
How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month - valgreens
http://stackshare.io/soylent/how-soylent-ships-a-trillion-calories-per-month
======
cblock811
The value prop that people will save money is kind of funny to me. My diet:

Breakfast: Oatmeal, honey, cinnamon $0.20

Lunch: Large Salad(spinach, carrot, tomato, cucumber, mushroom, bell pepper,
sometimes almonds) $2.50

Dinner: Steamed Veggies and Seared Tilapia (kale, carrot, tomato, capers,
tilapia) $3.50

If people just budged properly they would be fine. That being said, I'm
curious to try soylent and have purchased a week supply of it. Could be fun to
play with.

~~~
hvs
I upvoted you because I agree that it is actually pretty easy to eat healthily
for pretty cheap if you are willing to manage it correctly.

I will say that you seem to have a surprising low daily caloric intake,
though. I have a high metabolism, but sit in front of computer all day and I
still need 2500 calories/day to maintain my weight.

~~~
cblock811
Yeah my roommate has commented on this as well. I'm thinking of adding in more
nuts and other calorically dense foods. I've only been doing this for a few
months so it's a bit of an experiment.

~~~
beachstartup
you probably just have a low natural appetite but most people need far, far
more fat in order to feel satisfied and not crave food all day and binge on
crap later.

nuts work great, but my personal favorite fat-booster is eggs, followed by
lots of olive oil.

------
jimrandomh
I notice that the instructions for Soylent stopped mentioning salt problem
somewhere between v1.3 and v1.5.

How much sodium to eat is very controversial, but if you're eating sodium, you
should know that they took the extreme low-sodium position. The current
version contains 1640mg of sodium per pouch, which is about half the typical
intake. This creates a risk of deficiency, especially when exercising or in
hot weather. The symptoms of sodium deficiency are headaches and lethargy; the
test for whether those symptoms are caused by sodium deficiency is to eat salt
(~1g mixed with food or water) and see if they go away quickly.

~~~
slinkyavenger
Why would this create a risk of deficiency for most people? Excepting exercise
- the maximum daily recommended amount is 2,300mg; for people who have
problems with sodium (particularly those with high blood pressure), the
recommendation is to limit sodium to 1,500mg/day.

~~~
jimrandomh
The controversy I refer to is over whether the 1500mg-2300mg range is
sensible. If you trust the IOM guidelines, that's fine, but my own reading of
primary-source research has come up with nothing but null results and my
personal experience has been that more is needed.

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
there is a lot of literature about how much sodium is too much, it's much
harder to find minimum values: I personally due to health issues am on an
extremely low sodium diet (< 500mg/day, usually around 400mg) and have been
for over two years with apparently no ill effects, but then again my wife
seems to not do very well if she goes under 1500, I guess we're all different
(which would make it nice for soylent to come with separate sodium so that
could be adjusted on an individual basis).

~~~
jules
> there is a lot of literature about how much sodium is too much

Is there? I remember reading an article a while back saying that all those
claims turned out to be based on a handful of flawed studies, and that for
healthy people there is no problem with any halfway reasonable amount of salt
intake as long as you drink enough.

------
jamii
I tried soylent for a while and found the experience fairly unpleasant. I
switched to [http://www.mealsquares.com/](http://www.mealsquares.com/)
instead. Warmed up, they taste like a dense brownie. The thinking detailed on
their website and the level of care that clearly went into choosing a safe
recipe gives me a lot more confidence than soylent did eg

> First, there's nothing especially risky or unusual in MealSquares; they're
> made from a broad variety of ordinary, healthy whole-food ingredients like
> milk, rice bran, dates, etc. See our nutrition page for the full list. And
> unlike many commercial baked goods, MealSquares are free of artificial
> preservatives and flavoring agents.

They also don't require mixing so they work much better as a camping/climbing
food.

~~~
fweespeech
[http://www.mealsquares.com/nutrition-
facts.html](http://www.mealsquares.com/nutrition-facts.html)

2000 calories of it is 130% of your daily saturated fat...and 126% of total
fat.

Eh. Soylent you could get away with eating it all day [theoretically].
MealSquares you need to supplement with other foods due to the fact content or
you'll end up screwing your health with that much saturated fat.

[http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter...](http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/NutritionCenter/HealthyEating/Saturated-
Fats_UCM_301110_Article.jsp)

Additionally:

> The American Heart Association recommends aiming for a dietary pattern that
> achieves 5% to 6% of calories from saturated fat. That means, for example,
> if you need about 2,000 calories a day, no more than 120 of them should come
> from saturated fats. That’s about 13 grams of saturated fats a day.

Its 6g per square, so you really shouldn't eat more than 2 and get the rest
from other sources. At which point, its a minority of the calories you
consume.

