People get “violently ill” from Soylent bars
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Food is not a game of roulette. Soylent is a new contender in the market of food replacement, and while I have enthusiastically enjoyed their product - I won't gamble on whether or not I may have a bad batch. They haven't earned my trust even if the hiccups are far and few between. Considering they market their product as "food you don't have to think about," they have done customers wrong.
Their approach needs to change if they want to win back the trust they've lost. From nutritional discrepancies in their labels, to mold inside and outside of sealed bottles, and unknown sources of violent illness - their M.O. for these problems seems to be to sweep it under the rug and only address customers that come forth.
When they have a batch that knows is tainted or has a problem, they make no effort to reach out to potentially affected customers. I've been subscribe to the bars since the beginning, and have had no problems until this one batch. While I did not experience violent illness, I had other symptoms I never would have connected had I not discovered the problem via articles such as this. When I have to inspect each bar and bottle I open, Soylent is no longer the worry-free meal replacement for me.
>their M.O. for these problems seems to be to sweep it under the rug and only address customers that come forth.
What? How could they possibly be able to consistently find these problems without customers coming forward? Do you want them to make every single customer service email publicly available or something?
For two weeks they sold Coffeist without knowing the manufacturing process burned off the Vitamin A and C. They promised an update via email to customers but instead posted a blog update, while re-labeling and selling the remaining product at full cost.
The last instance of mold occurred just last month inside and out of sealed 2.0 bottles. Machinery leaked mold before the bottles were wrapped. Numerous customers and several batches were contaminated - with no contact from the company.
Other problems have included varying consistency from batch to batch and formula changes of viscosity without warning, and then the claims from users that have found roaches inside of the Soylent-branded boxes containing the bottles (not inside the shipping box).
The problem here is their approach. To discover this information you have to be connected to the community and keep yourself fully up to date or else you may find yourself unknowingly consuming a tainted batch. So far Coffeist has been the only instance in which they reached out to customers, despite there being several to many contaminated batches of their entire line - from bars, bottles, and powder.
The whole point of Soylent is that it's convenient, worry-free, and nutritionally complete. When I have to vigorously check my bars or bottles for mold, improper mixing, or to see if the expiration matches a contaminated batch - it's no longer convenient or worry-free. When they don't know for two weeks that manufacturing burns away the vitamins - and they re-label to sell it at full cost - it's no longer nutritionally complete.
"If you notice you have a bad batch, contact us," is not the approach I can trust for a new contender with no market trust. For a company that totes 100% transparency, they need to work on their customer outreach.
This is true of every single product in existence. General Mills doesn't send you a letter or email every time they come across a bad batch of cereal, and it probably happens more often to GM than it will to Soylent. And I doubt GM would even discuss this sort of thing online, much less actually manage to recall anything in less than a month of investigating.
Soylent is not a conventional product. It's trying to tap into a new market and approaching these issues as if they've already a mainstay. When there's mold in both their powder and their bottles, now I'm checking my bars for mold too. When they sell a product they claim has 100% nutritional value, yet they don't test such a claim - I'm now wondering if the rest of my supply is also lacking.
I've enthusiastically enjoyed Soylent. Their Coffeist is my go-to breakfast and I will continue to finish my remaining supply of bars and bottles. But I won't spend another time until Rosa Labs can be trusted to back up their claims and correct these frequent manufacturing mishaps.
The only reason they DON'T send you a letter is because 99% of the time people purchased the goods in a store and no contact details of consumers are available.
They should have been collecting lot numbers, cross referencing them with sales, and emailing affected customers with the option of immediate replacement and pre paid shipping label for return of suspected batches
b) After the mould issue with 2.0 was discovered and acknowledged, they kept selling contaminated batches. One person on Reddit posted about how they had ordered their first batch of Soylent 2.0, then went on the blog and discovered that they'd acknowledged an issue where bottles could end up with mould on the inside. When their shipment arrived, they discovered a majority of the bottles were contaminated.
The problem isn't that there are issues with production, but that the company seems to have no interest whatsoever in being proactive about these issues and preventing things from getting to consumers. What the company should have done is to notify people who'd been shipped bottles of Soylent and cease shipping potentially contaminated products to customers until the issue was resolved. They did neither, putting customers' health (and their brand) at risk.
Maybe GM wouldn't have gotten to the bottom of this immediately, but they sure wouldn't have kept selling products they knew to be contaminated to customers in the meantime.
Maybe in sheer numbers of bad boxes, due to their much higher volume. But as a percentage of produced boxes, that seems unlikely. I've been eating cereal basically my whole life and never gotten a bad box, meanwhile I've been drinking Soylent for about nine months and had two shipments where the drink tasted very abnormal. Soylent replaced these without question in both incidents, but I had to reach out to them.
