three minerals that actually govern fluid balance — alongside supporting vitamins and minerals. Sodium is the one that does the heavy lifting for absorption; potassium and magnesium matter for what happens once the fluid is in you.
On magnesium specifically: ours is magnesium bisglycinate, 100 mg per stick (24% DV), which makes burbo an excellent source of magnesium. The form matters as much as the number — bisglycinate is well absorbed and gentle on the gut, where cheaper magnesium oxide is neither. We wrote a whole post on how to read that line on any label, ours included.
The sweetener
We sweeten with OnoSweet, a zero-calorie form of Reb M, plus a small amount of organic agave.
Reb M (rebaudioside M) is worth knowing about if you've written off stevia-sweetened drinks. Older stevia products leaned on Reb A, which is where the bitter, lingering, faintly metallic finish came from that turned so many people off. Reb M is the molecule that tastes closest to real sugar, with far less of that aftertaste — and it's intensely sweet, so a very small amount does the job.
One detail worth calling out: OnoSweet is stevia-free. Reb M occurs naturally in the stevia leaf, but only in trace amounts, which historically made it impractical to extract at scale. OnoSweet is instead produced by precision fermentation — the same class of process used to make many food enzymes and vitamins — which yields Reb M directly, without the stevia plant extract. If you avoid stevia on taste or on principle, this isn't that.
The organic agave is a sugar syrup, and we name it plainly: it's there in a trace amount to round out the front end of the flavor so the whole thing doesn't taste thin — not as a carbohydrate source and not in a quantity that does anything nutritionally. It's listed in the other ingredients on the pack.
What we left out
- No artificial colors
- No artificial flavors
- No sugar load — the sweetness is zero-calorie Reb M, not a dose of dextrose
- No mega-dose sodium
Made in the USA with organic and natural ingredients.
A note for the label-readers: our folate is folic acid — the synthetic form — rather than methylfolate. Folic acid has the deepest safety and absorption record and is the form used in food fortification worldwide, so we chose it with confidence. If you specifically seek out methylfolate, now you know where we stand.
Why only about 325 mg of sodium?
This is the question we get from people who've been reading electrolyte marketing for a while, and it has a real answer. The highest-sodium sticks on the market are built around roughly 1,000 mg of sodium per serving. That number isn't arbitrary — it's aimed at people losing enormous volumes of salty sweat over multi-hour efforts, and for that person it can make sense.
For everyone else, it overshoots. Sodium's job in a hydration drink is to create the osmotic conditions that pull water across the intestinal wall — but that relationship isn't linear. Past a certain concentration the drink becomes hypertonic, sits in your stomach longer, and slows the very absorption it was supposed to speed up, which is why an over-salted drink can leave you feeling bloated and, perversely, thirstier. We cover that mechanism in why too much salt slows absorption.
burbo lands at 327 mg of sodium per stick — the low end of the American College of Sports Medicine's 300–600 mg-per-hour guidance for exercise. That makes one stick a sensible single serving for a normal hot day or a moderate workout, and it means you can scale up when the day actually demands it. A 1,000 mg stick gives you no such flexibility; you get the dose whether you needed it or not.
How many sticks? A ladder you scale to the day
Because burbo is dosed at 327 mg rather than 1,000, you scale it to the day. ACSM's general guidance for exercise is 300–600 mg of sodium per hour, which makes the arithmetic straightforward:
- Ordinary day — desk work, light activity, travel. One stick, whenever you want the water to taste like something you'll finish.
- A workout, a hot afternoon, a long flight. One stick before or during. At 327 mg you're at the bottom of the ACSM band, the right place for a single moderate hour.
- Extended heat or a long session. Roughly one stick per hour of continued sweating. Two across a hot two-hour session puts you at 654 mg total — squarely inside the guidance, not above it.
- Heavy, salty sweater in real heat. Two in the first hour, then one per hour after, is a reasonable pattern. Salt on your hat brim is the signal you're in this group.
