from Hacker News

Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

by Rifu on 11/7/16, 4:43 PM with 325 comments

• by old-gregg on 11/7/16, 10:26 PM

  Soylent's problem is not a seemingly overlooked ingredient. Their biggest problem is inability to run the continuous food processing loop.

  What's the point of tweaking the recipe if you can't guarantee the execution and your customers get, basically, randomness for lunch?

  We had a corporate subscription for Soylent 2.0 drink. The taste varied from batch to batch on the scale from "milk in a cereal bowl" to "sewage water".

  These issues have been regularly popping up on reddit and their own forums for months now. We have suspended the subscription and I can't bring myself to try another bottle, even though I originally loved the concept and the taste.

• by Pitarou on 11/7/16, 9:39 PM

  Inexcusable.

  The only reason Soylent have gotten away with it for so long is that the FDA rules for this category of product haven't been written yet.

  A product shouldn't make people sick when used as intended. So if a product is intended to be consumed as 100% of your diet, it MUST:

  - contain all known macro- and micro-nutrients necessary for human health

  - contain nothing that makes you sick when you eat it all the time

  Soylent failed on both counts:

  - Early formulations lacked selenium. Beta testers duly developed symptoms of selenium deficiency.

  - The latest formulation contained algae. Customers duly got sick from consuming more of this kind of algae than humans have ever consumed before.

  The first mistake might be excused as a beginner's error and a learning experience. But they didn't learn. Luckily, Soylent lives in the land of class action lawsuits. The lawyers are gonna shut these jokers down.

• by binarymax on 11/7/16, 5:22 PM

  Where is the FDA in all of this? I would hope that after the widespread issues with the product, they would have stepped in and blocked shipment until safety studies have been done that comply with regulations.

• by glenda on 11/7/16, 5:13 PM

  Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong.

  What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.

• by teaearlgraycold on 11/7/16, 5:32 PM

  >Since its introduction in 2013, the protein drink Soylent has become the go-to food substitute

  Maybe I'm being pedantic, but Soylent is not a protein drink. It's primarily a carbohydrate drink.

• by jostmey on 11/7/16, 5:23 PM

  Soylent better be sure that they are right. They just fingered the problem onto another company (TerraVia). What supplier would work with Soylent if it turns out Soylent is wrong?

• by baby on 11/7/16, 6:43 PM

  I love what Soylent is doing, I have wished for such a meal replacer all my life.

  I've drank something like 40 bottles of Soylent (which are, so far presumably safe) and they have helped me replace a lot of fast food. Never had problems with them until I started getting nauseous and now I can't drink it anymore.

  With all these news about people getting sick, I feel a bit silly having beta tested stuff with my own body. And they definitely have lost at least one customer here.

  But I'm still happy to see them experimenting with such a product. I still want this to happen, I will just not beta test it myself.

• by hammock on 11/7/16, 5:12 PM

  >Algal flour is a fairly novel ingredient that serves as a vegan replacement for butter and eggs. Derived from algae grown in fermentation tanks and then dried

  Reminds me of fungal protein, aka quorn aka mycoprotein. They were advertising it as the next big thing in protein sources. Its also grown by fermentation. If you google it, there are safety concerns.

• by hacker_9 on 11/7/16, 5:14 PM

  Clearly there is a market for this 'super convenience' food/drink if people are still willing to buy this product after it made them sick. Even when their own stomach is the guinea pig. The company could do with better marketing though, reading things like this:

  In 2013, he raised capital to turn his full attention to Soylent, which he named after the science fiction novel that served as the basis for the 1973 movie featuring Charlton Heston as a detective who discovers that a new type of food called Soylent Green is made of people.

  ..certainly doesn't help.

• by briHass on 11/7/16, 5:47 PM

  Part of the issue is their desire to keep the product vegan. Instead of using known-safe, health-promoting sources of polyunsaturated (O3/O6) fats like fish oil, they use algal sources, which have very little data supporting them as safe/effective sources of O3.

• by bdcravens on 11/7/16, 8:09 PM

  Blue Bell in Texas shut down for months due to listeria. Would that put some companies out of business? Maybe, that's ok. This is public health we're talking about.

  Disrupt. Move fast and break things. Iterate iterate iterate. Fail fast. This may be okay when you're making a better spreadsheet, but not everything can be a startup.

• by sevensor on 11/7/16, 5:13 PM

  Is this unrelated to the mold contamination people were reporting?

• by jorblumesea on 11/7/16, 7:05 PM

  The fact that Soylent is classified as a "Nutritional supplement" is absurd. No inspections, no accountability.

• by jdavis703 on 11/7/16, 5:29 PM

  Well one of the reasons I liked their products was because of the "algal oil" (no word on if they're going to remove that also). This is basically vegan fish oil, which as a vegetarian is one of the things I've missed.