Rosa Labs has consistency issues that other food companies seem to have solved long ago. I hope they improve because I really like Soylent.
Quality control? Testing/inspecting their products for mold during and after production?
I ate one of the contaminated bars about 2 weeks ago (9/28/2016) for breakfast (~9-10am?) and the only other thing I had that morning was water. By noon, I was walking out for lunch and rapidly got nauseous, then puked right on the sidewalk outside Fulton Center. Two of my coworkers witnessed it. I was unable to work, so I went home right away and tried to sleep it off, woke up later that night and felt, for the most part, better. Symptoms mostly subsided by 10pm that night.
I didn't put together that it was food poisoning until a week later when I saw these reports online (by following @Pinboard of course, for shame). I thought one of my coworkers got me sick. I tend to think most cases of food poisoning are your own fault (let something expire and eat it anyway, forget to wash something, etc). I never suspected that packaged food would cause something like this.
As many others hopefully have, I also used this incident to cancel all of my subscriptions with Soylent (2.0, Coffiest, and the bars). I started eating Soylent because of a jaw surgery I had in February. It was a convenient way to keep my weight up while I couldn't eat any solid food. Now that my jaw is healed, this is a great excuse to get back to normal food.
ps. Because Soylent is shamefully blaming this on the victims, I should state that I have seen an allergist within the last year and have no known allergies. I've consumed Soylent products, including the bars, since February 2016 without issue. I have no intolerance to any known food, as hopefully one of my twitter accounts can prove (@WhyIsntDanFat). Whatever happened, it's their fault, not some peculiarity with the way my body works, assholes.
pps. I also want to note that I consumed my contaminated bar AFTER reports about them making people sick appeared online. Soylent could have notified me to avoid them. Instead, they did nothing as the reports piled up and I ended up walking into this trap they could have reasonably alerted to. The only contact I had with them was 10/6/2016 when I emailed to notify them they were responsible for making me sick.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-most-c...
It comes from poor hygiene in the food supply chain. Salmonella and Listeria don't appear in fruits because they've been left out on the counter.
Never bite into food that isn't clean. Never slice it unless you will be cooking it afterward.
You can clean by peeling, if this is possible without cutting. (bananas and citrus) You can clean by blanching, which is a brief exposure to boiling water. You can clean by washing with bleach, excepting the many foods (apples, cucumbers, etc.) that have been waxed to seal in the germs.
Sadly, this normally means that raw apples and raw cucumbers are hopeless. Eh, maybe you can get the wax off with warm oil followed by ethanol. Realistically, you won't get these clean before cutting into them.
At first I blamed my lunch (I ate my lunch that day at the dining center of my University, which likely serves ~thousand people everyday). Before seeing this post I never suspected it was the bar.
If you make software, and your customers lose data, time, or money because you sold them buggy software due to lack of testing, you'll probably be OK. You can iterate quickly and break things regularly as you improve the product, and your customers will put up with it.
But if you make food, and your customers get poisoned because you sold them poison due to lack of testing, you're going to get in trouble. Federal and state government agencies will want to have a serious chat with you and possibly will shut you down. You cannot iterate quickly and break things regularly to improve a food product; you cannot experiment with the health of your customers.
If poisoning from Soylent bars was due to lack of careful testing prior to releasing the bars to market, shame on the company.
Not all software is uber-for-toothbrushes.com.
Other software could kill people.
Yet I keep hearing about serious issues with Soylent products. So then, what is Soylent not doing that every other food manufacturer is? Basic quality controls?
"Small percentage of consumers report dissatisfaction with product - company investigating."
Edit: I agree that processed soy shouldn't be a "main" diet ingredient. But these guys freak out over using a little soy sauce.
For the record, soy sauce is fermented, which makes it relatively safe to eat. As Kresser points out in the article, fermentation significantly reduces soy's antinutrients.
I have 3 teen boys, all breastfed as babies. For one of them, him mom went nuts with soy milk right after his birth. (a screwy doctor suggested it) She drank crazy amounts of it. Sure enough, that boy clearly has boobs, and the others (same parents) do not.
LMFAO are these fuckers serious? PERSONALLY CONSUMED.
You're not gonna do microbial studies or anything like that? They literally ate their own evidence.
...I have nothing to apologize for. You know you were thinking it.
On an unrelated note, this line stuck out:
>Reporters at BuzzFeed flagged the Food and Drug Administration’s inspection record of the manufacturing facility where the bars are produced, Betty Lou’s, Inc.
Is it just me, or is this not the sort of thing you'd expect from BuzzFeed?