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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday October 04 2015, @05:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the super-may-be-an-overstatement dept.

El Reg reports

Soylent, which produces liquid food for techies who hate chewing, has stopped shipping its gloop after some of it was contaminated with mold.

The firm started flogging version 2.0 of its formula in August, and has produced 400,000 bottles of the strange substance. It has since learned that 11 of the bottles had mold inside or on the outside by the time they reached customers.

That's a tiny proportion, however, on Friday the biz confirmed it's halting operations.

"During our record review process we did discover that the conveyor guardrail settings were not optimized, causing some bottles to move erratically on the conveyor, which resulted in small splashes on the external surface of the bottle, thereby allowing mold from the environment to grow on the bottle," it said in a statement.

"To verify that these findings were indeed isolated, we conducted physical and visual inspections, along with microbial tests, of 2,000 bottles in our distribution center and found only two bottles with the same defect. We have since optimized the line settings to minimize any recurrence of this issue."

[...] Soylent says that the problem has now been sorted and shipments will begin on October 8.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Soylent Betrayal: Meal Replacement Company Launches "Soylent Squared" Chewable Food Bar 61 comments

Here's Soylent's New Product. It's Food.

Mr. [Rob] Rhinehart first pitched Soylent to the world with a post titled "How I Stopped Eating Food." Now his successor Mr. [Bryan] Crowley says that Soylent's customers — and everyone else — should definitely keep eating food.

Asked if new customers should consider living solely off Soylent, Mr. Crowley said, "We don't recommend it, no. Absolutely. 100 percent. We don't recommend, not because we don't think it's healthy or we don't think it's there. It's a very difficult thing to do and our research tells us that it happens for a very limited amount of time." (Mr. Rhinehart himself moved the company toward gentler "meal replacement" messaging before stepping down in December 2017, when he announced Mr. Crowley as his own replacement.)

Now Soylent has edged closer to something its customers might recognize as food.

There are other reasons to tell a less provocative story. In 2017, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency informed Soylent that its product didn't meet agency requirements for "meal replacement," which halted the company's expansion in that country. In 2016, the first attempt at solid Soylent — the Food Bar — was quickly pulled from circulation after customers reported vomiting and diarrhea.

The company is working hard to ensure its products are not merely safe to eat, but also tasty and enjoyable. "That's the big word that we talked a lot about," Mr. Crowley said. "Before it was all about function. Original Soylent was function, function, function. Now you hear words like enjoyment in our mission."

Stargate SG-1 s04e01.

Previously: Soylent Halts Sale of Bars; Investigation into Illnesses Continues
Soylent Meal Replacement Sales Blocked in Canada

Related: The Other Soylent Finally Ships
Ambronite: Organic Soylent Alternative
In Busy Silicon Valley, Protein Powder Is in Demand
Soylent 2.0 is Coming: Food Replacement Premixed in Bottles
Spore Scare Stops Shipments of Soylent Superfood
Soylent Stops Selling Powder While it Investigates Customer Sickness Complaints
Soylent Has Arrived At Walmart


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Cornwallis on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:00PM

    by Cornwallis (359) on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:00PM (#245267)

    How would anyone know the difference between mold and the crap in the bottles?

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:04PM (#245272)

      How would anyone know the difference between mold and the crap in the bottles?

      The mould is tastier.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:30PM (#245281)

    Soylent is not a "superfood" - that's a marketing term, frequently used by MLM scams, for a food that is supposed to make you magically healthier than a normal diet would. If anything, soylent is the opposite of a superfood - the goal is to replace a normal diet. I'd call soylent a lazy-food - its for people who don't want to cook, or don't want to worry about making good food choices - it's the equivalent of Einstein's apocryphal closet of identical suits.

    • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:43PM

      by nitehawk214 (1304) on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:43PM (#245289)

      Exaclty, there is no such thing as "superfood". Seeing that on a label is an easy way to identify a product as being bullshit that is marked up 4x for no reason.

