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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant. I really don't understand the hate that's directed towards this product. Nobody was seriously injured, it was a relatively small number of people that got sick.

Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it.

People get food poisoning randomly from restaurants all the time. And usually they can never figure otu exactly what it was that caused it, they just carry on and maybe get their rating lowered or license taken away if it keeps happening. Chipotle even just had the same problem.

Yes, they get a bunch of shit for it. But it's not like this is a problem that doesn't afflict the 'normal' food industry as well.

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Sorry for the strong language but bullshit.

I am sure it has changed over the years but I still have vivid memories of the rodents that ran around the original warehouse they mixed soylent in. It was a joke. They had a bunch of randos mixing powders haphazardly and no sense of proper food prep/sanitation. It was scarier than some of the operations that supplement manufacturers run. I am sure its changed but it blows my mind that this is classified as an ambitious project.

Edit: Here is the video. https://youtu.be/t8NCigh54jg?t=5m50s

None of the bags made in that facility were sold to the public. I remember because I was an original crowdfunder eager to receive my first shipment. They did not ship until they were producing it at the regulated co-packing facility.

Just out of curiosity, what did they do with the mix from that warehouse?

As far as I know, they tested it on themselves and gave it to friends and reporters to hype it up.

That still sounds criminal to me.

I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted. People shouldn't even be giving away food that was mixed in a facility that has rats running around.

Do you think that people with a rodent problem shouldn't invite others over for dinner? Do you think they shouldn't eat in their own home? Are your concerns actually about health or about the sanctity of food being corrupted by impurity?

About 20 million homes each year get rodent infestations. Even more have rats in them, but not at the infestation level. This is not limited to people in poverty or low incomes, either.

Commercial food prep facilities obviously should be held to higher standards, but this facility was basically the equivalent of doing it in their garage for test batch purposes, which I doubt you would bat an eyelash at.

I don't care about the standards they had as a startup before they had a commercial product. I care about the standards they have at the facilities creating the product I would be purchasing.

So, in that Vice Motherboard piece, CEO Rob Rhinehart claims that Grocers don't scale to 7 billion, but he provides nothing to back up that claim or his other claim that engineered food is better than what a standard Grocer offers.

Later, he goes on to claim that no one is lacking clean water around the 12:30 mark, seems like this CEO is just aimlessly spewing bullshit with no facts to back up what he claims.

What is going to happen next? Are they going to source their ingredients from farms where all those rodents can run around freely?

> You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant.

But Soylent is supposed to be consumable on a daily basis, so long-term effects are important. Remember the documentary Super Size Me, which tested long term effects of food from a certain fast-food restaurant? [1]

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521

I imagine that's why the company is still tweaking the formula based on results. It's not like they picked a formula years ago and have refused to iterate.

I have to agree with the above poster. I don't understand the hate directed at Soylent, and I don't understand what folks expect them to do. The company is very transparent as well, which is exactly what you'd hope for a company trying to develop a product like this. In many cases, the folks who say the problem Soylent is tackling is borderline impossible are the same ones who expect them to find a perfect formula right out of the gate and see any stumbling blocks as vindication that the whole effort is doomed. These expectations seem grossly at odds to me.

For what it's worth, many people absolutely do eat restaurant food on a daily or nearly daily basis. In the past year of eating a mixture of food from restaurants, home-cooked meals, and Soylent, I've only ever gotten sick (severely so, at that) from restaurant food.

Also, as for that documentary, he just lived off fast food for a month, right? That's hardly long-term. Plenty of folks have effectively repeated exactly the same experiment with Soylent many times over at this point. He also didn't just eat fast food, but intentionally overconsumed (hence the title of the documentary), which is quite contrary to the purpose of Soylent (given that each bottle is just 400 kcal).

That documentary tested overeating well outside the bounds of any sane nutritional guidelines. It's sad that people don't have the critical thinking skills required to realize the same thing would happen if you ate those levels of calories at any restaurant or even at home.

wasn't there a counter-documentary where someone ate from mcdonalds every day and also followed a fairly strict exercise regimen and wound up being way fitter than when he started?

Yep, it was called "Fat Head." The exercise regime wasn't even that strict, it was basically continuing the regular walking the documentarian already did. However, the food intake was strictly limited to 1800 calories and less then 100g of carbs per day. The goal being to show fast food isn't inherently unhealthy, it was the quantity (as already noted above) being eaten in Super Size Me that was unhealthy. In that regard, Fat Head succeeded as the documentarian's health metrics all improved (lot weight, lower blood pressure, better cholesterol measurements).

Note that the premise of "Super Size Me" was to get the "Super Size" menu whenever asked by the Mc Donald's counter clerk, leading to overconsumption.

