Soylent hasn't had any quality struggles in the past 6 months that I'm aware of.

12-18 months ago they had multiple issues: sporadic mold under the caps, some people severely allergic to the algae-based ingredient they used, and occasional long shipping delays. But all of those issues have been ironed out while Rhinehart was still CEO.

I honestly think this situation is closer to young Larry Page stepping aside for 10 years while Eric Schmidt ran Google than it is to anything particularly bad that Rhinehart has done. By all measures I've seen, Rosa Labs is highly successful and growing fast.

While I agree with you, I want to point that last October Health Canada decided that soylent could not be sold in Canada anymore, because it doesn't meet the minimum requirement of a meal replacement.

I'd be interested to hear what requirements it failed. Because on the surface (which is as deep as I've looked into Soylent) it seems pretty comprehensive, no?

It didn't have enough carbs (seriously). Canada has very specific nutritional requirements for a "meal replacement".

The KetoChow guy gets around this by recommending to their Canadian customers, instead of mixing with cream, to mix KetoChow with maple syrup.

I kid not.

This is a good point, thanks. I don't think Soylent has ongoing problems, and while I had the mold in mind Rhinehart seems to have done well with that.

My thought was less that Soylent had a consumer confidence problem, and more that Rosa Labs may have a board confidence problem. Meaning the 12 month old issues still floating around, but also meaning that Rhinehart has magnets in his fingertips and is generally a "weird futuristic tech dude" stereotype. That was great for getting Soylent going, and I expect Rhinehart will keep coming up with fascinating new stuff. But if the board is looking for mainstream appeal and enormous returns, they'd do better with a "nutrition on the go" image than a "posthuman meal replacement" image. And part of that would be moving Rhinehart to product, where he'll shine regardless, and out of the spotlight, where he might be image-incompatible.

It's the same move as something like Good Day Chocolate; they're basically a bog-standard nootropics company, but they put the stuff in chocolate instead of pills and packaged it for the Whole Foods checkout line. I'm not sure that's the goal with Soylent, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was an attempt.

Are you referring to the fake problems with the delicious snack bars? Or something else? I don't keep close track of Soylent as I only consume their products now and then (its shelf life is one of the things I love about it... and now I fear they'll cut that because it stunts repeat sales and encourages the kind of consumer they don't want) but that's the last I know of. Was bummed when they discontinued them, I ate loads of them and never had an issue. When they accepted returns and proceeded to eat them to prove they were fine, I appreciated that response and felt it the appropriate one but I know they backed off of that and apologized.

Not particularly - I never kept up with the snack bar controversy enough to even know what the complaint was.

I was thinking foremost of the mold issues with liquid Soylent. That's fairly old (12+ months?) and seems to be solved, but it's a long-term reputation problem in the same sense as Chipotle. Less crucially, I'm also thinking about the digestive issues people have reported - that some people talk about nausea and terrible gas when consuming lots of Soylent.

Neither of those things seems to be a "our product is nonviable today" issue, but both have raised a specter among the people I talk to of "Soylent is weird and maybe not healthy". Swapping the CEO to someone more mainstream seems like one step towards fighting that perception.

I can personally testify that the issues were not fake. It was awful. Maybe it was 1:1000 I don’t know but it totally happened.