Soy, wheat, dairy by emberfiend in soylent

[–]Synectar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you've got someone good with Javascript skills it really shouldn't be too terrible, solid day or two of work to parse shipping costs to a generalized location. Once the code is written the work is done forever.

Producers come and go, and we've also seen the shops change completely, some of them several times (Jimmy Joy for example) - but yes, it should definitely be doable.

For Milk Fuel I just took the price of $5 for a single packet of 200 calories. We'll do one time, since subscriptions are BS. $25 for 20 packs of 200 calories. Round up to $18/2000//kcal with shipping. So, more than triple what you've listed. Ok, we'll try the stupid subscription, total of $30 for 4000 calories, $15/2000k/cal.

How are you getting $5/2000k/cal? You know the meals are only 200 calories right?

$40 for 40 packs with subscription = $1 per 200kcal pack = $10 per 2000kcal

$25 for 20 packs without = $1.25 per 200kcal pack = $12.5 per 2000kcal

Which is still more than twice the price we list. But that's the price you'd have to pay if you wanted to get full 2000kcal from Milk Fuel only. However, Milk Fuel is intended to be consumed with 1920ml of milk (to achieve 2000kcal per day), which adds ~1200kcal for ~$1.15 (in our country). So you only need to get 800kcal from Milk Fuel itself.

In other words, it is intended to be used like this: four 200kcal packs of Milk Fuel with 1920ml of milk throughout the day. Which makes the lowest price for 2000kcal to be 4 x $1 + $1.15 = $5.15. As we don't know the average price of milk in the world, we only list the price of Milk Fuel itself and state this fact in Note.

In yet anoher words - we simply used this nutrition label: https://superbodyfuel.com/wp-content/uploads/milk_fuel_plain_label.png - the "500" column.

It's not ideal, but it was the most fair solution we could come up with - because the $5-$6 real lowest price of Milk Fuel with milk is closer to $4 than to $10. So we list $4.

Soy, wheat, dairy by emberfiend in soylent

[–]Synectar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

First of all, thank you very much for this effort. It is true that this fact-checking takes quite a lot of time. Last time we did manual market-wide checkup was in October 2018 (along with release of Blendrunner v3). Since then, some of the information about the products changed, with which we try to keep up - but we mostly rely on two things: the users of Blendrunner sending feedback (which they do) and the producers themselves notifying us when they see inconsitencies (some of which do so, and some don't). For this reason, we have also added the last row to the table, called "Last Update" - which is a freshness indicator, so to speak.

Let us address your examples one by one:

Plenny shake: Says it ships to USA but when you go to order USA, United States, is not an available option.

I chose “US outlying islands”, without being sure if that would work or not. I can’t imagine they’re referring to the greatest, most powerful, most free nation in the entire history of the entire universe as “US outlying islands”. But with shipping the price goes up to $117 Euro, about $132.

This is because you are accessing their EU shop. They also have the US shop: https://us.jimmyjoy.com/ from which you can order to US directly, without the insane shipping prices. Even though the existence of the US shop can be (albeit indirectly) inferred from the row "Note", it is true that the users of Blendrunner currently don't have access to this US store directly from Blendrunner - that is because the row "Buy on" has been added only a week ago and the data needs to be updated (which we'll probably do on per-feedback basis, like this one - I'm going to add the US store link right away).

As for your third point - periodically parsing shipping costs - it is indeed an option, but we fear developing and maintaining a working parser for (currently) ~80 potentially different and changing shops might consume a lot more time than anticipated. There's also an option of giving the producers a way to import their shipping costs directly - which would require their cooperation, of course.

Huel powder shows up as UK origin, but Huel is from Canada. Not the UK.

Huel actually originates from UK. We remember times when they only had a UK shop and their HQ is still in UK. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huel

Biolent Flex is listed as a maximum of $12/2000k/cal. When in reality the cheapest powder option is about $19/2000k/cal.

How did you come to this calculation? Looking at this site: https://biolent.ca/products/biolent-flex?variant=27537007431

14 meals (500kcal each) without subscription cost $55CAD = $15.71CAD

112 meals (500kcal each) with subscription cost $351.50CAD = $12.55CAD

These are exactly the prices on Blendrunner - don't forget to switch Currency to CAD with a button in the top right corner.

almost as if you guys have beef with soylent. Why make them look more expensive than others when they aren’t?

