Super Body Fuel

Hi everyone,

We’ve got some more good news: Basically Food BURN chocolate is back in stock! :D

Available to order now. Shipping immediately. :]

If you have a subscription for BURN chocolate, we’ll reactivate it for you to ship on Monday. If you don’t want your subscription to renew, you have the weekend to cancel it before it ships!

If you have a subscription for a different flavor of BURN and want to switch to chocolate, you can do that on our website, or email us for help.

And, in case you’re wondering, this new batch has no DHA added, so no risk of a fishy smell. But it does have added glycine – sweet! :D (That’s a pun, by the way.)

Many thanks to those of you who chose to preorder BURN chocolate – your order should be on its way. :] We’re very excited to finally have our most popular ketogenic offering available again, over a year and a half since we first ran out! :D

For those of you who missed the earlier updates, please note that we’ve run out of money and had to raise our prices due to inflation (+$10) and tariffs (+$10) in order to stay in business! :o You can read more about the details here and here. We’d really love to lower prices again in the future as circumstances allow, but we just don’t have the resources or volume to do that yet.

Thanks and our sincerest apologies to those who have preordered BURN vanilla or BALANCE vanilla or chocolate, as we’ve had some setbacks sourcing appropriately sized bags or tubs in time! :s We expect to have those done and shipping by the end of September, but if you need your preorder canceled and refunded in the meantime please let us know!

For all you milk-lovers out there, we still have BUILD vanilla and a little bit of BOOST vanilla in stock at the moment, so the next batches we need to order are BUILD chocolate and BOOST chocolate. Given that we still need to order ingredients for those (including a new batch of our custom vitamin mix which usually takes 2+ months to make), we can’t expect them to ship until sometime in December, but we’ve decided to open those up for preorders as well, for those of you who’d like to help out. :3

We’ll have to borrow more money to pay for these too, so every preorder helps! <3

If you can afford it and you don’t mind the wait, you can place a preorder for your preferred product line here: BOOST or BUILD (or BALANCE or BURN). Thanks so much! c:

Remember, we also have DIY recipes available for all product lines and flavors, so reach out if you want to make your own in the meantime! ;)

Thanks for sticking with us! :D

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

We’ve got some good news again: Basically Food BUILD vanilla is back in stock! :D

Available to order now. Shipping immediately. :]

If you have a subscription for BUILD vanilla, we’ll reactivate it for you to ship on Friday. If you don’t want your subscription to renew, you have a day to cancel it before it ships!

If you have a subscription for a different flavor of BUILD and want to switch to vanilla, you can do that on our website, or email us for help.

And, in case you’re wondering, this new batch has no DHA added, so no risk of a fishy smell. But it does have added glycine – sweet! :D (That’s a pun, by the way.)

This manufacturer has been months late for no reason, and we are looking forward to referring to them as our “previous manufacturer” – but in the meantime, they are still working on one more batch for us: BURN chocolate, which should be available sometime in August.

Our new manufacturer should also be delivering BURN vanilla and BALANCE vanilla and chocolate on approximately the same timeframe. Of course, if any or all lag into September, it would not be entirely shocking. We’ll do our best to hurry things along though. :p

For now, we’ve decided to try taking preorders on our website for the upcoming BURN and BALANCE flavors we’re expecting, in case you’d like to get your order in sooner and help us out with our current cashflow drought. :] And if you’re a BOOST fan, we’ve still got BOOST vanilla in stock!

Remember, we also have DIY recipes available for all product lines and flavors, so reach out if you want to make your own in the meantime! ;)

Thanks for sticking with us! :D

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

So, it’s been a few weeks since the last Basically Food update, and we’re still waiting on BURN chocolate and BUILD vanilla. We’re expecting our vitamin mix resupply to arrive in early June, after which all our upcoming production runs should proceed, including BURN vanilla and BALANCE vanilla and chocolate.

But in the meantime, we’ve been reviewing our changing costs in detail and calculating the price points we’d need to break even at various sales volumes. And, with the combined cost increases due to inflation over the last 10 years, plus the recent tariff changes this year, we’ll need to raise our base price from $50 to $70 per unit ($25 to $35 for BOOST) in order to break even at the sales volume we had before we started running out of inventory last year. That’s approximately $10 of increase due to inflation plus another $10 due to tariffs. Our first price increase in 10 years. :o

At that price point, we could make a modest profit once we grow back to our pre-pandemic volume – enough to pay back the money I’ve personally contributed for these latest runs, and hopefully, fund our continued growth organically. We’ll still need to launch a crowdfunding campaign in order to have the initial funds to get back in the air, but without adjusting our prices, we’d just crash back down to zero again. This is our chance to generate enough lift to stay in the air and then keep climbing higher over time.