~~~
3pt14159
Eh, saturated fat isn't great, but it isn't as terrible as we used to think.
Check out:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with_diseases)

To me the problem is the sugar content. It's easily double, even for a large
man, and almost triple for a small woman.

~~~
dcosson
The sugar content here does seem higher than ideal, and soylent is about the
same.

I'm currently experimenting with making a DIY soylent and I've noticed that if
you're trying to get all the carbs from whole-grain, real sources you end up
getting a lot of fiber (~50g/day even when doing a relatively low amount of
carbs like 35% of your daily calories). A lot of people report feeling bloated
and painful from too much fiber. It also adds up in price. So, they supplement
with fast-burning carbs like maltodextrin and sugars (soylent is trying out
the slower burning sugar isomaltulose).

I'm a little skeptical that something that gets broken down into half fructose
and half sucrose exactly like table sugar and HFC is harmless if it just gets
digested slowly, that'd be like saying drinking soda is totally healthy as
long as you sip on it slowly all day instead of getting too much at once.

~~~
3pt14159
If fiber makes you feel bad it means you are not drinking enough water.

------
bane
I've recently become a Soylent convert. I originally got it just as a quick
breakfast replacement. It's not life changing, but here's what I think of it
and why I use it:

\- It's quick and cheap. About $3 a meal, and I prepare a whole pouch at a
time (just make sure to drink it all within 48 hours). Meal prep and clean-up
time amortized across 3 meals is something like 20 seconds per meal. Even
microwaves taquitos aren't that fast.

\- It's almost guaranteed to be better for me than anything else that's quick
and cheap. I personally think it's probably about as good as food science can
get in terms of providing complete nutrition. There may some kind of micro-
nutrients or some such that it may not be the best for. But considering the
garbage I would normally eat on the run, I'm pretty sure I'm coming out on the
positive side of things.

\- I stay satiated on a solo cup full of it for about 2-3 hours longer than I
do even with a gut splitting meal. I sometimes skip lunch entirely.

\- When I get around to eating a regular meal, but appetite is about 50% of
what it is normally. This is an amazing side-effect that's zero effort on my
part.

\- I can mix it with other ingredients/foods have it as part of a meal or an
entire meal.

\- my blood sugar feels more evened out during the day, so I don't go through
sugar highs and sleepy lows as much

Downsides:

\- a fully prepared container goes bad super fast, even in the fridge. I chalk
this up to being full of nutrients, it's kind of like the opposite of
McDonald's French Fries -- which will stay in good shape for months, even away
from refrigeration.

\- if I go above 50% Soylent for my meals, I get ultra-intense dreams -- often
about eating meat. They aren't nightmares, but they're unpleasant.

\- the satiation can sometimes feel a little like bloating

I'm considering also switching most of my lunches to it, but I also enjoy
regular foodstuffs so much, and I actually do like the mid-day downtime during
lunch.

~~~
mjklin
I also got the dreams.

And you didn't mention the flatulence. The first time I did an all-Soylent day
was for a full day bus ride. I felt so sorry for the people sitting near me...
Sorry folks, I didn't know!

~~~
bane
I came on board with 1.4 and haven't noticed more than normal flatulence. But
I also tend to have a fiber rich diet so...

------
apsec112
I think they mean "billion", not "trillion", two words that are sadly very
close together. A typical person might consume 60,000 calories a month, so a
trillion calories a month is the equivalent of 17,000,000 people consuming
nothing but Soylent. Soylent's not _that_ popular.

~~~
Animats
OK, so that's about 17,000 users, or maybe twice that many orders if the
typical order is the 2-week size. That's about 1000 transactions a day, or
about 2 transactions a minute.

That transaction volume could be handled on a shared server with CGI programs.
Why do they need so much computer infrastructure?

~~~
Theodores
Exactly!

------
jules
This is very interesting and strange to me. Cooking and eating tasty and new
food in the company of other people is a major source of enjoyment in my life.
I understand that most people may not enjoy cooking, but surely most people
enjoy eating tasty food. Why would you give that up for Soylent?

~~~
bane
You don't. You just drink it instead of meals when you don't expect to have a
a culinary and social experience. Surely not every meal you eat is such a
delight. An awful lot of food is just calorie stuffing to maintain energy.
Replace those with Soylent and you're also probably getting better nutrition.

Then when you want to have a regular old meal experience just don't drink the
Soylent.

It's not a lifestyle choice, it's just a convenient meal replacement.

