Soylent Food Bars Making People Violently, Mysteriously Sick

Soylent offers food replacement drinks and snack bars, but you may want to stay away from the bars for now. As Ars Technica reports, some people are becoming ill after eating them, leaving Rosa Labs on the defensive. "We have retrieved remaining bars from our consumers and have personally consumed many of the remaining bars without adverse effects," says the company. "We have also sent them for further microbiological testing and all tests have come back negative. Based on this we remain very confident in the safety of the bars." Graphic reports of gastrointestinal distress started popping up on Soylent's website last month and Reddit about a week ago. A Gizmodo reader says he had to go to the ER. One Reddit user has counted 33 reported cases since Sept. 7; the bars were released just two months prior to that.

Since not everyone is having problems, some suspect there's a problem with just one or a few of the batches. A source tells Ars Technica that Rosa Labs is spending tens of thousands of dollars to investigate the problem, and that the company's main theory at the moment is that some customers might have a sensitivity or intolerance to one of the ingredients. BuzzFeed reports that, based on the FDA's online database, the facility that makes the bars hasn't had a Foodborne Biological Hazards inspection since two years prior to the bar's launch. Soylent, however, says it was inspected by the FDA this year. The company is refunding customers for any bars causing problems, and notes that so far, the number of complaints received per bars sold is 0.03%. (Soylent's drink is popular, ,though some say it's "joyless.")