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.
Look at Chipotle for instance, they are dealing with similar contamination related problems.
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.
However, their process is supposed to decrease the number of issues not increase it.
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.
The idea of using A/B testing for food safety testing is horrifying.
Do you actually think anything bad will happen if you ate for a month sans one micronutrient will permanently damage you?
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...
FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA: http://investors.terravia.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=89...
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...
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.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbe...
[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.
Users should expect hiccups.
This is not the same for a bulk of consumer restaurants.
Right on their index
† 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!