Soylent has had to delay shipping until mid-April thanks to supply chain difficulties. It all comes down to the process of securing multiple tons of rice protein for Soylent’s forthcoming meal replacement drink.
Rob Rhinehart and his team have gone to great lengths to perfect their formula. One of the common complaints about the original formula was mouthfeel. Many said it was too gritty. The Soylent team has sought to correct this complaint by incorporating a finer rice protein in the mix, but they’ve had challenges in sourcing enough of the product to meet demand. This has delayed shipping.
Soylent is also the only source of demand, as they shared in a recent blog post…
We are exclusive customers of this particular rice protein at this time. Since it is an entirely new product they are still working on scaling production upwards, which contributed to the delays. Unfortunately, the supplier produces other brown rice protein isolates and these have been given priority in production over ours. Additionally, since all of our nutritional information was calculated based on this specific rice protein, switching at this time would take even longer than waiting for the current protein to arrive — it would likely require altering the amounts of other macro ingredients, blending/testing sample batches, placing a new PO with a different manufacturer, etc.
Delivery is expected to begin sometime around April 17th.
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