What we have in stock right now is BOOST vanilla and chocolate, and we’re raising the price on that to $35 per unit – effective today, as we’ve already been losing money at $25 a unit for a while now. When the other product lines are in stock, they’ll be available at $70 each, free shipping included.

We’ll let you know when BURN, BALANCE, and BUILD are back in stock – hopefully in June. In the meantime, we still have DIY recipes available for all product lines and flavors, so reach out if you want to make your own! :)

Once we’re back in business, our priorities will be fleshing out the website, establishing a social media presence, and launching a crowdfunding campaign. Stay tuned. :d

Thank you for your continued support! <3

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

So, some bad news here at Basically Food – we just ran out of BUILD chocolate, again. :/ I’m sorry. And we’re still waiting on BURN chocolate, and now BUILD vanilla, coming within the next few weeks. Fortunately, we still have plenty of BOOST chocolate and vanilla in stock.

Beyond that, crowdfunding?

Here’s an update:

Our third manufacturer is behind schedule, but they should be ready to mix and package BURN chocolate and BUILD vanilla as soon as the last ingredients have arrived, sometime in the next few weeks. That includes a new batch of our custom vitamin mix, as well as the last of our preferred cocoa powder before it’s out of stock till 2026, due to a global cocoa powder shortage. For future chocolate runs, we’re looking into alternative cocoa powder suppliers – still working on that. :d

Given the many delays and poor communication with this third manufacturer, we’ve spent the last few months searching for and talking with other manufacturers, focusing on those that will let us handle the ingredient sourcing and just charge us a fee to mix and package our product. We’ve talked with quite a few promising candidates, and narrowed it down to our top choice with a few good backup options if that one doesn’t work out. Feeling optimistic about that. :]

Unfortunately, a few obstacles have popped up. One is that right as we’ve started reaching out to our old suppliers to get started on ordering ingredients for the next few runs, the tariff situation unfolding in the US has resulted in many suppliers being out of stock due to panic buying, and facing price changes that are still up in the air but could result in some key ingredients (like rice protein) doubling in price by the time we can get our hands on any. :o

Secondly, once we make the final payment on BURN chocolate and BUILD vanilla with our third manufacturer, we won’t have any more money to pay for the next few runs. Yep, we’ve (almost) finally done it – we’ve run out of money. :p That’s what happens when you have a few years of slow sales and then run out of inventory for over a year, turns out.

If you’re reading this, you probably know that the product is good – better than most alternatives, some might say – and the business model is solid. Hard to go wrong with a shelf-stable food product that people buy month after month, year after year. The market certainly supports many similar companies, orders of magnitude larger than ours. And with a stable supply, and a sales volume high enough, the business could be comfortably profitable – enough to expand in the ways we’ve been meaning to for years, like “just add water” powder or ready-to-eat bars.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to bootstrap this business from day one without outside funding. As you may have noticed, over the last few years, that luck has run out. But that doesn’t mean the show is over – it just means that we’ll have to make our own luck, in the way that most people expect to do when they start a business. And if there’s any business worth starting right now, it’s this one.

To start with, I will contribute as much as I can afford from my personal savings (back from the few years I worked in tech, long ago) to fund the next three runs with our fourth (and hopefully) final manufacturer: BURN vanilla, and BALANCE vanilla and chocolate. And that should buy us a few more months of inventory, at least.

But beyond that, we’re going to need another influx of cash – and hopefully a much bigger one, so we can order enough inventory to last a year or more and get some nice volume discounts while we’re at it. Because I’m allergic to venture capitalists, in addition to my many food allergies, that means crowdfunding – taking preorders from you all, along with anyone else who will take a chance on us. If Ample could raise over $350k and Vite Ramen could raise almost $250k, we could probably do the same, right? :3

Or, if you have another idea, let us know. c:

The other thing to note is that with these new tariffs in place, our ingredient costs are likely to be quite a bit higher, especially for the formulas with rice protein (everything except BOOST). I’m currently estimating about $10 more per unit, give or take, just in raw ingredient costs. Yes, it’s ridiculous. And very artificial. But it looks like it’s here to stay. And if it does, we’ll have to charge an extra $10 per tub, or bag, accordingly, just to break even: $60 instead of $50, a 20% increase.

