Is the meal replacement startup Soylent at its last straw?

Soylent, once Silicon Valley food investment honey, went through a management shake up last week as a polarizing meal replacement company announcement that CEO Bryan Crowley would step down and be replaced by CFO Demir Vangelov.

Although Crowley’s tenure included seemingly positive corporate developments, such as Soylent’s nationwide expansion to 4,378 Walmart stores and the reintroduction of the fan-requested bar product SquaredMore and more, the Internet is asking whether all is well for the attention-grabbing company.

Following this leadership update, reports surfaced that the company quietly shut down its Soylent innovation lab just a year after opening its doors and granting $ 25,000 in funding to its resident food startups. . Both its 404 error-back to the website and firm The Yelp page appears to confirm this news.

In addition, the company reduced the size of its offices by more than half in November. Downtown Los Angeles News confirmed that Soylent reduced its workforce to a 14,000 square foot office in DTLA line from his original 29,000 square foot home. Although the reasoning has not yet been confirmed, various Glass door Comments claimed the company had suffered layoffs in the past year.

A representative for Soylent declined to comment on its leadership changes and recent updates.

Look at the early days of Soylent

While the internet at large can find schadenfreude in all the less than positive news about Soylent, the company’s success to date is due in part to its foundation of loyal fans. These enthusiasts, some of whom helped the company get started with its crowdfunding in 2013 campaign who generated $ 1.5 million in pre-orders under the leadership of founder Rob Rhinehart, have been closely tracking company events via the customer service-monitored subreddit, R / Soylent.

While this community apparently wants Soylent to be successful, they have been watching recent events closely to try and piece together what is going on behind the scenes of their beloved brand. Namely his third most popular item over the past 12 months, published Jan. 14, described the community’s long-standing concerns about the health of the business, ranging from the Soylent update silent interruption from its flagship and construction-grade meal replacement powder in the UK to its subtle reviews of unhappy solidarity of what appears to be a beloved former representative of the company (U / Soylentconor).

Show us the money

Forum sleuths aside, Soylent appears to share less performance data than its competitors. Mainly, competitor of meal replacements Huel reported $ 100 million in revenue to Forbes.com after record sales in January, citing $ 9 million in revenue for the month and 4.6 million meals purchased through its website. The company regularly shares growth figures and has published selected performance indicators since 2015, its first year of activity. Although her first three years were profitable, she did not Remark that last year he suffered a loss.

Competitor of Soylent Jimmy Joy Likewise, said it has sold over 25 million meals in 88 countries to date.

This contrasts with Soylent who has not shared such consistent and explicit figures. Notably, the company’s blog posts regarding its venture capital funding rounds, which include measures of relative growth (“In the first quarter of 2017, net sales nearly doubled compared to the same quarter of previous year. ”) appear to be deleted from Soylent’s blog.

High expectations from VC

Regarding the review of the venture capital funding announcements previously available on Soylent’s corporate blog, it should be noted that the company previously raised a huge $ 72.4 million in funding investors like GV and Andreessen Horowitz.

A number of disruptive food companies have reached a similar, if not higher, funding peak in recent memory, including JUST ($ 220 million) and impossible foods ($ 687.5 million). But as Rhinehart explained in the Leadership News Publish on Soylent’s blog, Soylent may have paved the way for venture capital’s later love affair with the food industry:

“Soylent started out as a movement. In 2013, there had been virtually no innovation or attention to one of the most important product sectors in the world: our food. Today, innovative food companies are achieving record IPOs, new retailers are lifting massive growth cycles, and food, agriculture and ingredients technologies are among the most disruptive startups in the ecosystem. . But we still have a lot of work to do to fulfill Soylent’s mission of nutrition for all.

As the primary beneficiary of this flood of food funding from VCs, Soylent may have experienced a misalignment of expectations with investors. Either way, venture capital funding increases the pressures to perform, which may have led Soylent to take faster, riskier bets than they otherwise would have.

Potential overcrowding of categories

In Rhinehart’s aforementioned blog post, he noted that Soylent created a movement in 2013. He reached early virality thanks to his association “Soylent Green” and his provocative suggestion of a liquid-only diet.

Although its mission has evolved over time to reflect more image-friendly values, such as caloric availability and the world hunger reduction, Soylent felt culturally synonymous with the concept of a meal replacement despite the existence of historic brands like SlimFast, possibly due to the FDA lack of definition for the term.

However, over time it seems that Google searches for “meal replacements” have steadily increased compared to “Soylent”. Given the cyclical peaks in search terms for all terms occurring in January, when consumers naturally search for new regimes, this could imply that Soylent’s share of the search spotlight and hence category ownership declines, as competitors such as the previously mentioned Huel have increase in the interest of research.

Only time will tell if Soylent can overcome this year’s resolutions.