Yes, but the overall point remains if you overeat you'll get fat regardless of what it is.

You can actually get a balanced daily diet out of mcdonalds if you ask for unsalted fries and get one of their salads once in a while.

Honestly sodium aside the only thing you need to do not to over eat at MC is to get water instead of soda and just regular sized burger.

It will be around 600-700 cals per meal with fries which means you can eat 3 of those a day and maintain weight or even lose some depending on your age, sex, bodymass and daily regiment.

As others mentioned, there was.

I did this myself around the same time as Super Size Me for a handful of reasons, none of which were to prove a point. I had good results from it. Would I have been even better off if I wasn't eating fast food for every meal? Probably. But I certainly wasn't worse off for eating that way and it scratched the itches which led me to that path in the first place.

Fat Head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me#Criticism_and_st...

Ya, I agree. Long-term effects are important. But AFAIK there's no indication of any long-term harm from Soylent. There's only an indication that a particular batch may have been contaminated.

This suggests not that they were careless in choosing their formulation or research, but that there was an error in the manufacturing process. This is something that can happen to any company, and has many times. Should they fix it? Yes. But I don't think they should be held to a higher standard here than anyone else.

There's no indication of long-term anything from Soylent, just people screaming that it must be bad, or people screaming that it's the future. It's mostly a ton of anecdote, and no reason to believe that it's particularly harmful, or particularly healthy in the long-term.

My feeling? You want to beta-test that with your health, I won't stop you, but I won't join you either.

All diet choices amount to beta testing with your health. There is no (known) correct way to eat, so we choose the best we can based culture/health class/news stories/diet gurus/doctors. It is very hard to make the case that eating Soylent (never tried it myself), is meaningfully different from choosing to go macrobiotic, or paleo, or following the food pyramid.

How about just... eating food? I know, I know... so unpopular, but "Paleo, Macro..." all of that crap? Let it go. Outside of people trying to sell you shit, including books, the best advice you'll ever get is just to eat a relatively balanced diet, keep up fiber intake, and maintain a healthy weight. Whether you prefer or personally thrive more on meaty diets, or eating a lot of barley isn't really that hard to figure out.

You don't need to chug slurry 24/7, or eschew all carbs to achieve it. Avoid too much of any one thing, avoid too much processed crap (not because it's inherently bad, but because it's usually loaded with salt and sugar), and learn to cook. It's hardly a science, but you have large historical samples of people living that way, compared to a couple years of someone telling you that you can spend the rest of your days drinking the latest gray sludge.

There is no such thing as just "eating food" - you are making diet choices, consciously and/or subconsciously in everything you choose to eat. Your comment is loaded with all sorts of diet judgement (fiber good, salt bad, balanced good, processed bad). We could find out barley causes cancer, or even though you thrive on a meaty diet, it causes heart disease. Or diet doesn't matter and it is all genetic or micro-biome. There is no diet that isn't beta testing.

The odds of finding out that something like barley and chicken are especially carcinogenic are a lot less than the odds that Soylent or Paleo or some other fad is frankly unhealthy.

Ignore the bulk of nutrition "research" which is after all, crap, and focus on the few things that are relatively sound. High fiber, healthy weight, good blood levels, get your nutrients. It's not that hard.

Couldn't it be argued that it's "relatively sound" that as long as you get a good balance of calories and macro and micro nutrients, which is exactly what Soylent provides, that you are on a good path?

FWIW, on the topic of healthy weight, the Soylent forum has many anecdotes of people who have used the product to lose (or gain!) weight because it allows them to easily count calories without having to spend time scanning products into MyFitnessPal every day and weighing all of their food.

The idea of "healthy weight, good blood levels, get your nutrients" is the goal of every diet I am aware of. But as for what goes in your mouth to achieve it, there is a plethora of conflicting ideas. I totally agree that the bulk of nutrition research is crap, which is why I put a barley and chicken diet, vegan diet, paleo diet, and Soylent diet in the same "beta testing" category.

My favorite two pieces of food advice both come from Michael Pollan:

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

And:

"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

I hate the second quote. My great-gradmother wouldn't recognize all sorts of delicious cuisine from other culture's as food.

A better one might be "Don't eat anything someone's great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food"

The main point of that documentary was to make the creator famous by doing click-bait style journalism in long-form.

Super Size Me was ridiculous, I bought into it too, but he was going out of his way to eat unhealthy at McDonald's. Even McDonald's puts nutritional information out there and doesn't recommend the daily intake of calories that guy was making.

The point is that they do recommend it, just not in the tiny print. 99% of what they say is "eat more", 1% is "with care".

The advertising shows combinations of items, the staff offer upsizing for a deal, etc. Their business model clearly takes advantage of upselling and impulse buys.

