Wouldn't a Boxed Soylent (sealed bladder in a box like boxed wine) be most efficient for shipping to consumer, and most efficient for consumption? If they are really trying to optimize every aspect, that seems like the solution (from my armchair!). My first thought when seeing the headline was "oh boy, Silicon Valley has been shopping something in a bottle for 1 year now, and now they're experts in bottle packaging innovation, but I was pleasantly surprised by the write up. They identified problems unique to their product and addressed them. Nothing earth shattering glass, but also not settling for status quo. It's minor but non-trivial, and it speaks to the attitude of the overall product. I've been keeping Soylent around as a healthy meal-in-a-pinch option and I really enjoy it, plain flavor and all. Super filling, tastes like a plant-y pancake batter.
My take on the reasons that soylent didn't go with paper packaging (cartons or bag-in-box):
1. Paper packaging is much more fragile than plastic packaging. Boxes permanently dent, buckle when compressed, tear much more easily, etc, when enduring punishment that a plastic container will shrug off. Paper is also much less resistant to water damage. Paper-packaged products like milk cartons or juice boxes are usually transported in durable, rigid-walled crates, and would probably do much worse than the previous plastic bottle in a regular door-delivery use-case.
2. I've always found the relatively low rigidity of the whole assemblage to make sipping directly from a TetraPak sort-of-thing a little slippery and uneasy. The box can warp in all sorts of ways. Maybe I've just been burned by spilling milk on my shirt late at night trying to drink from the carton...
3. Bag-in-box specifically doesn't "scale down" to single servings that well. The experience of drinking out of a bladder within a larger box is less-than-ideal because the bladder can slosh around inside the container. Maybe if they aimed to sell bulk wet Soylent fluid, bag-in-box would be the way to go.
What kind of plastic is this? Actually, I don't care; I wish disposable plastic in general would go away.
Isn't part of their marketing greeness? But their model is keurig-for-calories? They _could_ refuse to do the plastic bottles and ship paper bags of powder...
Compared to the cellophane and Styrofoam packaging that a steak is sold in in the standard American grocery store I think it's an improvement. They also mention that they no longer have the mostly-trash, plastic cap wrapper in the new design.
A keurig type machine for soylent paper bags would be an interesting sight. Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee.
> Now I wonder how keurig even began convincing people to use their unconventional methods for coffee.
It's a simple, self-contained way to freshly and quickly brew a single cup of coffee with no mess, and priced for consumers: Cutting a few annoying chores out of a rushed morning at a cost of a few tens of cents per cup.
I don't know how difficult it is to mix Soylent, but you can buy an automatic baby formula maker for $150-$200. Put water in the tank, power in the top, and boom: automatic mixing. I'm surprised an enterprising Soylent enthusiast hasn't hacked something up yet—particularly given their "early adopter" tech audience.
It shouldn't be too much harder to add "pods" (powder containers) to that device. It might even make the process easier because the machine wouldn't have to measure the right amount.
Just combining water and powder doesn't give the right texture. In my experience, you have to use a blender, or it doesn't come out smooth. But when I use a blender, it still has a "frothy" texture that isn't quite as smooth as the stuff in the bottles they ship.
They do sell a powder if you want to mix it up yourself. Then you aren't shipping a lot of water around. But a bladder/bag wouldn't be portable which would defeat the purpose of the convenient mixed option.
Yes, the footprint of a tetrapak would be completely square, no rounded corners wasting space.
It also makes for much more compact trash as you can fold and reseal them almost completely flat. Plastic bottles can be "compressed" but they still waste significant space
You are very condescending. These people are trying to do something, they share the process, they try to get some inspiration from people they like. What's the big deal ?
If I go to the supermarket, almost every smoothie bottle looks somewhat like the new Soylent bottle. I can't tell if they actually took inspiration from Dieter Rams, but it's really easy to refer to him since he is like the father of modern industrial (consumer) design.
Soylent is an enterprise and they want to make themselves to look as good as possible in order to generate more revenue. No reason not to criticize awkward marketing blog posts like this.
(I apologize for the crappy image; I'm nowhere near a copy of the movie to make a decent screenshot)
No bullshit. Just the product name and necessary information about its content. No useless colors, no pictures of animals, smiling faces or other crap. There are days I dream of starting a food company just to make food in such packaging.
I do believe they are trying to do something, but it has more to do with marketing and product placement than with design.
Lastly, we did our best to follow the “less but better” teachings of 1960’s Braun designs. These enduring designs are known for their stripped down features and clean lines. No unnecessary buttons or extraneous curves, just what you need; everything in its place.
It's a bottle. There's no need to evoke Braun or their “less but better” approach, it's always just been a vessel and some sort of cap.
