Ya, and there's nothing wrong with that. I wouldn't fault anyone for choosing not to use Soylent because of this.
But there seems to be a weird sort of vitriol in the reaction here that doesn't seem like it happened to Chipotle. Perhaps because people see it as an example of the overconfident arrogance of 'tech people'. I'm not sure. But it seems deeply misguided to me.
Yes, something has gone wrong. Yes, they are having trouble figuring out exactly what it was. But so did Chipotle. So do lots of other food companies when things like this happens. Would it be great if this didn't happen? Absolutely. But it's not unprecedented and it isn't at all clear to me that their processes and controls are substantially inferior to the industry standard.
And secondly, they market themselves as a sort of radical new approach to food. They expressly cultivate that image of transformation and self-experimentation. Anyone willing to use a product like that should be more tolerant of bugs than average, IMO. If I got sick from Soylent I might stop drinking it, but I wouldn't say they shouldn't have made the thing in the first place.
The whole point of bringing in the discipline associated with release notes and iterations is to make it a lot more transparent than existing food producers. The only problem is that they are not transparent enough with exact quantities and processes anymore.
However, their process is supposed to decrease the number of issues not increase it.
I agree i'd like them to be completely transparent. However, they're certainly more transparent than your average packaged food company.
And I don't think you can extrapolate from a single incident that their process has increased the number of issues. You need more data than that to make a claim of that sort.
> How might they acquire that knowledge, other than through the process they seem to currently be executing?
Well, a lot of folks would like to see a bit more care paid attention to the entire process. This isn't the first time Soylent has shipped potentially dangerous product.
Not long ago, they shipped their new bottled formula to folks, and it arrived covered in mold! Their snack bars have made people violently ill, and now their powder too. Every product Soylent makes, is making or has made people ill.
Soylent has practically zero quality control/testing, and doesn't have on-site staff dedicated to ensuring their product is safe. They send out a few carefully selected samples to an external lab, but that's far from continuous testing of the product rolling off the line.
Some might attribute it to the "silicon valley" mindset Soylent has. "We'll disrupt the food industry - but we won't bother to learn what it takes to produce uniformly clean and safe product".
There's good reasons the "big guys" spend so much on lab personnel and equipment. If people all around the world started getting sick from Coca-Cola, it wouldn't be good - to say the least.
Do you have sources? I was of the opinion that all of this stuff is heavily regulated by the FDA. What makes you think Soylent really criminally negligent, or at least any more so than any other food manufacturer?
Soylent is classified as a nutritional supplement, which isn't the same as "food". It's the same umbrella things like body-building supplements enjoy being under, with far more relaxed requirements than "food".
Sources are well known, a quick search turns them up[1][2][3]. The testing procedure has been disclosed by Soylent during their last debacle, and there was discussion here on HN[3][4].
I used to buy Soylent myself, started at version 1.5 (powder in the bag). But come on, this sort of thing is seriously not OK. You need better quality control, and you need better (and more rapid) testing of product as it rolls off the line. Hunt and pecking clearly isn't getting it done, and problems are slipping out under their noses. It's people's health - nothing to joke at. "Move fast; make people sick" isn't a good mantra.
> FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA
Soylent has no real idea if that ingredient was the culprit (and from the FDA's classification, it seems reasonable to suspect that ingredient is not the problem). For all anyone knows, it could be a combination of ingredients, or not an ingredient at all, but rather contamination in the manufacturing process.
I agree with most of your criticisms, but they don't actually apply to the claim that the algae-derived ingredient, while legal and safe, causes allergic reactions or digestive issues with a very small portion of people.
I believe Soylent has a pretty good idea. They know what changed in their formula, they know the difference between the products receiving complaints and the products not, and they have evidence from other companies (Honey Stinger) who had similar issues.
I wonder if they run any sort of A/B testing. Wouldn't harm if they sent few packages with one ingredient missing once in a while, then see what's the response.
> I wonder if they run any sort of A/B testing. Wouldn't harm if they sent few packages with one ingredient missing once in a while, then see what's the response.
The idea of using A/B testing for food safety testing is horrifying.
I recently went to Chipotle for I think the first time since the changes[1], and while I'm sure the food is safer, having the chicken cooked offsite ruins the texture. I'm not sure I'll go back any time soon.
[1] I didn't stop going because of the incident, I stopped going because I stopped doing what I was typically following with lunch at Chipotle.
I'm not suggesting that they weren't damaged by those incidents. 2016 data isn't in yet, but 2015 sales figures show them to be at least holding steady.
My point was that the company ultimately aggressively addressed the problem head-on and very well may have saved the company. The public has no long term memory. Let's compare notes in 2018.
I had to read that twice before I understood that you didn't mean diaphragm contractions; I was really scratching my head as to why soylent users should expect hiccups!
I don't think most people even have a concept of a "beta-style food," so it seems pretty unreasonable to expect them to infer that from Soylent's marketing.
I'm not sure that's true; I've dabbled with the idea of ordering it a few times but thought it's probably best to wait a little bit more. Maybe I'll wait forever or maybe soylent will lead to an end of the destruction caused by industrialised farming, who knows.
Despite this hiccup I'm glad they are making the attempt to be able to feed the world a well balanced diet (isn't that the plan?).
Other food manufacturers specialise in trying to poison you in the longer term with salt, sugar, flavour packs, fructose, "low fat", MSG, anemic vegetables, mercury tuna and antibiotic meat.
>We are constantly exploring the frontiers of food technology, with an aim to engineering foods which are more nutritious, efficient, and affordable than ever before.
Lots of companies say stuff like that. If what you mean to say is "We want to move fast and break things, and we consider this a beta product not ready for the wide market, so we're applying looser controls than most food companies, and this stuff might make you stick," then you need to say that. You can't reasonably expect people to intuit that from generic marketing talk† about exploring frontiers.
† For example, milk brand FairLife boasts on its website about "changing the face of the dairy industry through cutting edge innovation." This is in reference to using 22-year-old dairies as their suppliers. Nobody understands it to mean that FairLife might make you sick.
The Mexican restaurant down the street doesn't advertise that they buy the cheapest chicken in town and therefore may give you food poisoning.
They expect you to get that point based on the price.
Advertisers are simply not going to do what many of these HN comments are demanding. This isn't a tech app, this isn't a linux distro. This is a general consumer facing product.
They don't have an abnormal rate of sickness and they aren't selling people fish oil. They're using experimental products, which they are up-front about, and have experienced setbacks because of that.
A food product that pleases this community would never make it to market or be profitable.
> This isn't a tech app, this isn't a linux distro. This is a general consumer facing product.
I thought you said it was clearly an experimental beta. They can't have it both ways, where they get a pass for any problems they encounter because it's experimental and not fully beta-tested (and thus not yet ready for general consumption) and they get a pass on vague marketing because it's a general consumer-facing product (which means it's considered "ready" for the general consumer).
> They're using experimental products, which they are up-front about
No, they aren't. That is the entire point I was making in the comment you're replying to. Their marketing doesn't claim to be any more "experimental" than the countless other brands that call themselves innovative.
I don't mean to harp on Soylent, because I mean, I'm not sure how many people were aware that this allergy even existed. Stuff like this happens even to much larger companies. But I think it's reasonable to hold them to the same standards as any other company producing food for the general market, not treat them as though they're in some hazy "public beta food" state that grants carte blanche.
Look at Chipotle for instance, they are dealing with similar contamination related problems.