      I buy a lot of dried fruits and anything with the "superfood" label is just a marked up version of the regular stuff.

      --
      "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
    • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:42PM

      by M. Baranczak (1673) on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:42PM (#245314)
      Agreed. I dig the alliteration, but there are plenty of S words that would have been more accurate. I'll refrain from mentioning those words.
  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:58PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:58PM (#245293) Homepage

    Spore Scare Stops Shipments of Soylent Superfood

    Pete Porter of Pasadena palpitating.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @01:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @01:17PM (#245600)

      All-American Association Against Alliterations Advises: Avoid Alliterations. Alternatives Are Almost Always Available.
      Australian Association Against Alliterations Agrees: Acronyms Are Absolutely Annoying.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:04PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:04PM (#245296) Journal

    Firefighting in the Navy, we had AFFF - commonly referred to as "A triple F". Aqueous Film Forming Fluid was it's official designation. The stuff came in 5 gallon buckets, and it could be poured into a tank, about 50 gallons or so. The stuff looked like soap flakes. A special mixer thingy would suck it up, and mix it with firefighting water, producing a foam like that which is used at airports. If I recall correctly, it mixed in a 2% solution, and it foamed up so that a gallon of water made crap-tons of foam. And, the foam was sticky, so that it would cling to bulkheads, pipes, deck plates and/or grating - it wouldn't just run off like water does, or like soap suds do. And, of course, it floated on top of all known petroleum products - diesel, JP5, JP4, kerosene, gasoline. The primary use of AFFF was in the boiler and engine rooms where a fire had to be snuffed immediately, without suffocating the crew within the space. Or, on flight decks, where exposed fuel and ordinance are found in abundance.

    Anyway, AFFF was pure protein. And, it was edible. I heard that it tasted nasty, so I never sampled the stuff. Word was, if you had a bucket of this stuff in a survival situation, you could live off of it. Don't ask me whether it foamed like mad if you ate it, I'm just repeating scuttlebutt.

    Anyway, when I read about Soylent, I think about that AFFF. Yeah, you might be able to live off of it - but who the hell wants to live that badly? NASSTY!

    If I were ever starving, I might change my mind about Soylent, about AFFF - hell, I might even resort to eating rats. I'd have to be starving though.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:46PM

      by ledow (5567) on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:46PM (#245318) Homepage

      To quote Crocodile Dundee.... Well, you can live off it. But it tastes like shit.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @07:59PM (#245322)

        Soylent doesn't taste that bad, IMO. I bought a bag once. It was like adding water to instant pancake mix and then drinking the batter.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @08:19PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @08:19PM (#245328)

          Yep, it is nearly ideal for being flavored - they keep refining it to make it as neutral to the palette as possible, sort of like white rice, so that it can easily flavored when you mix up a batch.

        • (Score: 2) by ledow on Monday October 05 2015, @07:30AM

          by ledow (5567) on Monday October 05 2015, @07:30AM (#245517) Homepage

          Is it just me that thinks that if the closest comparison is BATTER MIX, that actually I was right in the first place?

          Sure, you can disguise the taste if you like. That's what flavourings are for.

          But that's not my point at all. Like Crocodile Dundee: an iguana, or a NY hot dog, don't actually taste like shit either. You can live off them, but they're hardly a culinary experience. Same as soylent.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @07:38AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @07:38AM (#245521)

            > Is it just me that thinks that if the closest comparison is BATTER MIX, that actually I was right in the first place?