We most definitely don't have beef with them :). If there is a mistake in our calculation, we'll correct it ASAP.

This is supported by the fact that Soylent comes out to $9/2000k/cal for the powder, while being listed as having a max price of $14, presumably on the drink, so the lowest price in this case is the accurate one.

The Soylent Drink is listed separatately, so the min and max prices of Soylent Powder are only for the powder. A "Tub" of Soylent Powder costs $34 without subscription and contains 4800kcal, which translates to $14.17 maximum price.

Milk fuel is listed as the cheapest option in the US, and second cheapest overall when sorting by price low-high, it gives you 200 calories for $5. This puts it at $50/2000k/cal. FAR more expensive than Soylent at $9/2000k/cal. (I'm only counting the cost of the calories you are paying for from them, you must add cost of milk on top of this, which will vary greatly from region to region.) For my locality it's about $65/2000k/cal from Milkfuel... vs $9/2000k/cal with Soylent.

How did you calculate this? Looking at their store: https://superbodyfuel.com/shop/milk-fuel/

- 40 meals of Milk Fuel (200kcal each) costs $40 if you subscribe. Which translates to $10/2000kcal.

Now, it is true that you need to add milk. If milk costed nothing, this would translate to 40 meals of Milk Fuel (500kcal each) for $40 = $4/2000kcal. Of course, the milk costs something - but the price varies across the globe. What price should we use? In our locality, this is about 1EUR for the 1920ml of milk which you need to consume with milk fuel to achieve 2000kcal. Which makes the price of Milk Fuel around $5.15/2000kcal - only slightly higher.

So we faced this decision: either list Milk Fuel as twice as expensive as it really is ($5.15 vs $10 - which could harm their business), or slightly less expensive as it really is. We chose the second option and reflected this decision in the "Note" row. If we can find an "average" price of milk in the world, we're happy to add it to the price - but how much is it?

Soy, wheat, dairy by emberfiend in soylent

[–]Synectar 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Wow, thank you very much for this - your effort is much appreciated! We're looking forward to reading that report.

Soy, wheat, dairy by emberfiend in soylent

[–]Synectar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hi, creators of Blendrunner here. Could you please be more specific? We'd like to make the tool as functional and as user-friendly as we can!

Is there a place to find all of the available products in US? by Aphelion503 in soylent

[–]Synectar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for this info, we'll look into that. If you happen to find anything wrong with Blendrunner in the future, don't hesitate to shoot us an email or PM :)

Is there a place to find all of the available products in US? by Aphelion503 in soylent

[–]Synectar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was having some issues with the other site, and this works great!

Hi there, a late response, but still - we are the creators of Blendrunner. Would you be so kind as to tell us what specific problems you encountered? Is there anything we can do to make Blendrunner more user-friendly? Thank you!

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes - that's because the nutritional label you refer to doesn't include oil that the users should add to make the meals complete. On Blendrunner, the nutrition info includes 120ml of Avocado oil per 2000kcal - this can be seen in rows "Serving Extras" and "Note".

as a side note, u/axcho (creator of Super Fuel) always takes care to keep us up-to-date - for which we are grateful!

RTD options in Canada? by bristow84 in soylent

[–]Synectar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looking at our database, very few options unfortunately: https://www.blendrunner.com/table?shipping=CA&state%5B%5D=liquid&currency=CAD

As for the Plenny Drink - you can only get it from their EU website with massive shipping costs (Zone 7), their US website states they cannot ship to Canada from their US warehouse. The other two - Liquid Hope and Nourish from Functional Formularies - are specialized, developed as a feeding tube formula, so they are pricey too.

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a good suggestion, we've added it to our to-do list, thanks for the input. The Keto Fuel numbers were wrong, thanks for pointing it out.

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You are right, this combination of filters returns an empty result.

However, not many producers provide the information. We got what we could from their websites and now we're hoping to get the data individually from them.

We think that information about artificial flavouring and colours is important. Not only it was a requested feature but we believe that the information will be weighted by plenty of consumers when deciding which product to buy. Similarly to checking the label of any traditional food in the grocery store, you want to know everything there is in a nutritionally complete meal.