This is silly. Your argument is still "It's a bottle therefor stop making a big deal about it" - it's someone's job to care about it. They explain the problem they set out to solve, how they solved it, a background to how these problems are solved (I don't know shit about design, so the "less but better" reference is actually interesting).
If you want to say "It's marketing" no shit, anything any company publishes ends up going through marketing at some point. Every tech blog a company has is marketing. Who cares?
If you show me a nice program you coded, I'd say "that's cool".
If you show me a nice program you coded and tell me that you've been inspired by John Backus, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, I'd say "yeah well it's still a program".
No. My argument was that a bottle was a vessel with a cap, and evoking Braun's “less but better” approach, while interesting (iconic, even) in itself, is unnecessary. To me, it merely sounds like pointless name-dropping.
Inacceptable! Unfortunately "designers" nowadays feel more like self-loving "artists" rather than problem-solving engineers - we need better education!
"Inventing a plastic bottle in 2017" - this could be joke, but the ignorance behind it makes me angry.
This is a nice blog post - what's with all the hate? So it's basically a marketing tool, but isn't that what blogs are for? As a customer of Soylent, I appreciate that they are writing blog posts about their thought process. It feels nice to be communicated with. Also, I highly doubt a detailed blog post like this is going to convert many new customers - seems like it's mainly for existing ones.
FYI, the new bottles are a nice improvement. There's no wrapper at the top anymore, which is sometimes annoying to open and creates extra trash, and the shape of the bottle is more space efficient for packaging and storage.
It's an old problem. There's a neat book, Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet, published by the EFF back in 1990. There's a quote from it[1] that comes to mind when I see people vehemently disagreeing online:
Something about online communications seems to make some people particularly irritable. Perhaps it's the
immediacy and semi-anonymity of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon
think seem to exist to make you miserable.
Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a letter received on paper, it's
just so easy to hit your R key and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them.
Even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into raving madmen. When this happens,
flames erupt.
And of course, Usenet was around long before this book was published. So now, when I see people being righteously indignant on HN or Reddit, I try to take it in stride. They're just carrying on the time honored internet flaming tradition. :)
True for "corporate blogs" but remember there are still plenty of people (maybe more than ever?) maintaining personal blogs for their own less nefarious purposes as well.
> The Pepsi Ratio is created by two simple circles,
that are in a set ratio to each other: The Golden Ratio.
> The Pepsi Ratio is aesthetic geometry.
> The Golden Ratio establishes a proportion of one part (a) relative to another (b). Playing by these rules produces an aestetic that is universally accepted to be in balance and harmony. The Pepsi aesthetic respects these rules: The brand identity can be derived from two circles, that have a set relation to each other.
I think the majority of the document is real but some of the pages have been swapped out with fakes. I totally believe that some pretentious designer did a lot of the backlog of work to look at the history of the design and I have a hard time believing that someone would put in all that effort to find those images, trace them in a vector art program, and then wireframe them just for a laugh.
I wish more companies put out there the rationale for their design choices. Not sure why a lot of comments here are so negative about them doing their job and communicating it.
Soylent pretends to be things it isn’t. This is easily one more example. This post reeks of “hipster”: name dropping of famous aesthetic designs, space references, black and white photos of milk bottles, some mathematical looking diagrams, talk of perfectionism (two years development)?
This is a marketing ad, nothing more.
“the same complete nutrition you have come to expect from Soylent”
I feel like that would be a good idea, to know more about what went into a design, but I fear that we would just end up with tons and tons of Apple-like videos, British accent and all. Then the neat factor gets alluded by marketing spin.
I wish they made a blog post about how they came about to think that Soylent was a good branding name. Having seen the movie, it makes me want to barf just looking at the bottle.
This is not a joke, I actually feel nauseous because of the name.
Me too. I will simply never buy or use this product because of the decisions made about how to name it. Those same processes will more than likely be involved in whats in the stuff as well, and .. yeah .. that just doesn't work for me.
Seriously people, the irony levels are too damn high. This is a case of an absolutely atrocious brand decision being made by people whose hubris are blinding them to the fact that they're insulting themselves, and their customers, by associating their product with cannibalism.
Probably as a joke, but it served them well, it's really a clever name IMHO.
I think it all started as a few blog posts about the founder's experiments in creating his own meal replacement, and after he got crazy media attention he decided to turn it into a product.
Soylent as a name is instantly recognizable and has a sense of self-awareness/irony that many other products lack, I would be surprised if the name itself didn't contribute greatly to the initial media coverage.
I'm inclined to buy it because of the name. I appreciate a company with a good sense of humor.
That, and every time I see a Soylent ad on Facebook, I usually get a good 10+ minutes of amusement from reading the indignant comments about the product's name. To be clear, I have no problem with your stance on the issue; you described your feelings concisely and reasonably. Those FB comments, though....many of them are neither concise nor reasonable.
