This won’t measure that as the results will be massively skewed due it being promoted on a the soylent forum (which funnily enough will be heavy on soylent users, until they remove the soylent logo, remove the reddit alien holding a soylent bottle, and change the name and remove soylent staff from being moderators, and all the links to soylent in the right nav 5 links to soylent.com at the last count and not a single one to another complete food brand) and being called a soylent survey.
The quicker we get away from this confusing Soylent and soylent issue the better. It’s illogical and confusing. Soylent is a brand, the category is undecided but would be “complete food”. Using upper and low case doesn’t work because soylent (the brand) uses lower case.
PS. The title of the survey is “2016 Soylent Eaters Survey” with an upper case s, which just shows how confusing using a brand is for a category. The category is so new we can define the category name, it’s way too soon to say we can’t change it.
Seven moderators. Only one is an employee of Rosa Labs. And he was invited because he was active on the reddit thread, and didn’t ever advertise, market, or otherwise promote Soylent over any other products.
Do you mean the reddit? Because the survey isn’t promoted at all in the Solylent forum.
If you do mean the reddit, that networking service will be heavy on Soylent users until Rosa Labs has less of a market share than it has now. It is simply fact that more complete food users buy from Rosa Labs than any other company. My guess is that the share of the market Rosa Labs has now is larger than all the European companies together. (I stress, my guess only.) I’d say that of right now, in terms of users, Rosa Labs is first, DIY is second, Joylent is third. I’m not prepared to guess beyond the top three.
None of this detracts that Huel is a great product. I can say for Soylent users on the actual Soylent forum, they actively support the startups in other countries. Makes a lot more sense for industrial entrepreneurs like yourself to fill a niche rather than have international customers have to wait for Rosa Labs to expand. Huel is a godsend (is that hyperbole?) for citizens of England and France.
This is Ted from KetoSoy (soon to be KetoOne). Wanted to address a few of the issues y’all are discussing regarding brand share biases.
We’ve done everything reasonably possible to get accurate brand share data, but it will inevitably be skewed towards Rosa Labs Soylent – our three 'least biased" data sources were reddit’s r/soylent, discuss.soylent.com and the respondents from last year. Last year the discuss.powderedfoods.com forum was also used, sadly that concept didn’t take off so we don’t have that source this year.
We ran the survey in a quarantine period of two weeks where the participating producers didn’t contact their lists or own forums to try to minimize the skew. Mana (who isn’t technically a participant this year) sent it out to their list a week early, so we’re using only the first week of brand data in the final report.
Phase 2 of the survey we’re looking for better use statistics so we “dirty” the data by reaching out to our own lists. As last year, we adjust the filters in the final report to have the best sub-set of the data for each question when we draw conclusions.
We use the /r/soylent “distributors” page plus write ins from the previous year as the distributions we ask about. We’re considering expanding that to include blendrunner.com’s list next year.
Soylent’s two distributions (1.5and 2.0) are anchored to the top, ‘other’ is anchored to the bottom, and the rest are randomized.
All distributors with a presence on reddit were invited to participate, not everyone responded or could meet the requirements (provide a coupon and send a link to the survey to their list). We’ll be expanding the invitations next year and inviting earlier.
Regarding a general term: Future Food is what we’ve used this year to account for liquid and bar distributions. I don’t love it. $100 and a free month of any distribution we make to whomever comes up with a good general term. I’ve also considered starlent (*lent) and “nutritional base.”
Next year’s survey will be better, so if there’s something reasonable we can do to get better data we’ll do it. We’re operating on the assumption that good data is better than no data.
@coup some people use Soylent for the brand and some people are trying to use soylent for the category, but the brand using soylent for their brand name, just slightly confusing eh?
It is far more logical to have a category name (energy drinks) and brands (red bull, monster, etc).
We think the category should be called either “complete foods” or “total foods”.
I agree that it is way more straightforward to have a brand and category as different terms. The definition of “a soylent” came first and the brand /company came later.
There is a Huel subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/huel . It’s not very active at all yet. I really like this forum, but an active subreddit could help increase awareness of the product
I quite like the term ‘meal replacements’ for Huel etc., although I suspect the people running the companies may have philosophical disagreement with this, and want to distinguish them from the less complete MR products previously in the marketplace
I thought you would say that . Completely agree with you on the inappropriateness of using soylent as a generic term, I hope it loses the ground it has gained.
@ketosoy@julian Maybe if the manufacturers can all agree on a term and stick to it in their messaging, you can force the adoption of one you like? The quick search I made on Google for ‘soylent’ shows most articles using ‘meal replacement’.
Here’s a list of some alternate different ones plus the ones already mentioned above:
@ric we can’t agree on soylent either, plus that is illogical and confusing, so clearly soylent for a brand and category name is the worst choice. We can do better with a bit of brain power, don’t give up so easy.
@Ric Soylent didn’t start being used as the category, maybe in usa but not elsewhere, I’ve heard people talk about the energy drink market, but never the soylent market.
. Completely agree with you on the inappropriateness of using soylent as a generic term, I hope it loses the ground it has gained.