And if we do, it will be the first time we’ve raised our base price from $50 since I started this business 10 years ago, as Super Body Fuel in 2015. We did not raise prices during COVID. We did not raise prices during the last few years of growing inflation, even as our costs crept up – we just slowly ran out of money. But if our ingredient costs go up by $10, we will have to raise our prices by $10. We have no money left. All we have is our recipes and our values. And you.

Remember, we still have DIY recipes available for all product lines and flavors, so reach out if you want to make your own in the meantime! ;)

Thanks for believing in us! <3

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

We’ve got more good news: Basically Food BOOST vanilla is back in stock! :D

Available to order now. Shipping immediately. :]

If you have a subscription for BOOST vanilla, we’ll reactivate it for you to ship on Monday. If you don’t want your subscription to renew, you have the weekend to cancel it before it ships!

If you have a subscription for a different flavor of BOOST and want to switch to vanilla, you can do that on our website, or email us for help.

And, in case you’re wondering, this new batch has no DHA added, so no risk of a fishy smell. But it does have added glycine – sweet! :D (That’s a pun, by the way.)

Our latest manufacturer has now delivered on all three batches: BUILD chocolate and BOOST chocolate and vanilla.

BURN chocolate is underway with a new manufacturer, currently ordering ingredients. Hoping for an ETA in late February or early March.

Remember, we have DIY recipes available for all product lines and flavors, so reach out if you want to make your own in the meantime! ;)

Thanks for sticking with us! :D

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

We’ve got some good news: Basically Food BOOST chocolate is back in stock! :D

Available to order now. Shipping immediately. :]

If you have a subscription for BOOST chocolate, we’ll reactivate it for you to ship on Friday. If you don’t want your subscription to renew, you have a day to cancel it before it ships!

If you have a subscription for a different flavor of BOOST and want to switch to chocolate, you can do that on our website, or email us for help.

And, in case you’re wondering, this new batch has no DHA added, so no risk of a fishy smell. But it does have added glycine – sweet! :D (That’s a pun, by the way.)

Our latest manufacturer has delivered on two of three batches: BUILD and BOOST chocolate. The third, BOOST vanilla, is currently in production. Hopefully available in the next few weeks!

BURN chocolate is underway with a new manufacturer, currently ordering ingredients. Hoping for an ETA in late February or early March.

Remember, we have DIY recipes available for all product lines and flavors, so reach out if you want to make your own in the meantime! ;)

Thanks for sticking with us! :D

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

Finally, some good news: Basically Food BUILD chocolate is back in stock! :D

Available to order now. Shipping immediately. :]

If you have a subscription for BUILD chocolate, we’ll reactivate it for you to ship on Friday. If you don’t want your subscription to renew, you have a couple days to cancel it before it ships!

If you have a subscription for a different flavor of BUILD and want to switch to chocolate, you can do that on our website, or email us for help.

And, in case you’re wondering, this new batch has no DHA added, so no risk of a fishy smell. But it does have added glycine – sweet! :D (That’s a pun, by the way.)

Our latest manufacturer has finally delivered on the first of three batches. Next up is BOOST chocolate, then BOOST vanilla. Hopefully by the end of this year, or the first week of January if not. Either way, it’s very soon. Relief! :)

Still waiting on BURN chocolate updates, still anticipating something like February. January would probably be too much to hope for. :d But at least things are starting to come together!

Don’t forget, we have DIY recipes available for all product lines and flavors, so reach out if you want to make your own in the meantime! ;)

Thanks for sticking with us! :D

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

So, you know how we said that we’d have some Basically Food back in stock in November if we’re lucky, December if we’re not? Well, as luck would have it, we’re very not! :D That is, BUILD chocolate and hopefully BOOST chocolate should be available in December, BOOST vanilla in late December or, more likely, early January, and BURN chocolate… someday. Hopefully January. Probably February.

The following four batches will depend on when we find a better manufacturer, and how fast they are. Sorry, BALANCE fans. :( It’s my favorite too.

Plain flavors might be even longer – that will depend on cashflow and minimum order quantities for whichever manufacturers we find. But we do have some handy DIY recipes for you to make your own! :) Reach out if you want some.

…

So, here’s the scoop. Our latest manufacturer, after weeks of silence following our last update, finally let us know that they won’t be putting labels on our products, because they only do supplements. You know, with Supplement Facts? And ours is a food product. Basically Food. With Nutrition Facts. So, no deal. Outta luck.

I mean, it would have been nice if they’d told us that months ago, before we paid them a bunch of money. But okay, cool. :| So, we had to switch our products back to tubs (after we’d switched to bags earlier to avoid delays in ordering) because tubs can be filled with powder and then shipped, unlabeled, to another company that will stick labels on them. And we had to find a company that would label our tubs on short notice. Which also costs money. (And also Arrow had to redesign the labels for tubs all over again – sorry, Arrow.)

