burbo is a hydration drink mix made by a small, family-run company in Virginia. One product, one flavor, no venture backing, no celebrity attached to it.
This page is the honest version of who we are and what we made, including the parts that aren't flattering.
Why we started
The usual way: a household problem and nothing on the shelf that solved it.
We wanted something the family could drink every day. Clean enough that we didn't wince reading the label. Mild enough that it didn't taste like seawater. Good enough that people would actually reach for it instead of leaving the box in the pantry until it went stale.
What was available was mostly one of two things: loaded with sugar and artificial color, or engineered for ultramarathoners and unpleasant for everyone else. The second category is genuinely good at what it does — it just isn't built for a school run, a desk day, or yard work in August.
What we made
A single-serve stick that turns a bottle of water into a lemon-berry drink, with electrolytes and a set of supporting vitamins and minerals.
Three decisions define it:
Moderate sodium — 327 mg per stick. The highest-sodium sticks on the market run around 1,000 mg. That number is aimed at people losing enormous volumes of salty sweat over multi-hour efforts, and for that person it makes sense. For everyone else it overshoots, and an over-concentrated drink actually slows the absorption it's supposed to speed up. At 327 mg you scale by the hour instead of taking one fixed dose whether the day called for it or not.
No sugar load. Sweetened with OnoSweet, a zero-calorie form of Reb M produced by precision fermentation rather than stevia leaf extract, plus a trace of organic agave to round out the flavor. Agave is a sugar syrup and we'd rather name it than bury it — it's there in a small amount for taste, not as a carbohydrate source.
Magnesium bisglycinate, 100 mg. The form matters as much as the number. Bisglycinate absorbs well and is gentle on the gut, where the cheap alternative — magnesium oxide — is neither.
Made in the USA with organic and natural ingredients. No artificial colors or flavors.
What we test for
burbo is third-party tested for heavy metals. That matters more in this category than it sounds: 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 find out instead of assuming.
We'll also be precise about what that claim does and doesn't cover, because "third-party tested" gets used as a catch-all. Ours is a heavy-metals screen. It is not a third-party nutrition audit or a label-verification certification. Plenty of brands let the phrase sit there doing vague work. We'd rather tell you exactly what's been checked.
The tradeoffs
Being small is a real disadvantage and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
We don't have the ad budget or the shelf space of the category leaders. At $24.95 for 14 sticks, we're about $1.78 each — not the cheapest option, partly because buying in 14-count rather than 30 or 60 costs you something per stick, and partly because the ingredients we chose cost more than the alternatives.
We're also not the right product for every situation. If you're going hard for four hours, you need carbohydrate for fuel and no hydration stick provides enough of it — ours included. If you're sick and losing fluid fast, an oral rehydration solution is the right tool and we'll tell you that rather than sell you sticks.
What we do have is the ability to tell you exactly why every ingredient is in the stick, and where the product stops being the right answer.
The blog
Most of what we know ends up in Hydration Science. It's written to be useful whether or not you buy anything, and it regularly argues against our own commercial interest, because that's the only version worth reading from a company that sells the thing it's writing about.
If you want to know how those articles get made, including our use of AI assistance and the rules we write against, that's on How We Write About Hydration.
Reach us
Email yummy@drinkburbo.com. A person reads it.
We're also on Instagram and Facebook.
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.