Hi HN, I’m Soham Sankaran, the founder of Pashi, the company behind Saag as a Service (https://saag.pashi.com). We offer three macronutrient-portioned variants of Saag (delicately-spiced Indian spinach curry): High Fat Saag Paneer, Balanced Saag Tofu, and High Protein Saag Seitan. We currently deliver weekly to customers in the SF Bay Area.
I started this service because I’ve struggled with nutrition all my life -- with obesity, the threat of my long family history of diabetes, and with getting adequate protein as a vegetarian in the United States. I’ve never had the time to consistently cook all my meals, and it’s hard to know the nutritional value of food you’re getting at restaurants unless you stick to salads or chain fast food (which is required to have nutritional information but is routinely off by 20-40%). Even if you know the nutritional values of the food you’re eating, attempting to log all your meals and snacks in a journal or an app like MyFitnessPal can be a massive time-sink and mental load.
‘Complete nutrition’ products like Soylent and Huel were appealing for relieving the physical and cognitive burden of dealing with nutrition all the time, but I perceived two major issues with them:
1) They taste absolutely terrible. These products are a massive step backward from thousands of years of accumulated culinary experience, and I don’t believe that most people are willing to forgo the pleasure that comes from eating real food three times a day, even if some kind of meal replacement is the right choice for their health. The biggest issue with diet plans and nutrition studies of all kinds is pervasively low adherence -- it just isn’t possible to get most people to consistently eat food that doesn’t taste good.
2) The retail versions of these products are not particularly customizable. Different people have different nutritional needs -- certainly calorically, but also in terms of macronutrient proportions. A female weightlifter and a male endurance runner have different bodies and different goals, resulting in different optimal nutritional profiles. Feeding them the same one-size-fits-all meal replacement is a mistake.
I stated Pashi to provide a real-food based nutrition service that tastes great but still retains the desirable characteristics of things like Soylent. The long term vision is to usher in a world where people can eat real, tasty food that is seamlessly customized to the specific nutritional profile they desire.
I initially soft-launched Pashi as a producer of entire meals with fully customizable calorie counts and macronutrient proportions, but this seemed to confuse people and didn't get very much traction. As a result, we’ve scaled back the focus to one of the most popular, customizable, and easily explainable foods on our menu -- Saag. If this gets some traction, we’ll introduce more fine-grained nutritional customization and more menu items depending on the feedback we get from our users.
I’d love to get the community’s thoughts on this and answer any questions here or via email (soham@pashi.com).
I started this service because I’ve struggled with nutrition all my life -- with obesity, the threat of my long family history of diabetes, and with getting adequate protein as a vegetarian in the United States. I’ve never had the time to consistently cook all my meals, and it’s hard to know the nutritional value of food you’re getting at restaurants unless you stick to salads or chain fast food (which is required to have nutritional information but is routinely off by 20-40%). Even if you know the nutritional values of the food you’re eating, attempting to log all your meals and snacks in a journal or an app like MyFitnessPal can be a massive time-sink and mental load.
‘Complete nutrition’ products like Soylent and Huel were appealing for relieving the physical and cognitive burden of dealing with nutrition all the time, but I perceived two major issues with them:
1) They taste absolutely terrible. These products are a massive step backward from thousands of years of accumulated culinary experience, and I don’t believe that most people are willing to forgo the pleasure that comes from eating real food three times a day, even if some kind of meal replacement is the right choice for their health. The biggest issue with diet plans and nutrition studies of all kinds is pervasively low adherence -- it just isn’t possible to get most people to consistently eat food that doesn’t taste good.
2) The retail versions of these products are not particularly customizable. Different people have different nutritional needs -- certainly calorically, but also in terms of macronutrient proportions. A female weightlifter and a male endurance runner have different bodies and different goals, resulting in different optimal nutritional profiles. Feeding them the same one-size-fits-all meal replacement is a mistake.
I stated Pashi to provide a real-food based nutrition service that tastes great but still retains the desirable characteristics of things like Soylent. The long term vision is to usher in a world where people can eat real, tasty food that is seamlessly customized to the specific nutritional profile they desire.
I initially soft-launched Pashi as a producer of entire meals with fully customizable calorie counts and macronutrient proportions, but this seemed to confuse people and didn't get very much traction. As a result, we’ve scaled back the focus to one of the most popular, customizable, and easily explainable foods on our menu -- Saag. If this gets some traction, we’ll introduce more fine-grained nutritional customization and more menu items depending on the feedback we get from our users.
I’d love to get the community’s thoughts on this and answer any questions here or via email (soham@pashi.com).