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Comment by ethagknight | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't a Boxed Soylent (sealed bladder in a box like boxed wine) be most efficient for shipping to consumer, and most efficient for consumption? If they are really trying to optimize every aspect, that seems like the solution (from my armchair!). My first thought when seeing the headline was "oh boy, Silicon Valley has been shopping something in a bottle for 1 year now, and now they're experts in bottle packaging innovation, but I was pleasantly surprised by the write up. They identified problems unique to their product and addressed them. Nothing earth shattering glass, but also not settling for status quo. It's minor but non-trivial, and it speaks to the attitude of the overall product. I've been keeping Soylent around as a healthy meal-in-a-pinch option and I really enjoy it, plain flavor and all. Super filling, tastes like a plant-y pancake batter.

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My take on the reasons that soylent didn't go with paper packaging (cartons or bag-in-box):

1. Paper packaging is much more fragile than plastic packaging. Boxes permanently dent, buckle when compressed, tear much more easily, etc, when enduring punishment that a plastic container will shrug off. Paper is also much less resistant to water damage. Paper-packaged products like milk cartons or juice boxes are usually transported in durable, rigid-walled crates, and would probably do much worse than the previous plastic bottle in a regular door-delivery use-case.

2. I've always found the relatively low rigidity of the whole assemblage to make sipping directly from a TetraPak sort-of-thing a little slippery and uneasy. The box can warp in all sorts of ways. Maybe I've just been burned by spilling milk on my shirt late at night trying to drink from the carton...

3. Bag-in-box specifically doesn't "scale down" to single servings that well. The experience of drinking out of a bladder within a larger box is less-than-ideal because the bladder can slosh around inside the container. Maybe if they aimed to sell bulk wet Soylent fluid, bag-in-box would be the way to go.

The plastic bags that cheap wine comes in is Rogue river, class 5-6, over Rainey Falls, sucked 10 feet into the vortex tested.

A few years ago I took a two week river trip with a buddy. We bought three boxes of wine.

We nixed the boxes, and the wine bladders were just strapped to to raft with all our other stuff.

At the end of the trip, we we both surprised how much abuse those bags went through, and not even a small leak.

Now--the raft was another story.

What kind of plastic is this? Actually, I don't care; I wish disposable plastic in general would go away.

Isn't part of their marketing greeness? But their model is keurig-for-calories? They _could_ refuse to do the plastic bottles and ship paper bags of powder...

It's only possible to recycle opaque PET milk bottles since very recently. Probably still in research phase. See [1].

[1] http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/carbios-opaque-pet-mil...

Amen! Do we really need another billion plastic bottles in the trash stream? Doesn't this contradict the entire spirit of Soylent?

Compared to the cellophane and Styrofoam packaging that a steak is sold in in the standard American grocery store I think it's an improvement. They also mention that they no longer have the mostly-trash, plastic cap wrapper in the new design.

A keurig type machine for soylent paper bags would be an interesting sight. Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee.

> Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee.

It's a simple, self-contained way to freshly and quickly brew a single cup of coffee with no mess, and priced for consumers: Cutting a few annoying chores out of a rushed morning at a cost of a few tens of cents per cup.

In what world was that ever a hard sell?

One with coffee filters

Have you used a Keurig? Or Nespresso?

I don't know how difficult it is to mix Soylent, but you can buy an automatic baby formula maker for $150-$200. Put water in the tank, power in the top, and boom: automatic mixing. I'm surprised an enterprising Soylent enthusiast hasn't hacked something up yet—particularly given their "early adopter" tech audience.

It shouldn't be too much harder to add "pods" (powder containers) to that device. It might even make the process easier because the machine wouldn't have to measure the right amount.

Just combining water and powder doesn't give the right texture. In my experience, you have to use a blender, or it doesn't come out smooth. But when I use a blender, it still has a "frothy" texture that isn't quite as smooth as the stuff in the bottles they ship.

Fetishization of commodity. The marketing and packaging is designed to tick those "satisfying consumption" boxes in peoples brains.

Why not just make them out of recyclable plastic?

They do sell a powder if you want to mix it up yourself. Then you aren't shipping a lot of water around. But a bladder/bag wouldn't be portable which would defeat the purpose of the convenient mixed option.

Yeah I thought they'd just go with a tetra Pak and move on

But it would t make a nice blog post of be as distinctive brandwise

Wouldn't tetra pak be even more space saving?

Yes, the footprint of a tetrapak would be completely square, no rounded corners wasting space.

It also makes for much more compact trash as you can fold and reseal them almost completely flat. Plastic bottles can be "compressed" but they still waste significant space

I think the one requirement for this design was:

"Just don't make it a bag and have the consumer have to squeeze it" - c.f. Juicero

By the way, you don't need to put a period in between the c and f in cf, it's shortened from ConFer. Typically it's styled "cf.".

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