• by mathattack on 11/7/16, 11:30 PM

  Here's what I don't get... There is all this bad hype about Soylent. Why not just get one of the dozens of other meal replacement shakes in your average health food store?

• by jasonwilk on 11/7/16, 8:30 PM

  I'm a fan of Soylent but I wouldn't say things like 'Soylent prides itself on rapid product development—an ideal popularized by Google and Facebook Inc.'

  Things that are going into my body should not be rapidly developed and released. It's slightly different than Facebook launching a new feature that may or may not break.

• by SuicidebyStar on 11/8/16, 7:35 AM

  I think I found a better alternative to Soylent called "Bertrand" (https://bertrand.bio/). It is made out of organic ingredients, tastes solid (just order the one with no flavor, it actually tastes better) and is hopefully more healthy since it is made from "real" natural powderized ingredients. So even if there are nutrition components (e.g. other micro-nutrients) which weren't researched properly till today (quite likely imho), they should still be in the drink since it's not made from artificial components.

  I'm drinking it for two months now and I'm happy with it. Very convenient, fair price, available in a vegan & gluten-free version and it tastes okay-ish (like oatmeal).

  P.S.: I'm not affiliated with this company in any way, just a happy customer.

• by caogecym on 11/7/16, 9:06 PM

  We always get latest version of soylent instead of having a way to subscribe a specific version. This is like cloud based service, the upgrade is transparent, you benefits from ingredient upgrade, and you suffer from it. The key here is how fast Soylent can identify and address customer's concerns.

• by shepardrtc on 11/8/16, 5:46 AM

  I enjoyed Soylent when it first came out, but then they started trying to be clever. It was already a complex product and they went crazy trying to replace the fish oil they were using. Around v1.4 it started to taste absolutely disgusting and the consistency was that of slime.

• by grondilu on 11/8/16, 2:55 AM

  I've not often eaten algae, but I do remember it to have the weirdest taste I have ever experienced.

• by NoGravitas on 11/7/16, 7:13 PM

  I'm not surprised. Spirulina is sold as a miracle health food, but it makes me toss my cookies.

• by lnanek2 on 11/7/16, 9:10 PM

  That's too bad. I love the algae based DHA-3 fortified milk at the super market. The other option is fish based DHA-3 fortified and I can't stand the taste. It's strange to blame something sold in supermarkets like that.

• by jzd131 on 11/7/16, 9:34 PM

  I get sick every time I eat fake eggs made from Algae- this makes a lot of senseto me.

• by 010a on 11/8/16, 2:56 AM

  Please fix it and get these products back on the market so I can get my order in.

• by st3v3r on 11/7/16, 6:11 PM

  Move fast and make people vomit

• by zelias on 11/7/16, 6:30 PM

  Wasn't Soylent Green also made of "algae-based ingredients"?

  Perhaps the name of the product is more on-point than we realize...

• by rosser on 11/7/16, 5:36 PM

  No, I'm pretty sure it was hubris. Proximal cause versus ultimate cause, and all that.

• by muad on 11/7/16, 7:10 PM

  Does it really make a difference for Soylent at this point?

  I would imagine their brand is already trashed.

• by print_r on 11/7/16, 11:07 PM

  I was sure it was going to be "People"

• by aj_n on 11/8/16, 1:46 AM

  Way to casually ruin Soylent Green, Bloomberg!

• by homulilly on 11/7/16, 5:23 PM

  someone should inform the author of this article that algae aren't plants

• by Balgair on 11/7/16, 8:01 PM

  Oh boy, another Soylent discussion.

  Here is what all the off topic discussion will be:

  Person1) "What is so hard to understand sheeple?! Soylent isn't for all your meals, just ones that you are too busy to eat. Also, it has all the vitamins you need not like all those thousand other bars/drinks!?"

  Person2) "I'd rather move to the bottom of the ocean than buy Soylent. Why would you ever skip a meal?! Capitalism is the root of all evil including making me miss my dinner!"

  Folks, we all come at food differently, it's a very personal thing. Just because you feel this way about food, does not mean we all do. It's like people that stand or sit when they are wiping after going #2. We all coexist just fine and none of us know that there is really any other way and are astounded when other people are different.

  Chill, people, chill, it's food.

• by mmaunder on 11/7/16, 5:57 PM

  Such an unfortunate name. The 1973 film was set in 2022, so not far off the mark.

• by WalterSear on 11/7/16, 11:50 PM

  People have been warning us about the green soylent since the 70s.

• by AndyKelley on 11/7/16, 8:54 PM

  I flagged it because the site started playing audio while I was trying to read. Had to close the tab to make my phone shut up. It was embarrassing and I was unable to read the content.

• by conjectures on 11/7/16, 6:34 PM

  Algae? Yeah right. Soylent green is made of people.

  Seriously though, how can a food supplement (sorry, meal replacement) company expect to prosper with a brand based on a sci-fi movie about cannibalism?