I think that sometimes, a name that provokes this kind of reaction is a good thing. Maybe it's better to have a product that people either love or hate than for some reason than to have one that everyone is indifferent about.
I quite liked the European competitor's original name, Joylent. To avoid legal issues they eventually changed the name and somehow ended up with "Jimmy Joy". That name was so intensely disliked that they renamed it again in about a month.
The company still seems to be named Jimmy Joy, and the product Plenny Shake. Both somehow strike me as really terrible brand names. Can't find anything about a subsequent rename.
That said, I'm a customer of theirs, and daft names aren't going to change that.
The company is still called Jimmy Joy. We decided to ask the community what the actual product should be called. Since we already had the 'Twenny Bar' we ended up choosing to name it 'Plenny Shake'
Also, lots of people (especially men) avoid anything with "Soy" in it because it is said to contain compounds which mimic estrogen. This was debunked [1], but still, it may hurt marketing.
The movie depicts a future in which nourishment has become purely functional -- not by choice, but because food resources are so scarce. (And to top it off, the function is served by the worst "waste" imaginable).
Now, instead of food, the scarce resource seems to have become time.
I understand that Soylent serves a purpose to some, but I believe we should strive to move away from that dystopian nightmare, instead of succumbing to it.
There are tons of bottles with that shape on the shelves of my local grocery store... It's quite common with any drink that isn't carbonated (and therefore doesn't have to contend with higher pressures). Juices, teas, etc...
Yeah, I'm left wanting. I thought maybe there was something interesting going on, but instead they seem to have discovered that rectangles pack more efficiently than circles. That's it? I learned that in geometry class as a teenager.
I normally really enjoy insight into product design, but this whole thing seems a little masturbatory. Braun's designs were great because other people recognized that they were smart and simple. It seems like Soylent is squarely aiming for the hipster market (I'm not really sure what else to call it) where people praise an extraordinary effort regardless of if the end result is noticeably better.
I'm not saying the bottle design work wasn't better or that the product doesn't benefit from it, but the write-up about it has this sense of self-satisfaction that puts a bad taste in my mouth (completely disconnected from the taste of the actual product which I can't really comment on).
Why not just go with a square carton design? Now the whole rectangle is full and they're mostly recyclable (I think?). It would probably also normalize Soylent into something like milk.
The blog post cites visible damage from door delivery shipping as the major design issue that they were trying to solve.
(Paper) cartons are much weaker and less resilient than plastic bottles. Think about the number of times you've seen dented or folded chicken soup cartons on supermarket shelves... I've certainly seen plenty of Safeway soup boxes to avoid because of obvious exterior damage.
I don't think cartons would get them very far in that area.
I've never really seen milk cartons delivered towards schools or shops (think juices and milk) be damaged all that often, but I'm not watching their deliveries either! I just imagined it was a problem already solved for non-pressurized drinks.
Then you're blessed with good fortune! Unfortunately I remember getting my lunch milk carton already sticky and wet from other damaged cartons in the elementary school cafeteria many times. Only the inside was waxed, so once one carton sprung a leak, the rest would weaken from the leakage, and sometimes when you'd go to pick yours up, it would tear and spill. Yuck.
The problem is the customer paying $4+ a serving won't find that acceptable. A school won't care if a few $0.50 cartons are dented in a shipping crate of over a hundred milk cartons, but a customer that gets a dented $5 drink is going to complain and ask for a refund/replacement.
"So why sqround? Why not a crisp cornered square bottle, you ask? Obviously, a perfect square would be most efficient in terms of packing. Squares, however, come with their own set of challenges. When bottles travel down the manufacturing line on their way to your door, they are constantly moving from single file to big groups, around curves and corners, and jostling into place. A bunch of round bottles will roll off one another and travel smoothly around corners, but a bunch of square bottles have a tendency to lock up with one another, kind of like a losing game of Tetris. By generously rounding the corners of a square (to the industry-coined “sqround”) we solve these production line issues."
They are selling a lifestyle and an experience more than potions of liquified nutrients. As such the packaging, the marketing, the blogs about it are very important (maybe even more important than what's in the bottle).
It's a bit like people go and pay $5 for a cup of coffee in a coffee shop. They are buying the experience more than the coffee.
> ..$5 for a cup of coffee in a coffee shop. They are buying the experience more than the coffee.
Slightly OT but for me it's the reverse. If I go to a really good gourmet café then yes it may be expensive and yes, a component of the price is the experience (usually these cafés are nice places to hang out in) but most of it is the coffee itself. I cannot buy a coffee that good for less money in another place, hence I am willing to pay the price they are charging.
