Comment by colept | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colept | Hacker News Reader

I've cancelled my subscription today due to lack of appropriate action on behalf of Rosa Labs.

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.

This is a little silly. It's been less than a week, they've been communicating to the communities that they're doing their best to look into it, they're asking for people to send them any sort of related feedback, and they're providing refunds no-questions-asked. Demanding a total recall in less than a week is asking a bit much.

>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?

The first of many hiccups in their batch processing.

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.

>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.

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.

That is not true of any other food products. If General Mills has a bad batch of cereal they notify the public by, at the very least, issuing recall notices to all the stores that sold the tainted products. Those notices are on display every time you walk in to a store. For retailers like Costco, where the store knows exactly who bought what and has their contact information, you do get contacted directly when there is a recall or other issue with contaminated food.

The difference is General Mills is an established brand that sells conventional products that we know and trust. If you get a bad batch of Cocoa Puffs, you won't think twice about eating Cheerios or Lucky Charms. You'll stop eating it for a while, hear about a recall on the news, and then one day you'll put it in your cart because you remember how good it tastes. There's more comfort in knowing it's produced in mass quantity.

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.

Costco sends me an email and a phone call every time they sell me tainted frozen veggies.

When GM does a product recall (which is pretty damn rare considering how many products they ship) everyone knows about it and it's all over the news for days. They even take out ads in newspapers to let people know which batches are contaminated.

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.

The last time there was a recall on food that I had purchased, I got a notice from the grocery store at checkout. With my receipt came a warning that I had purchased product XYZ during the time when it may have been subject to recall and that I should discard it and follow the process for a refund.

Why wouldn't Soylent know to whom they sold a particular batch too? Don't they track that? If not, its an oversight that needs immediate correction.

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

a) The company has the e-mail addresses of everyone who's ever bought soylent, so it's trivial for them to let people know they might have gotten a contaminated batch (or what to look for in case they did).

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.

> and it probably happens more often to GM than it will to Soylent.

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.

> What? How could they possibly be able to consistently find these problems without customers coming forward?

Quality control? Testing/inspecting their products for mold during and after production?

Also known as being an actual food manufacturer.

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