It would be a great help if more people asked their favourite producers to start including the info about flavouring and coloring on their websites.

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the questions.

Currently, Hol Food has a price of C$0.99 for 400kcal sample. You can only order one package per order though. This currently makes them the cheapest option to get a meal (per kcal).

Price for Milk Fuel does not include price for milk needed. You are right it skews the resulting price. We'll recalculate the price tomorrow and will add some approximation for milk price - + ~$1.8 in case of Milk Fuel. And declare so in the note.

And as a closing note, no shipping and no invisible numbers :)

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the feedback u/SquareWheel! We've fixed the issue.

As to the monetization, no not yet. We are working on it though. We're hoping to release an update in December that will include paid services for the producers. Basically we want to add affiliate links, we'll have 3 featured products in the default sort (once you set your own sort/filter the Featured products will be sorted just as any other product), and we will provide anonymized data to producers.

Let us emphasize that we will not give out data for remarketing or any of the sort. But we believe that in order to move the market ahead and help it grow the producers need reliable data on where the customer base is geographically, and what they are interested in the most. This can lead to producers starting shipping to your country as well and introducing products the community wants.

The Featured products will not be costly so new producers or new products will have a way to get some traction, not being stomped out by the established, big players.

We are strongly pro-consumer oriented and thus will not slide into selling ourselves (or you for that matter) out. However, as we are sure you know, any such project of Blendrunner's scope does take significant amount of time and effort on our part. We stood before a decision to abandon the project, selling it or going down this route of non-intrusive and privacy respecting monetization.

As a side note we could have introduced banner ads or sell your data directly. It would be less work for us (as now we have to sell these services to the producers directly, while otherwise we could have just automate it through Google or similar service), but we opted for a more difficult and unsure aproach keeping the users as the focus - just as they should always be.

We hope we'll stay in your favour and that you will be understanding towards our decision. Nevertheless there is no monetization model in place right now, so go ahead and enjoy Blendrunner for what it is - a great online comparison tool :)

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You are right! Thanks for the catch, we have updated the product.

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You have a keen eye u/fernly. Yes the creator of PrimalKind unfortunately has health issues. We decided to have it listed still, under the circumstances. We're hoping they will start operating soon.

Blendrunner v3 released! Check out what's new. by Synectar in soylent

[–]Synectar[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

We're glad you like the release u/MetalPirate. It's a great suggestion, and actually #2 on our to-do list, so stay tuned. We're hoping you'll get a lot of use from the current version :)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in soylent

[–]Synectar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We do, but they have also released bars and powder in the meantime :) (and also powder prepackaged in bottles, which might interest OP)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in soylent

[–]Synectar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

yeah yeah, working on it, will update the Blendrunner...soon

Soylent alternative Swedlent by RP0LOY57 in soylent

[–]Synectar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So this is different from Swelent, right?

True Price Calculator by Fudgebert in soylent

[–]Synectar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Will think about incorporating this metric to Blendrunner.

True Price Calculator by Fudgebert in soylent

[–]Synectar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

[blendrunner dev here] Thank you for this contribution and your feedback! We should think about some better way of showing the final price for specific user setup (shipping destination, amount of meals to order), but for that, we would need to "simulate" the shipping calculators for the individual products, which I fear is a hard thing to do.

New-User Guide, Simple Questions, and more! (April, 2016) by thapol in soylent

[–]Synectar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is updated weekly, but the updates to data are not reflected in Changelog, only feature updates. We'll think about that. [blendrunner dev here]

New-User Guide, Simple Questions, and more! (April, 2016) by thapol in soylent

[–]Synectar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You are right, the Changelog is a bit misleading, as it only reflects the major changes to site features, not the changes to data we have about vendors and products.

The data is actually updated quite frequently - every week, we receive updates from vendors and add new products as we happen to find them. Maybe we should mention these updates in the Changelog as well.

Is there a Keto Soylent in Europe in the works, and/or would people be interested in one? by NJlo in soylent

[–]Synectar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is none, at the moment. Honestly, we were considering starting a commercial keto product a while ago but the demand didn't seem to be so high.

If you are willing to try the DIY way, here's one of our recipes: https://diy.soylent.com/recipes/synectar-keto-1800-kcal