            No. Just you. [benjerry.com]

          • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday October 06 2015, @01:48PM

            by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday October 06 2015, @01:48PM (#246072) Journal

            I've been doing Soylent (partially, not replacing 100% of my food) for a couple months now. I wouldn't call it delicious, but it certainly doesn't taste *bad* either. It's basically just oats and rice. It's kinda pleasant actually, slightly sweet, certainly a bit bland, but I like bland (they say it's intentionally pretty flavorless so you can add your own, but I never feel the need to.) If I've got a box of day old Chinese food and a bottle of Soylent sitting in the fridge I'll sometimes toss the Chinese food and drink the Soylent instead. Not that day old Chinese food is a particularly high standard. :)

            I'd actually say it's somewhere between pancake batter and brown sugar cinnamon oatmeal. Less floury and more sweet than I'd expect batter to be. Consistency is definitely a light batter though.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @11:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @11:02PM (#245370)

      Actually, as a regular soylent drinker, the taste isn't terrible, or even bad. It simply has no taste really. You add whatever flavorings you want to make it taste good but without doing that its still fine. I think most people claiming it taste like shit haven't had a single drop of the stuff touch their own tongues, like you Runaway1956. Why would you choose to give an opinion on something that you yourself have never experienced? Did they teach you to talk about stuff you have no experience with in the Navy perhaps? I don't know, you tell me where you got this awful habit of talking out your ass when you have no direct knowledge of what you are speaking of.

      As always, have a great day!

      AC

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @04:46AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @04:46AM (#245480)

        > Why would you choose to give an opinion on something that you yourself have never experienced?

        That's actually a good working definition of the conservative mindset - they are all to willing to pass judgment on people living in a completely different environment than they have ever known.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @02:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @02:20PM (#245632)

        Why do you choose to make negative comments about Runaway1956 when you have never met the person? Did they teach you to make gross oversimplifications to try to win arguments? I would argue that if he had a bunkmate who ate the stuff and told him how awful it was, then he would be qualified to say that he heard it tastes awful, thus forming his opinion not to eat it. Just because you have a chip on your shoulder because you spend a small fortune because either you are too incompetent to properly feed yourself, or you are too worried about your cultivated image as being techy and different (or both) that you lash out at people who make tangential comments regarding factory foodstuffs.

        If you want to live off of a diet shake once marketed to women, but has a new label slapped on it and it is now marketed to "geeks", that's fine, and I don't think anyone here thinks any less of you for it, but you really shouldn't get in the habit of attacking someone simply because of your own insecurities.

        • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday October 05 2015, @06:24PM

          by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday October 05 2015, @06:24PM (#245750) Journal

          Why do you choose to make negative comments about Runaway1956 when you have never met the person?
           
          Analogy Fail.
           
          We all just "tasted" a Runaway1956 comment and the poster found the taste lacking based on personal experience.
           
          Personally, I found the taste matched the description provided for the actual Soylent. Bland perhaps, a runny consistency, but not terrible.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @08:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @08:24PM (#245805)

        Why do you guys buy this stuff when there are already tons of other meal replacements. You can talk about completeness all you want but soylent is a long way off from replacing the majority of your calorie intake (turns out well before soylent was made people had discovered we don't know enough about nutrition to make such products) so you might as well eat better tasting, cheaper, meal replacements anyhow.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Monday October 05 2015, @12:12AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Monday October 05 2015, @12:12AM (#245402) Homepage

    The fact that it molds so readily is perhaps a good sign of Soylent's "healthiness".

    I mean, consider the McDonalds hamburger, which does not mold at all. Certainly you should prefer to eat food that molds over food that doesn't. I mean, if even mold won't eat it, why would you?

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @02:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @02:20AM (#245450)

      History professor and cultural curator Jon Wiener (perhaps the smartest guy on radio) has a 1 hour show each week on my Pacifica Radio affiliate.
      This week, he did a redux of three 18-minute[1] segments recorded in 2008.
      The last of the 3 was with Michael Pollan, author of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

      That guy made the same point you did:
      Stuff that has been sitting around for months where even lower lifeforms won't touch it makes you seriously doubt that you should.

      7MB MP3 download [kpfk.org] available till December 4.
      Stream with no expiration date [kpfk.org]
      The (2nd) segment, on Henry Ford's failed latex plantation|social experiment in Brazil, I also found to be interesting.

      [1] You can shave off some of that time if your media player allows you to speed up playback--especially if yours includes an anti-chipmunk feature.