SSM is a story about what happens to someone who doesn't know any better and just goes to the convenient restaurant, eating the standard portions they sell. It's best viewed with that other documentary, about the guy who got skinny eating at McDs (and exercising!). It's not (strictly) the food that does it, but the portions and lifestyle it encourages.

I'm not sure I'd consider 30 days to be "long term", but I do agree that long-term effects are important. I think deficiencies in important micronutrients take longer to have detectable effects and are harder to debug, in general though. It's why I am intrigued by Soylent but try to get my nutrients by just having a variety of foods in my diet.

„...long-term effects...“

Slightly OT: in regard to „long-term“ effects of food/diet, I am curious what you consider long-term? Is long-term a defined timeframe? Is it 1 year, 10 years, 1000 years (multiple generations)?

That's more entertainment than a real documentary.

> Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it.

Really? It seems to me like it's Ensure for computer programmers.

Have you tried ensure?

It's intolerably sweet (comes in chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and butter pecan). There's no option for people who want a meal replacement, not dessert.

It gives me indigestion every time I drink it.

I switched to Soylent because it's a better product than Ensure.

But that's not a revolutionary difference in kind.

>Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers.

I have never understood why people think Soylent is doing something so interesting. It is essentially baby formula for adults. And its not like the nutritional requirements of infants are any simpler than adults. The formula industry has existed for decades and has generally done a good enough job of producing products that are able to make up 100% of a human's diet.

It's not that interesting from a scientific perspective. They're not doing anything that any doctor or biology grad student couldn't do. It's the concept that's interesting.

Food is a pretty inefficient thing. In terms of the time we spend consuming it and the resources expended in its production. Soylent is a first step towards a solution to those problems. The theoretical efficiency gain is very high. Of course, Soylent won't achieve that, but the idea is alluring.

Personally, I don't want to drink Soylent for all or even most of my meals. I drink it 1-2x per week. I generally feel better after drinking it than after eating a meal, and i'd say say Soylent is healthier than the average meal i'd make for myself otherwise.

Aside from that, it's fast, cheap, stays good for a long time and requires no cleanup. All that doesn't mean it's going to change the world, but it is a nice addition to my palette of available foodstuffs.

Food poisoning is bad food prep techniques.Restaurants generally provide food with ingredients within an expected band, prepared in an expected way.

Soylent using experimental ingredients in their products and finding out that they are irritating some users is not the same thing.

If a restaurant told me they used all sorts of "new" industrial ingredients than I would likely balk. I would not want to be in on that beta program.

Especially since, you know, it's likely they are pursuing new ingredients all the time to improve their margins, not the food quality, taste or nutrition.

"Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers"

No, they aren't. There is nothing special about what they're trying to do compared to any other packaged food manufacturer. That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer.

"It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups."

It entirely is. If this happened to Twinkies, people would be livid. I see no reason that shouldn't be the same response here.

Soylent pretends to be more ambitious in substance, but that's mostly hype. OTOH, it's the hype that's the only reason anyone pays attention to Soylent at all, so they are kind of stuck accepting the bad side of that along with the good.

I think a lot of people are forgetting about Olestra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects

Edit: I think that a well-known incidence of a popular food product which got FDA approval and saw widespread use also causing gastrointestinal distress is entirely relevant to the discussion.

If you disagree with me feel free to use the comments.

Anal leakage - thanks Olestra, didn't know that was even a thing.

If I replaced a meal with Twinkies, I would expect to get sick.

> That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer.

I think it's the opposite, people are unnecessarily critical of Soylent. The problem is consumers weren't aware they were allergic to algae flour. It has nothing to do with Soylent's hygiene or formulation practices.

I think the attention received is relative to the attention solicited. Soylent has been everywhere in the news talking up their revolutionary product. It's not unlike Apple's Macbook debacle. They launched a product and made a big deal about it, it had a flaw and everyone latched onto it to complain.

It seems to me that Soylent barely even has a marketing budget compared to Apple. To compare it to Apple's marketing of the MacBook Pro seems like a huge stretch. In my honest estimation, word about it has largely spread precisely due to the large amount of vitriol it receives and the fact that it easily and naturally leads to controversial forum discussions on nutrition.

Something about the very idea of Soylent causes people on lots of internet forums to pop out of the woodwork and discuss it quite passionately, from both directions. The basic concept seems to engender a lot of excitement from some and a lot of disgust from others, and when those folks clash online you immediately get 200+ comment threads like the one we're in. This phenomenon has been going on for years at this point, over and over, both here and elsewhere.

> Apple's Macbook debacle

Are you talking about the machines that haven’t been released yet, that nobody outside of Apple has ever tried?