~~~
jules
> Surely not every meal you eat is such a delight. An awful lot of food is
> just calorie stuffing to maintain energy.

It is? Not really for me and people I know. You can still make calorie
stuffing enjoyable. Even if I'm alone I can whip up a 10 minute meal that
tastes damn nice compared to what Soylent is supposed to taste like. E.g. heat
a wok with a bit of oil, dump in a package of pre sliced wok vegetables and a
handful of cashew nuts. While that is going soak some noodles. After a couple
of minutes add soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger syrup and the noodles, and you
are done. With some practice you can make this in 5 minutes. I don't
understand why somebody would rather save 3 minutes (roughly 1/500 of a day)
and drink Soylent. Can't you sleep 3 minutes less instead?

I've always thought of food like sex. It keeps you healthy, but that's not why
we do it. Optimizing food (or sex) to minimize the time spent while ignoring
the enjoyment completely misses the point for me, so that's why I find it
interesting and incomprehensible that Soylent is so successful.

~~~
bane
So you're around your ingredients, kitchen and cooking equipment 3 meals a day
and are able to prepare a variety of delightful, completely nutritious and
balanced meals from scratch each of those meals, 7 days a week, 365 days a
year?

If not, do you stay within driving distance from your home so you can go there
to do this?

Then, I envy your meals, but I don't envy the leash you have on your life.
Personally, I travel far enough away from my home every day that were I to
follow this pattern, I literally would spend all of my day on the road in
between meals.

Or do you _ever_ just grab something to fill an empty stomach and get on to
what you need to do? Or just out for a full day somewhere far enough from your
kitchen that you can't drive back home to make your meal, and your available
choices range from dirty water dogs to chain restaurant? Do you do this more
than 2 or 3 times a week because of your busy schedule?

Then Soylent is probably for you. I can almost guarantee it will be the
superior alternative for whatever you end up eating in those cases.

~~~
clarky07
I think you're missing the enjoyment part. I'd rather have a chicken sandwich
or a salad from Wendy's than Soylent. As would most people I suspect. It's
possible the grilled chicken or salad isn't actually better for me than the
Soylent, but it isn't THAT bad, and it tastes so much better.

------
CyberDildonics
These advertisement articles are way too common on HN.

------
thisone
I find it a bit frightening that some of these products are marketed as a way
to work even more.

Makes me wonder how many stadium pals are owned by the same type of people.

~~~
knodi123
Funny side note; I was trying to remember what the stadium pal was called,
based on vague recollections from years before, so I googled "catheter for
recreation".

Do not google that. It was a weird, dark hole.

------
mrcwinn
I tried Soylent 1.4 for four days (one meal per day - eased into it). I had
incredibly bad headaches. I felt _weird_ , like my vision was impacted. It
felt like I was getting a fever, even, although I wasn't. I've never had a
"food" have such an immediate, negative impact on me. And it tasted pretty
bad. Even if they describe it as "neutral," or like pancake batter, that's not
exactly a good experience.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get myself to continue eating it. I would give 1.5 a
shot, but only if they had a 1 or 3 pouch demo for cheaper. Not investing
another $85.

~~~
yoklov
Never tried soylent, but as someone who has had a lot of trouble with this in
the past, that does sound a lot like dehydration...

But maybe not, who knows!

------
MrUnderhill
For Europeans wanting to try it, check out Joylent[1] as well, a Soylent fork
based in Netherlands. They do a few different tastes too (vanilla, strawberry,
banana, chocolate and soon mango).

[1] [https://joylent.eu](https://joylent.eu)

~~~
dom96
I was looking for a way to purchase Soylent in Europe. Thanks for the link!

I must say though, their videos make me a bit worried, I can understand they
are trying to make them fun and entertaining but to me they just come off as
unprofessional.

~~~
syllogism
I've found veetal.de very good.

------
matthewowen
So this is an article about how Soylent's small ecommerce site runs?

How... underwhelming.

------
ldayley
"a Trillion Calories" \-- what a fantastic way to represent what they do in a
way that sounds HUGE but is also both true and not hyperbolic sounding.

~~~
gtk40
That is a lot no matter how you look at it though. If you assume someone eats
2,000 calories a day and 60,000 calories a month of only this one product,
that would still be providing a month worth of food for 15 billion people.