      -- gewg_

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by ledow on Monday October 05 2015, @07:51AM

      by ledow (5567) on Monday October 05 2015, @07:51AM (#245527) Homepage

      Really? Are we back to the "organic" argument?

      We spent thousands of years finding ways to preserve food because when it goes off it's DANGEROUS. The moulds that grow can be toxic, but even before that they are invisible and the food itself has deteriorated. We learned to cook it, to chill it, to freeze it, to salt it, to pack it away from oxygen, keep it separate from other foods, put it in soft containers (e.g. apples, which mustn't touch if you don't want them to "bruise"), and so on. We did this because, quite simply, food became dangerous quickly, and either made us ill or made us have to throw it away (hopefully quick enough that the rest of the food was fine).

      Modern preservatives are an extension of this. Yes, you could say that some things have gone too far and too synthetic (and McDonald's burgers - where I'm from - rot just like everything else... fast food has no need for preservation once they've been sold as you're not going to keep them on a shelf for weeks. The preservation is in the delivery before-hand and then the cooking) but that's FAR from implying that things that go off quick are healthy or good for you in the slightest.

      The problem is more that people are reliant on these things working and have lost critical senses of smell. Put your "out-of-date" stuff in front of a cat or dog and watch it wolf it up. It can smell whether it's actually gone off or not and decide for itself. We are losing that. Unless it's eggs (whiffy), milk (curdled and whiffy), or something obvious (e.g. visible mould on bread), we just assume it's fine. That's the danger. The worst item for this is tomato ketchup - which goes off quite quickly, is preserved only by the sugars (it's almost a jam!) but is left open for weeks at a time. It's so heavily flavoured that you CANNOT TELL when it's gone off. When was the last time you threw a bottle of ketchup out because it was suspect? I'm guessing for most people the answer is "never".

      And, like the cat/dog thing, just because mould won't eat it - or the cat won't eat it - it doesn't mean it's gone off. My cat wouldn't TOUCH a banana. But there's nothing wrong with that. Crackers in an air-tight tin won't go mouldy for MONTHS. Freeze your flour and flour mites won't appear it in for YEARS. It doesn't mean the underlying food is bad. And just because mould/animals WILL touch it doesn't mean it's good for you too. Rats will eat raw sewage. Mould will attack the very fabric of your house.

      It's this kind of blinkered food science that is funding the industry and actually making it what it is. Like the whole "superfood" junk. If I hear the word "antioxidant" again, I might just scream. Let's not even get into the whole "sugars" issue (starch is a sugar - crisps [potato chips] are worse for your teeth than pure syrup).

      A food that moulds because it slightly missed the bag in the factory is a DANGEROUS food. Let's not get into their factory processes to let that stuff out the door and only later find out about it. That's the whole point of preservatives in the first place. And by "preservative" we can be talking about something as simple as salt, sugar, etc. In Italy, they salt entire hams, or hang them up for months on end until the outside of the meat goes hard - that's their preservation technique. Soylent just goes mouldy, before it's even left the factory.

      This is NOT a good thing.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @04:28PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @04:28PM (#245702)

        > And, like the cat/dog thing,

        You have aggressively missed the point - going off a red herring of your own creation.

        Name one food that mold won't ever touch but is a source of sustenance for people. Not just zero-calorie stuff like spices, actual sustenance.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @09:43PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @09:43PM (#245832)

        In Italy, they salt entire hams, or hang them up for months on end until the outside of the meat goes hard - that's their preservation technique.

        Even those cured meats get moldy - it's just that, when prepared correctly, that mold is beneficial (to humans). Like the white powdery stuff you see all that time - it's not some kind of added powder. It is actually a mold that is a close relative to penicillin. But it is naturally growing on the meat despite the curing process.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @04:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @04:07AM (#245472)

    This site really is Soylent News. I'll be damned

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @02:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @02:25PM (#245637)

    Ok, so they came up with an explanation about why the mold is on the outside, but how did it get on the inside?