Can you explain how it’s a “debacle”?

Here’s a response from Bret Victor, who apparently worked on prototypes 8 years ago: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/793508197336178688

> There is nothing special about what they're trying to do compared to any other packaged food manufacturer

I'm neutral on this debate, but I think you are wrong here. Soylent is a meal replacer. It is supposed to bring you all nutrients you need in a meal.

Haven't you ever seen a commercial for meal replacement shakes before? They've been a staple in the diet industry as long as I've been alive. Liquid diets are also a "thing" in medical settings for patients who are unable to take solid foods. Remember "Carnation Instant Breakfast"? That's been around since the 60s. Its really not an original idea.

People keep saying that, but no one point me to a webpage where I can buy these.

(even getting downvoted =) the hate against soylent is strong)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_20?url=search-alia...

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_19?url=search-alia...

I don't hate Soylent in the least but you've gotta be closing your eyes and plugging your ears to believe what they are trying to do is new or original.

I mean I used carnation instant breakfast as an example, that's available in every single grocery store in America.

Dozens of those already exist and are used everyday in hospitals across the US.

They come in a wide variety of types - high and low protein, high and low calorie, with or without fibre, designed for naso-gastric tube feeding or for drinking, flavoured or unflavoured, designed to be eaten on their own or to be mixed with some other food stuff, designed to be eaten cold or hot.

The novelty of Soylent is (irresponsibly) marketing these to the public.

Those have existed for quite some time. And, quite frankly, they're just packaging food. That's not novel. Every other food maker is responsible for making sure their product is safe. Why should Soylent be any different?

I do stop going to a restaurant once I or someone I know has gotten sick there.

Look at Chipotle for instance, they are dealing with similar contamination related problems.

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.

Chipotle's issues were sanitation related. Soylent's problem was people being allergic to an ingredient they didn't know they were allergic to.

You (and Soylent) have absolutely no idea whether that's true. Which is the problem.

How might they acquire that knowledge, other than through the process they seem to currently be executing?

> 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.

Edit - Adding sources:

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-20-shipments-were-d...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/reports-of-violent-vo...

[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-soylent-...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12812730

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg&feature=youtu.be...

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?

FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA: http://investors.terravia.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=89...

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.

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-20-shipments-were-d...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/reports-of-violent-vo...

[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-soylent-...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12812730

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg&feature=youtu.be...

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.

Why?

Do you actually think anything bad will happen if you ate for a month sans one micronutrient will permanently damage you?

Probably not "allergic" given the reported reactions. More likely intolerant. Important distinction, an intolerance isn't going to kill you.

Do you have any links that prove the "allergy" hypothesis?

And they've taken active steps to prevent it happening again.

And yet, they are still struggling to fix their reputation and get customers back in the door.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...

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.

Look at the graph of CMG compared to MCD or DPZ to see how convinced the market is by this. The Chipotle contamination incident was devastating.

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.

Are you suggesting there exists a restaurant that nobody has ever gotten sick from eating at?

Sure: new restaurants that don't have many customers yet.

Soylent is marketed as an innovative beta-style product.

Users should expect hiccups.

This is not the same for a bulk of consumer restaurants.

> Users should expect hiccups.

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.

Right on their index

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.

"Sorry for the trace amount of cyanide in our food product, after all it's just the beta version. Moving fast and breaking things you know."

because we crack down on and have to on companies selling food products when people are getting sick. look at all the recalls companies do with just possible contamination.

the professional food industry knows damn well there are no acceptable risks. if people are getting sick entire batch numbers are yanked from retail.

the one time a big company purposefully ignored resulted in jail time for executives from Peanut Corporation which knew they were selling contaminated product. As in, people are getting sick and they did not pull it

Ya, but it seems to me that's exactly what happened here. They pulled the batch numbers that were contaminated.

I guess I don't really see the difference. This isn't unprecedented in the packaged food industry, and it doesn't seem like they're handling it any worse than any other company has.

It is in that Soylent used an experimental ingredient which had not been shown to be appropriate for this use.

Which ingredient is expiremental? The one that is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA? Doesn't sound very expiremental to me if the FDA has already fully tested and formulated a rating for it.

«You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant.»

Except you also have more accumulated debug time/expertise in a typical restaurant. Soylent tries to do a lot of things from first principles that otherwise people have spent many years building: food supply chains, logistics, recipes, kitchen procedures, etc.

Bringing it back to a code analogy, too, most restaurant food is "naturally" a more loosely coupled component model and it is easier to isolate components when debugging (no mayo, hold the lettuce), whereas Soylent is very tightly coupled and it shouldn't be surprising that it may suffer some of the same maintainability concerns in the long run.

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