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Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

latimes.com

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Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#881

Post by fernandotakai »

praxulus wrote: post #214
ng12 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

Surely cleaning up after cooking is almost always a chore, no matter how delicious the food was?

i usually cleanup while i listen to an audiobook/music. it's not a chore.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#882

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

huac wrote: post #757
wcchandler wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely something I'm facing. I have a pretty deep interest in farming and have a bunch of approaches for "disrupting" it. But you know what my hangups are? Penetrating the culture and getting involved with the industry. Case in point -- where's the best place to buy zoysia seeds? Amazon? eBay? Some random mom and pop place with a ecommerce page? No. The best place to go is to "Bill" who is friends of frie…

Sounds like there's asymmetrical information, a great place for a startup to break into. Or create a better marketplace for seeds!

The question is there really anything to "disrupt" and is the market worth it for a startup?

I live on a horse farm and as a result, need to buy hay. Our main "hay guy" is a farmer and his son who lives about 1/2 hour away, has great prices and charges a low fee (usually: sometimes he doesn't bother charging) for delivery. There are online hay markets, and Craigslist.

They don't bother with any of that. They just ask us to tell other horse owners about them so they have a market. When I drop by to pickup some hay, they are almost never there: I leave cash in the mailbox. If I don't have exact change and I overpay by $5, he gives it to me the next time.

There are many, many, many people who are perfectly happy doing business like this. They like their work, make enough money at it (going by the shiny new tractors!), and have no desire to get online or grow their business.

I have more anecdotes about other similar people I've dealt with just this week alone, but you get my point: many of these markets aren't remotely large enough to interest a VC and the participants only want to do business face to face.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#883

Post by FeepingCreature »

cyphar wrote: post #688

Am I the only person who is more than a little freaked out by the name choice for Soylent? Sure, I get the nerdy reference but the main point of the movie is that the products Soylent made are made from people . Why someone would name a company after that is beyond me, not to mention that the founder appears to have a cult-leader-vibe. /shrug

It's pretty much all about the nerdy reference.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#884

Post by Bartweiss »

skuhn wrote: post #286
Animats wrote: post #196

Soylent made such a big deal of being a "tech company", and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute. What they didn't have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about "sending samples out" to external labs. It's not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are pro…

I think that Soylent will go down as a cautionary tale for anyone who looks at a field they know very little about and thinks "how hard could it be?". Along with Theranos. What Soylent should have built to be worth $100+ million is a way to make a food product tailored to a particular person or group of people that's based on automation and nutritional science. Instead they seem to have a cobbled together amalgam tha…

I appreciate the larger point, but the iron example seems pretty unfair.

Soylent is designed to be nutritionally complete as a sole food, or 'neutral' as part of a larger diet. That is, drinking a bottle of Soylent will reduce all of your remaining nutrition needs by the same proportion.

The result is that the balance of a diet hinges on the non-Soylent parts. If the man with too much iron and the woman with too little maintained the same (relative) diet without Soylent, they would still be unhealthy. More broadly, you can't say that a food is inherently unhealthy just because it doesn't fit into a specific slot in your diet. (You could say it's generally unhealthy for having bad nutritional balance, but that's not the case with Soylent.)

The more reasonable criticism here is of Soylent as whole-diet replacement. That's something that Soylent actually can't do, because specific nutrition needs don't vary in lockstep. If one person needs more calcium, and another needs more magnesium, Soylent can't possibly provide like a more flexible diet could.

So I agree that Soylent could have built out a more personalized (or customizable) product, with better results for many users. But I don't think it's fair to appeal to imbalances elsewhere in a diet and demand that Soylent resolve them.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#885

Post by Bartweiss »

Spooky23 wrote: post #485
skuhn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Soylent will go down as a cautionary tale for anyone who looks at a field they know very little about and thinks "how hard could it be?". Along with Theranos. What Soylent should have built to be worth $100+ million is a way to make a food product tailored to a particular person or group of people that's based on automation and nutritional science. Instead they seem to have a cobbled together amalgam tha…

It's amazing how the whole marketing aura just goes poof. Last week, the average commenter would be going on about how the real problem is that people are eating unnecessary food with Soylent.

Well, that was still my first thought when I hit "without other sources of iron". One bottle per day of Soylent can't fix up the variation in the other 75% of your calories. I don't call Wheaties unhealthy for being low on protein, because balanced nutrition has to be calculated across a whole diet.

Having said that, it is alarming that Soylent can't possibly be a balanced replacement for everyone. A custom product would have been an interesting possibility for doing that.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#886

Post by ng12 »

mbrock wrote: post #391
ng12 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

That's a problem of empathy. You can't understand how other people would have this specific feeling or practice. Obviously though many people do have it. There seems to be something very unsettling to people like you about the idea of "meal replacement". To me it appears to be a kind of cultural conservatism, like it's an attack on "family values".

It's not about empathy. The original poster was asking why people don't understand Soylent, and my answer is that it's solving a problem that they never even considered could be a problem.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#887

Post by rimantas »

unethical_ban wrote: post #612
rimantas wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good morning," said the little prince. "Good morning," said the merchant. This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink. "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince. "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills,…

IS either opinion incorrect? Why can't we agree that some people don't want to take time preparing food, and others do?

It's not about the food. It's about slowing down and taking your time. When you start taking tablets to save time drinking, o soylent, to save time eating, you for sure do not slow down. Why it is important to slow down and unplug is another big topic, but that is absolutely essential.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#888

Post by rimantas »

nsaslideface wrote: post #725
rimantas wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good morning," said the little prince. "Good morning," said the merchant. This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink. "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince. "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills,…

"New technology usurps romanticization of older technology" is not a new and surprising concept. One could replace "pill" and "spring of fresh water" with any technological advancement which took over some earlier activity that a subset of the population found and still finds enjoyable to do. Typewriters and computers, bicycles and cars, making a fire using sticks verses using a stove to cook food even. In my experie…

It has nothing to do with technology and tools.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#889

Post by chillingeffect »

n72 wrote: post #837
yolesaber wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is when he talks about his enlightened post-kitchen lifestyle. "I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber." Did this dude just leave the stove on all the time and keep the knives pointed u…

Yeah, so presumptuous of the architect to assume he'd want a kitchen. I'll bet this architect also dared to assume he'd want a toilet.

I think when we get intensely focused and emotionally invested, we tend to think our work is the answer to the world's problems and every other way of doing things is flawed.

For instance, Sergey Brin claiming Google Glass would prevent the "emasculating" effect of smart phones....[1]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/28/tech/innovation/brin-google-gl...

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#890

Post by ng12 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #274
ng12 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

Don't you ever have things to do? I like a great meal a lot, but if that was the three top events each day, I'd consider it an empty life.

Who said anything about that? Of course I have things to do, but grabbing a sandwich from the deli on my block is almost as fast as soylent and much more enjoyable.

Although from this thread I'm starting to think the real reason many people dislike Soylent is the holier-than-thou attitude many of it's supporters seem to sport :)

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