And, of course, you know how it is with ordering tubs – they’re always late. So, the tubs themselves arrived, a couple weeks ago, but the lids didn’t arrive till this week! So, in theory, BUILD and BOOST chocolate should be ready to start production as soon as they can get on the schedule. Which should happen pretty soon, we’re told. Great! :)

Of course, BOOST vanilla is not happening just yet, because there’s one more ingredient that’s not arriving till the middle of December: Magnesium Malate. :o Theoretically, that’s not an issue for BOOST chocolate and BUILD chocolate, because we already sent our leftover Magnesium Malate (along with a number of other ingredients from Super Body Fuel) to the manufacturer, which should be enough for those two batches.

But it’s possible that they might end up just a bit short of this crucial ingredient before finishing both batches, which would mean we’d have only one batch ready in December (probably BUILD chocolate) and the other would be ready sometime after the mid-December magnesium resupply. So, BOOST vanilla (and potentially, if unlucky, chocolate) in January. Or if we’re incredibly lucky (and this manufacturer likes to work through the holidays), late December. :p So yeah, January.

What about BURN chocolate?

Well, we got their corrected sample, which was fine. And then they gave us a new price quote, which was 50% higher than the quote they’d given us a year earlier. That’s a big bump! So they get to be a year late, and then charge us a bunch more money for the privilege! And they hadn’t started ordering ingredients yet, of course, because the large amount of money we’d paid them earlier was now not large enough, they’d decided. :x

So we decided to give yet another manufacturer a try. Their price quote is a little more reasonable. Plus they even label products with Nutrition Facts! :D Amazing. Since we’re definitely not working with the other manufacturer again, it seemed prudent to try out a new one with a single test order before pouring a bunch more money (and hopes and dreams) after it.

But, we’ll have to see how long things take with them. If it’s going to be a lot longer, we may have to fall back to our lovably obstinate current manufacturer just to keep things moving and get you your BURN! Regardless, neither of them have ordered anything, so it’s likely to be a couple months before all the necessary ingredients are in, meaning BURN chocolate won’t be ready till February, realistically. I really hope that’s not an overly optimistic estimate. :|

In the meantime, we’re ramping up our manufacturer search, focusing on food co-packers that do dry mix blending, rather than snooty supplement companies. The hope is to have a number of good options that are all communicative and want to work with us, and then choose the most promising to do our next four runs: BALANCE vanilla and chocolate, and BUILD and BURN vanilla.

Of course, not having any inventory these last few months means that our money supply has been going down, instead of up like it’s supposed to. ;p So, we should have enough money to finish the first four runs (and their labeling), and to start the next four. And then with those first four done, we should have some product in stock again, and the money should be flowing in again, so that by the time those next four are done, we should have enough money to finish them (50% upfront to start, 50% upon completion to finish). Yay, business! :D

But, we’re probably not going to have a ton of money left over to do plain batches or other flavors, right away, so unfortunately we don’t have a good time estimate for those. :/ If we can find a manufacturer willing to do some small batches to help us out, it shouldn’t take too much money. But we’ll see. Either way, plain is coming before cinnamon. I think we all need a break from cinnamon after the last year or two. :p

Again, we’ve got DIY recipes if you want to make your own, plain or otherwise! :) Email us!

Please take care. We’ll keep hanging in there if you do! <3

Thank you,

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

So, September came and went with no new Basically Food inventory in sight! All that’s left is BURN and BALANCE cinnamon, much of which is bad-tasting product that requires replacements or refunds. What’s going on? :o

First of all, I’m really sorry that things have gotten to this point, and that you haven’t been able to get the food that you depend on. :( We have been doing our best, but new problems have continued to pile up and block progress. Fortunately though, we finally have confirmation from our manufacturer that the first few production runs are underway and we expect to have them available to ship to you, our customers, in November. Early November if we’re lucky, late November if we’re not.

BOOST and BUILD chocolate and BOOST vanilla are in the process of ingredient ordering, and will be added to the production schedule to be mixed and packaged once the slowest ingredient (many pallets of oat flour) arrives sometime in October. They will try to give our production runs priority, they say, given how long we’ve been waiting.

It’s been over a year. :|

So, you’ll be able to get BOOST, BUILD, and BURN chocolate and BOOST vanilla in early November if we’re lucky, late November if we’re not. Or, maybe even late October if we’re really lucky, maybe sometime in December if we’re really unlucky. Fingers crossed.