Mix each stick into a full bottle of water rather than concentrating them — more sticks should mean more fluid, not a stronger drink. Over-concentrating is the one way to make this worse rather than better.
And here's the ceiling
burbo isn't only electrolytes. Each stick also carries a full day's folate and B vitamins — a feature on a one- or two-stick day, and the thing that sets a sensible ceiling past that. Folic acid has an established tolerable upper intake level of 1,000 mcg per day for adults, and each stick contains 400 mcg; supplemental magnesium's upper level is 350 mg a day against our 100 mg per stick. So, plainly:
- Two sticks in a day — comfortably fine. That covers the large majority of hot days, workouts, and travel days.
- Three — the practical ceiling, where the vitamin load rather than the sodium becomes the limiting factor.
- Past three — an all-day ride, a tournament Saturday, outdoor work through August. Keep drinking, but take the additional sodium from food, salt tabs, or a plain vitamin-free electrolyte. That's just the arithmetic — and a product dosed with enough intent to tell you where it stops.
Knowing exactly where a product stops is a genuinely useful thing to have — and for most people on most days, two sticks is more headroom than you'll ever need.
How is burbo different from the big electrolyte brands?
The category splits into three camps, and it's worth knowing which one you're buying from:
- High-sugar hydration mixes — built around glucose to accelerate absorption. Effective during hard endurance efforts, harder to justify as a daily habit.
- High-sodium performance mixes — built for heavy, salty sweaters going long. Excellent for that use case, aggressive for everyone else.
- Everyday hydration — moderate sodium you scale by the hour, no sugar load, clean label, drinkable daily. That's where burbo sits.
None of those camps is wrong. They're solving different problems. The mistake is buying a fixed 1,000 mg dose for a life that mostly needs 327 — and occasionally needs 654.
Do I actually need this every day?
You need electrolytes every day. That part isn't up for debate — sodium, potassium, and magnesium are fundamental to nerve signaling, muscle contraction, and keeping fluid where it belongs, and your body has no way to store a surplus for later.
What isn't automatic is needing an electrolyte supplement every day. On a mild day with normal meals, food and water often cover it. That gap is precisely why burbo exists in the form it does.
It's not only about the electrolytes
Two other things earn a stick its place on an ordinary day, and neither is about sodium.
The first is that it gets you to drink the water. The most common hydration failure isn't a mineral deficit — it's simply not drinking enough. Plain water is easy to forget and easy to abandon half-finished on the desk. Give the same bottle a flavor you look forward to and it actually gets finished. Whatever else is in the stick, the fluid you drank because you enjoyed it is the part doing the most work.
The second is what rides along with it. burbo includes vitamins and minerals beyond the core electrolytes — nutrients that support normal everyday function, and that don't scale with how much you sweat the way sodium does. They're daily, whether you trained or sat at a desk. So on a rest day, when your electrolyte losses are minimal, a stick is still delivering something useful, plus the bottle of water it talked you into.
That's a meaningfully different proposition than a pure performance mix, which is optimized for one job and largely idle when you're not doing it.
Is it worth the price?
A 14-pack runs $24.95 — about $1.78 per stick. The comparison worth making isn't another brand's stick anyway; it's the bottled sports drink you'd otherwise grab at a gas station, which typically costs more, weighs more, and arrives with a substantial dose of sugar you didn't ask for. What you're paying for is a clean, moderate-sodium daily stick you'll actually reach for.
The short version
burbo is a clean-label, moderate-sodium hydration stick from a small US family team — sweetened with stevia-free, zero-calorie Reb M and a trace of organic agave, third-party tested for heavy metals, and built for daily use rather than race day. We formulated it around 327 mg of sodium on purpose, because a dose you can scale by the hour beats a fixed dose you can't.
If you're still deciding, start with the science: read how much electrolyte you actually need, run the two tests in that post, and then decide how burbo fits what your body is losing. That's a better basis for the purchase than any brand's sales pitch — ours included.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.