Well, a lot of folks would like to see a bit more care paid attention to the entire process. This isn't the first time Soylent has shipped potentially dangerous product.
Not long ago, they shipped their new bottled formula to folks, and it arrived covered in mold! Their snack bars have made people violently ill, and now their powder too. Every product Soylent makes, is making or has made people ill.
Soylent has practically zero quality control/testing, and doesn't have on-site staff dedicated to ensuring their product is safe. They send out a few carefully selected samples to an external lab, but that's far from continuous testing of the product rolling off the line.
Some might attribute it to the "silicon valley" mindset Soylent has. "We'll disrupt the food industry - but we won't bother to learn what it takes to produce uniformly clean and safe product".
There's good reasons the "big guys" spend so much on lab personnel and equipment. If people all around the world started getting sick from Coca-Cola, it wouldn't be good - to say the least.
Edit - Adding sources:
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-20-shipments-were-d...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/reports-of-violent-vo...
[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-soylent-...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12812730
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg&feature=youtu.be...
FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA: http://investors.terravia.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=89...
Sources are well known, a quick search turns them up[1][2][3]. The testing procedure has been disclosed by Soylent during their last debacle, and there was discussion here on HN[3][4].
I used to buy Soylent myself, started at version 1.5 (powder in the bag). But come on, this sort of thing is seriously not OK. You need better quality control, and you need better (and more rapid) testing of product as it rolls off the line. Hunt and pecking clearly isn't getting it done, and problems are slipping out under their noses. It's people's health - nothing to joke at. "Move fast; make people sick" isn't a good mantra.
> FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA
Soylent has no real idea if that ingredient was the culprit (and from the FDA's classification, it seems reasonable to suspect that ingredient is not the problem). For all anyone knows, it could be a combination of ingredients, or not an ingredient at all, but rather contamination in the manufacturing process.
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/soylent-20-shipments-were-d...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/reports-of-violent-vo...
[3] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-soylent-...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12812730
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8NCigh54jg&feature=youtu.be...
