Soylent Blog

"Soylent’s levels of heavy metals are entirely safe and sustainable, even for people using Soylent as a complete food substitute. Trace amounts of lead and cadmium are present everywhere, including drinking water, which is why the FDA and EPA set strict exposure limits. The FDA’s limits for lead in infant formula, which is especially stringent, is 0.5ug/mL.

Our testing is done by Covance, an independent third-party lab, using the ultra sensitive and precise method ICP-MS. Testing protocols are standardized by AOAC International. Lead in Soylent 1.5 is 0.009982ug/mL, less than 1/50th of the FDA requirements for infant food. See the full certificate of analysis of Soylent 1.5 for details.

The FDA does not set cadmium limits for food, but even the highest cadmium levels we have seen in testing, 21ug per serving, is thousands of times lower than the level of any observed effect in Proposition 65 toxicology data. We also test for arsenic, which at 0.7525ug per serving is well below the Proposition 65 limit.

The heavy metal levels specified by California Proposition 65, which were cited in As You Sow’s press release, are much more stringent than those set by the FDA, the EPA, and the WHO. As a result, most packaged foods sold in California, as well as restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, convenience stores, and theme parks are required to display the warning. We are not required to change the product, but we are required to display the Proposition 65 text where we sell…

I'm bothered by the amount of maltodextrin. (Among other things. But this jumps out at me.) Assuming this is correct:

http://blog.soylent.me/post/68180382810/soylent-1-0-macronutrient-overview

That's a lot. As you can see it's the #1 ingredient in Soylent:

http://blog.soylent.me/post/74770956256/soylent-1-0-final-nutrition

They claim that the overall glycemic index (with fiber, etc.) is "rather low", but I can't find fasting vs. postprandial glucose readings that would substantiate this. By itself, maltodextrin has a rather high GI. I do see that Rhinehart posted about this concern a while back:

http://discourse.soylent.me/t/effects-of-soylent-on-diabetics/4894

...but does anyone have more recent info? Without more data, diabetics and prediabetics should best avoid this for now.

edit: A clarification - blood glucose testing won't actually tell you the product's GI, of course. And the important number to look at is glycemic load, but that is easy to calculate given GI. The Soylent folks have not yet shared the GI afaik. (They would need to send it to a lab for testing.) Diabetics should already be monitoring their glucose levels anyway, so I assume they will figure out pretty quickly if this stuff spikes their blood sugar. It's not something you would want to replace all your meals with if that is the case!

Whether or not you are diabetic, it would be a good idea to go to your doctor and get complete bloodwork done before you start using this if you are planning to…

I imagine when you "buy" your supplies and don't pay for them until about ninety days after you took delivery of the supplies, that is considered debt as well?

I mean if I want to ship something, Fed Ex will ask for payment up front but when Amazon.com ships something they probably don't actually send the money right away. I am still trying to grasp this concept credit terms. I must add that I have had no training in this field and have basically just skimmed through the soylent blog post

http://blog.soylent.com/post/133420708272/pricing-soylent-efficiently

so in my mind, what we want to do is get the "interest-free loan" from our supplier of equal or greater duration to the credit term we give our customers.

I imagine this is a double whammy because suppliers offers better terms when the going is good and become strict when the going gets bad. Now that I think about it, perhaps Apple sitting on a pile of cash isn't such a bad idea after all right? I mean if they have to go through a rough patch again, won't any credit terms they get (banks, investors, or suppliers) automatically be worse? I don't know the rules about financial stuff but my perception is that as public companies there is only so much information you can withhold (and only for so long) without breaking financial regulations (and those regulations presumably exist for a good reason).

The title "Update on Soylent Bar" is pretty vague, so here's the gist:

> It has recently come to our attention that a small number of our customers have experienced gastrointestinal issues after consuming Soylent Bars. As a precautionary measure, we are halting all Soylent Bar purchases and shipments and are advising our customers to discard any remaining bars in their possession.

> After hearing from our customers, we immediately began investigating the cause of the issue and whether it was linked to a problem with the Bars. So far we have not yet identified one...

> We will be reaching out via e-mail to all Bar customers to offer a full refund.

Wow.

I have a box of Soylent Bars from a few weeks ago I've been eating on occasion. I haven't had any issues, and they seem fine to me.

Kudos to the Soylent team for covering the issue so quickly, especially after the incident last month [1] where Coffiest wasn't meeting its prescribed nutritional content. It seems like they're struggling with production quality and consistency at scale.

(That said, I am a happy Soylent customer.)

[1]: http://blog.soylent.com/post/149763512312/update-on-coffiest-and-powder

> is he really serious about the nutrition thing? His team might as well have been hand-picked for a social-networking startup

They were a traditional tech startup. They pivoted when that market collapsed.

http://blog.soylent.me/

> YC accepted our original idea, to build affordable wireless networks for developing countries, for the summer 2012 batch. We spent the entire summer prototyping our technology and looking for a customer. By demo day, we had a white space radio with a Bill of Materials (BOM) of $70 operating around Silicon Valley. We didn’t have customers and were facing an intimidating set of regulatory hurdles. We spoke with some of the valley’s top VC’s but failed to raise. Instead of pushing for investment that wasn’t there, we went back to focusing on acquiring customers and finishing our product as soon as possible. We never found a customer.

It is irresponsible for them to launch a product, with massive publicity, and claim the product is safe for everyone (diabetics? pregnant women? People with Crohn's? Anorexics?) and to claim there is much evidence to support safety.

They addressed this here http://blog.soylent.me/post/66807143901/this-morning-vices-brian-merchant-published-a

>> We would also like to emphasize the fact that Soylent 1.0, the product for which we have accepted over $1.5M in preorders, will not be manufactured by hand by our executive team. We have signed a purchase order with RFI Ingredients, a contract manufacturer with over 20 years of experience producing FDA-approved food products.

I was extremely skeptical of these guys, but they seem to be addressing some of the major concerns I had. I still think there's a lot of testing to be done before this lives up to all the promises, but they get some definite kudos for their quick responses.