
People get “violently ill” from Soylent bars - ZoeZoeBee
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/reports-of-violent-vomiting-diarrhea-from-bars-has-soylent-on-the-defense/
======
colept
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.

~~~
whamlastxmas
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?

~~~
colept
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.

~~~
whamlastxmas
>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.

~~~
6nf
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.

~~~
coredog64
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.

------
dguido
I was one of these people! I still have all the bars from the same pack, in
case anyone wants to run experiments. The bar that made me sick was part of
the known bad "2:07 B.B. 14JUL17 F3 1966" batch.

I ate one of the contaminated bars about 2 weeks ago (9/28/2016) for breakfast
(~9-10am?) and the only other thing I had that morning was water. By noon, I
was walking out for lunch and rapidly got nauseous, then puked right on the
sidewalk outside Fulton Center. Two of my coworkers witnessed it. I was unable
to work, so I went home right away and tried to sleep it off, woke up later
that night and felt, for the most part, better. Symptoms mostly subsided by
10pm that night.

I didn't put together that it was food poisoning until a week later when I saw
these reports online (by following @Pinboard of course, for shame). I thought
one of my coworkers got me sick. I tend to think most cases of food poisoning
are your own fault (let something expire and eat it anyway, forget to wash
something, etc). I never suspected that packaged food would cause something
like this.

As many others hopefully have, I also used this incident to cancel all of my
subscriptions with Soylent (2.0, Coffiest, and the bars). I started eating
Soylent because of a jaw surgery I had in February. It was a convenient way to
keep my weight up while I couldn't eat any solid food. Now that my jaw is
healed, this is a great excuse to get back to normal food.

ps. Because Soylent is shamefully blaming this on the victims, I should state
that I have seen an allergist within the last year and have no known
allergies. I've consumed Soylent products, including the bars, since February
2016 without issue. I have no intolerance to any known food, as hopefully one
of my twitter accounts can prove (@WhyIsntDanFat). Whatever happened, it's
their fault, not some peculiarity with the way my body works, assholes.

pps. I also want to note that I consumed my contaminated bar AFTER reports
about them making people sick appeared online. Soylent could have notified me
to avoid them. Instead, they did nothing as the reports piled up and I ended
up walking into this trap they could have reasonably alerted to. The only
contact I had with them was 10/6/2016 when I emailed to notify them they were
responsible for making me sick.

~~~
guyzero
"Food poisoning is usually your own fault" \- absolutely not.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-
most-c...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-most-common-
sources-of-food-poisoning/386570/)

It comes from poor hygiene in the food supply chain. Salmonella and Listeria
don't appear in fruits because they've been left out on the counter.

~~~
dguido
Fair. At least in my own experience, I have succeeded in making myself sick
more frequently from stupid decisions in the kitchen. I think this was part of
the appeal of Soylent to me :-P.

------
cs702
Food is NOT like software.

If you make software, and your customers lose data, time, or money because you
sold them buggy software due to lack of testing, you'll probably be OK. You
can iterate quickly and break things regularly as you improve the product, and
your customers will put up with it.

But if you make food, and your customers get poisoned because you sold them
poison due to lack of testing, you're going to get in trouble. Federal and
state government agencies will want to have a serious chat with you and
possibly will shut you down. You cannot iterate quickly and break things
regularly to improve a food product; you cannot experiment with the health of
your customers.

If poisoning from Soylent bars was due to lack of careful testing prior to
releasing the bars to market, shame on the company.

~~~
paulddraper
Maybe the software _you_ work with.

Not all software is uber-for-toothbrushes.com.

Other software could kill people.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

~~~
uabstraction
As a machinist who occasionally write programs in G-Code from scratch and
adjusts them almost daily I can say even if it doesn't kill anyone, it might
send 25 pounds of brass spinning at 750 RPM flying across the shop. People
take writing harmless software for granted, but there are many fields where a
software failure can cause a serious emergency. There are embedded systems
lurking in a huge variety of machines which operate with deadly forces... from
aircraft to power plants to industrial processes to the car you drive to work.