Agreed. Where I work, I can get a cup of iced coffee at 7-11 for $1, or I can go to a coffee stand and get significantly tastier iced coffee for $4.75. They have roughly the same experience in this case because the coffee stand doesn't have a place to sit.
They never really talk about alternatives to the plastic bottle, just variations of it.
I would also think filling and distribution of a carton is a solved problem considering how much milk/juice gets moved in them without too much damage.
They talked about shipping durability, which was the point I was making. A cylindrical-ish plastic bottle would be less prone to crushing than a square cardboard carton.
Normally I would find this sort of thing quite interesting, but this is somehow... inauthentic. As is Soylent in general. Reading their blog posts, you are never quite sure if they are serious about the whole meal replacement concept or if it's actually a big joke.
But isn't that exactly what design should do? Not mimic for the sake of mimicry, but attempt to better understand the rationale for any decision and ultimately designing with intent. The homework is the meat of the thing.
So what if the result is the same? At least the team behind the work now understands how they got there—and communicate as much to their current or potential fan base.
I wouldn't want to hire a babysitter to watch my child if their sales pitch was: "I've watched a lot of babysitters in movies, I know what I'm doing." It's a bit of a silly comparison of course, but the point remains: how you get to a result is just as important—if not more important—as the result itself. That's good design!
I see your point, but I'm going to call a bit of bullshit on it. What you are saying makes sense if the team then moves on to perform similar tasks again and can use this institutional knowledge to their advantage. But here it seems that the team was actually at least in part comprised of outside consultants. So they did spend two years of Soylent's time and money to design and Odwalla bottle. Sure it makes for a cool story, but it seems more like they could have saved themselves about 18-20 months by looking harder for different packaging options instead of inventing new ones, not to mention the money that went into this. No really, they didn't mention how much this cost.
Your comparison can actually be used as a counterpoint to your argument: maybe they should have hired someone who didn't need to look at so many reference designs to figure out sqround.
I guess it depends on how much time and money you want to waste.
A team of people spent two years supposedly working on this. That same team could probably have gotten samples from 4-5 manufacturers and selected an Odwalla bottle with a brand design in 2-3 weeks.
It just seems silly and wasteful to me. But hey, it's not my money!
The blog post doesn't make it very obvious which bottle is actually new, I assume the left-most on the first image? The second image have them flipped and the last image is not the most clear.
The first image, second bottle also look "more designed".
I find it hard to believe that the asymmetric design has optimal strength:weight ratio, which means it's not 100% eco-friendly. It looks like it's deliberately wasting material so it can have a distinctive shape that can be design patented, instead of a fully optimized generic bottle.
That's the difference between a freshman design project and an actual design used in practice. It's unlikely he has the mathematics/engineering background to do a proper analysis of his design.
He's not thinking of the bottle as a pressure vessel (which it is).
They had a lot of problems with mold in the past with the bottles. They don't mention that in the article - i guess they don't want to draw more attention to that disgusting issue. But the mold issue was probably an important factor in their bottle design as well.
They solved that problem a long time ago by making the caps sealed on the bottle. They originally were not, and some of the liquid would get lodged up along the rim of the cap during shipment. That was the part that got moldy.
As someone that has a few commercially produced products (BBQ Rubs and Sauces) I never cease to be amazed by how much work the packaging piece of the puzzle is.
I easily spend as much time worrying about bottle, closures, labels, etc. as I do about the actual product.
Don't you think its interesting to see the thought process of the people who make what we see in the world. Sure, it is just a bottle, but that doesn't mean that someone didn't put time and effort into making a good one.
I mean, sure, but don’t act like you’re changing the world. This is nothing more than marketing. Also, 5 seconds of thinking would tell you that a juice box has more packing efficiency than a bottle.
Yep, it's marketing, but it's also somewhat educational. That's marketing done right. Compare to the marketing blurbs for most products that are fairly meaningless.
Can you imagine if the people who marketed shampoos and cleaning products explained how they work in a similar way?
It does seem like they're trying to create a following like Apple. Instead of letting the work speak for itself, though, Soylent seems to think that they can incite that kind of appreciation.
Apple might have some good products, but a lot of bad ones as well with a whole lot of marketing and devoted fans that will wait in line all night for it, so really not that different.
I'm not an Apple person by a long shot (full-time Linux desktop / Android user) but I'm struggling to think of an outright bad product that they've put out in the past 15 years or so... I guess the Watch had its shortcomings and the specs on their computers are falling behind the competition but everything they put out seems very well designed and engineered.
Watch, new computers lacking many peripherals unless you buy a bag of dongles, rehashing the same product over and over while software upgrades make them obsolete...just saying marketing is a huge part of what apple does.
Soylent Cafe is almost exclusively sold online by the dozen, so a bottle that's more space-efficient and resistant to shipping damage is a tangible benefit to customers.