~~~
criley2
I think a person eats 2,000 kilocalories a day and 2,000,000 calories per day.

When one person eats 2M calories a day, selling trillions of calories is
suddenly not so hard!

~~~
gtk40
Ah, perhaps you're right. I assumed by the uppercase 'C' it was kilocalories,
but maybe it was just how it was formatted.

------
vermontdevil
Has anyone tried the drink? Is it good?

~~~
puredemo
It's alright, sort of tastes like bland vanilla rice.

Had to stop 'cause the girlfriend is celiac and they can't guarantee gluten
free.

~~~
psykovsky
Wasn't it enough for your girlfriend not to drink it?

~~~
puredemo
Not really, we share a lot of meals and we maintain a gluten-free household.

Actually they do seem to be gluten-free now, fwiw.

~~~
Nadya
According to their FAQ they are not gluten-free.

[https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/201274745-Vegan-
Or...](https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/201274745-Vegan-Organic-
Kosher-Gluten-Free-GMO-free-allergen-free-etc-)

------
kainolophobia
I feel like this entire operation could run on one box...

Engineering is not purely technical prowess, it's the balance of technology,
economy, organization and other variables.

I see no mention of cost in this article; is this infrastructure friendly to
the future of the business?

------
sjg007
Man, how about a startup that just teaches people how to cook. How about an
app that teaches you to cook with and while on a date?

------
wheaties
Why is a CTO only in charge of engineers who work on software? I would assume
that the people doing anything molecular are also engineers. Sorry if this
sounds strange but I hate it when talking to software folks I somehow have to
remind them that before computers existed there were these other, strange
professions also called engineers.

------
driverdan
I've been making my own "Soylent" for many years for much less money.

8oz skim milk

1/2 cup oats

25g milk protein isolate

1 banana

1 tbsp natural peanut butter (or almond butter)

Dash of good cinnamon

Multivitamin

Takes only a few minutes to make, tastes better than Soylent and is cheaper.

~~~
cdcarter
Four of these per day are still less than half the appropriate fiber intake
for a grown man.

------
mdekkers
Why don't they simply measure the grains of powder sold? That will certainly
be an even bigger and more useless metric!

------
Raphmedia
Any alternatives for Canadians?

~~~
sanswork
A lot of people don't like it and sell their stuff on eBay so you could try
there.

~~~
Raphmedia
I would be worried of buying food secondhand. Nobody can prove for sure that
I'm buying Soylent powder and not ... powdered caffeine mixed with whey and
anthrax

~~~
sanswork
You buy food second hand every time you shop at a grocery store.

A kid in the store room replacing your pancake powder with caffeine, whey and
anthrax is about as likely as someone selling a box of Soylent on eBay.

~~~
yellowapple
On that note, pancakes made of caffeine and whey would be... interesting, to
say the least.

------
sabujp
Isn't it unhealthy to drink your food, sugar, and nutrients?

------
ctdonath
For discussion: instead of EBT/food-stamps, how about a Soylent subscription?
Everything a body needs, relatively inexpensive, no allegations of abuse
(lobster, cigarettes, junk food).

~~~
rwallace
Captive audiences create bad incentives. As soon as the users don't have a
choice, the supplier no longer has an incentive to maintain quality.

------
sabujp
i'd rather eat insects grown in a lab.

------
curiously
Remember water? How you used to drink it? So tedious right? You have to gulp
so many times and sometimes it dribbles down to your chin ruining your shirt.
Don't you wish you could just snort water? I mean now you can! One line of
water is equivalent to drinking 3 cups of water. Why waste time drinking water
like an idiot when you can snort it and get the same amount? I mean it's a no
brainer honestly if you think about it. Obviously, this level of ingenuity
comes at a price. What? Of course it's more expensive than water you can get
anywhere, because you can snort it.

~~~
tardolympics
Have you already started a kickstarter campaign? The time savings alone would
make me 10x more productive!

------
philip1209
Oh wow, I missed that Heroku now supports Docker. I've been messing around
with Elastic Beanstalk and Kubernetes for Flask deployments and now I'm
tempted to see whether Heroku is worth exploring.

~~~
yellowapple
It's not. They're introducing a "better" (read: worse) pricing structure, and
they have a reputation for deliberately making their platform worse (see also:
the switch from intelligent to random load-balancing on dynos).

If anything, migrating _away_ from Heroku to EB, Kubernetes, Cloud66, etc.
would be a better strategy.