~~~
TheCapn
I like sharing this image with friends when talking about how safety and
responsibility matter in software:
[http://i.imgur.com/SFHjzNg.png](http://i.imgur.com/SFHjzNg.png) \- A snippet
from the help files for a PLC coding program. If people want to adopt calling
themselves Software Engineers I say they need to uphold Engineering principles
and that usually involves a lot more responsibility than I see in software
communities.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Pick any processed food product on the supermarket shelf and you can be sure
it will be safe and consistent between batches, with very infrequent
exceptions, to the point that they usually make the news. Industrial mass
manufacture of food has been all but perfected.

Yet I keep hearing about serious issues with Soylent products. So then, what
is Soylent not doing that every other food manufacturer is? Basic quality
controls?

~~~
bertiewhykovich
Brain-dead "software-style" reasoning applied to food.

~~~
mesozoic
Moving fast and breaking things...

------
jaredtobin
Discussions on this kind of thing probably largely settle into opposing "yay
Soylent!" and "boo Soylent!" sides. When I look at this as a tidbit of news,
however, it doesn't seem to say very much to me.

"Small percentage of consumers report dissatisfaction with product - company
investigating."

~~~
bertiewhykovich
More like "many cases of violent reaction to food product reported, no
substantive action taken by company and blame deferred."

------
gr33nman
Making processed soy a main ingredient of your diet is probably a bad idea:

[https://chriskresser.com/the-soy-ploy/](https://chriskresser.com/the-soy-
ploy/)

~~~
jimmydddd
I'm a fan of Kresser, but I think he and the other "paleo" or former paleo
guys went a little overboard with the soy witch hunt. I looked into it after
Soylent changed from rice to soy protein. Really not too much supporting
evidence for all this fear of estrogen and man boobs.

Edit: I agree that processed soy shouldn't be a "main" diet ingredient. But
these guys freak out over using a little soy sauce.

~~~
gr33nman
I hear you. I find Kresser is generally pretty careful and evidence-based, but
there is definitely a subset of the Paleo community that is uncritical and
dogmatic.

For the record, soy sauce is fermented, which makes it relatively safe to eat.
As Kresser points out in the article, fermentation significantly reduces soy's
antinutrients.

------
hatsunearu
>After these reports, we have retrieved remaining bars from our consumers and
have personally consumed many of the remaining bars without adverse effects.

LMFAO are these fuckers serious? PERSONALLY CONSUMED.

You're not gonna do microbial studies or anything like that? They literally
ate their own evidence.

------
qwertyuiop924
The illness is probably from eating all the dead people.

...I have nothing to apologize for. You know you were thinking it.

On an unrelated note, this line stuck out:

>Reporters at BuzzFeed flagged the Food and Drug Administration’s inspection
record of the manufacturing facility where the bars are produced, Betty Lou’s,
Inc.

Is it just me, or is this not the sort of thing you'd expect from BuzzFeed?

~~~
taspeotis
BuzzFeed does investigative journalism now.

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/the-tennis-
racket](https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/the-tennis-racket)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Well, I know that now, but it still sounds weird to my ears. I still associate
Buzzfeed with annoying memes, cat pictures, and Ze Frank being less funny than
he used to be.

~~~
40acres
Buzzfeed has a really interesting model, seems they use all ad revenue that
those annoying memes generate to fuel their investigative journalism wing --
which is pretty good from what I've read.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
That is genuinely cool.

------
MiddleEndian
The original Soylent didn't even contain iron. Not surprised their new product
makes people sick. The makers don't know what they're doing, outside of
marketing their product very well online.

------
whamlastxmas
More accurate title: a small number of people have self-reported a varying
range of alleged symptoms commonly found in food poisoning after eating a
Soylent bar, with some of them claiming it's not related to a possible soy
allergy or sensitivity.

------
HillaryBriss
it's the chipotleization of soylent. they should send everyone a coupon for a
free soylent burrito.

------
big_paps
I dont understand why people eat such hyperprocessed stuff like that at all.
Go buy an apple ...

------
DanBC
Excessive consumption of sucralose can cause diarrhoea, which sucks if you
think this product can replace your meals.