…

But why are we a few months behind schedule relative to the last update? And what’s going on with BURN chocolate? And BALANCE? And the other flavors?

So, you ever run into the problem where, say, you’ve spent 8 or 9 years honing your recipes and figuring out the best suppliers to get each ingredient from, and then you tell a manufacturer to follow your recipe exactly with a particular mixing process and use the exact suppliers that you’ve requested, but then they decide that this seems way too easy and assume that you actually want them to reinterpret your recipe as if each line is specifying the amount of each nutrient that should show up on the label rather than in the formula itself, without asking you, and then add several times the amount of each mineral ingredient and a bit too much of certain other ingredients, and then, after a long delay to calculate these “corrections”, proudly send you a bunch of samples to approve, which taste inexplicably off? And then they take days or weeks to respond to your inquiries trying to figure out why? No? Well, that happened to us, recently.

That’s what happened after our last update at the end of June. Of course, we didn’t find out that’s what happened until a few weeks ago! But now we know.

Anyway, we finally got that squared away and clarified, and now we’re just waiting on the corrected (well, the version without their “corrections”) BURN chocolate sample to make sure they’ve got it right, and then they’ll start ordering ingredients for that once we’ve approved it. So BURN chocolate will probably come a bit later in November. Hopefully.

BURN and BUILD vanilla, as well as BALANCE vanilla and chocolate, will come after – not sure when. We ordered enough of our custom vitamin mix to cover the first four runs, but we’ll have to make a second order of vitamins to cover these next four runs. And that will take at least another couple months from when we pull the trigger.

Before we spend a bunch of money on that, though, we want to see this latest manufacturer get our first run completed without the quality issues (fishy DHA, bad-tasting cinnamon, mixing inconsistencies, and so on) of the previous manufacturer. If they fail at that, we’ll need to have some money set aside to try out yet another manufacturer, else our game is over. But in the meantime, we’ll push as far as we can into the ordering process, short of spending our money, so we can hit the ground running once we see how they do with BOOST and BUILD chocolate.

Also in the meantime, we’ll renew our search for alternative manufacturers, ideally those that specialize in food rather than supplements (and know how to follow a recipe) and are willing to work with client-supplied ingredients. Preferably a bit closer to us in California or near our Illinois distribution warehouse, for faster turnaround times and lower freight costs. Would be nice! :d

Our mistake was in overcommitting to the first manufacturer that seemed decent (but actually, wasn’t) instead of continuing to search until we found several promising candidates to choose from. Getting this right, doing the work to find the Right Manufacturer™ for us, is the most critical piece to the long-term survival (and thrive-al) of this business, after, you know, having product inventory available to buy again. Relationships are hard sometimes.

As far as cinnamon, plain, and our Basically Protein and the like, we’ll have to see how much money we have left over after replenishing vanilla and chocolate, our most popular flavors. There might not be much. :p If we’re lucky, though, we’ll find a manufacturer willing to do some smaller runs for us as a favor alongside our larger chocolate and vanilla runs, such that we could afford to maintain our (somewhat unwieldy) SKU count.

It’s tricky though. Once we have product in stock again and we find a reliable manufacturing partner, cash flow will become our biggest bottleneck. That would be a nice problem to have. Money is just numbers, right? Easy. ;)

Anyway, I’m so sorry again about the interminable delays and ongoing lack of food here for sale at Basically Food. I feel really bad about it, and also, your frequent emails and comments asking when things will be back in stock gives me hope that what we’re doing is worth it, and that, once we can get these production issues sorted, there will be a glorious future ahead for all of us. That would be real nice. :o

Also, if you are out of your favorite (basically) food and you want some help with DIY recipes to cover the intervening time interval, send me an email and I’ll help you out. :)

Thank you for caring. <3

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

Hope your summer is off to a good start! :) A lot of you have been wondering what’s up with all the Basically Food flavors that have been out of stock for the past several months, and I want to apologize for not sending out an update sooner. It’s a big deal to depend on us for your food intake, and of course you’d want to be secure in knowing what’s going on, especially when things are going out of stock! I’m really sorry for not doing a better job with keeping you up to date.

So, assuming you saw the January update already, the news is that things with the new new manufacturer fell through at the last minute, and we had to start over with another manufacturer, setting things back by a few months. :s We’re doing our best to accelerate the timeline for BOOST chocolate in particular, but even that has been delayed. The latest setback is that we’ve had to scrap thousands of dollars worth of our existing vitamin premix because things took so long with finding a new manufacturer that it expired, pushing things back by at least a month or two! So we’ve put in an order for a new batch of vitamin premix – this time with cellulose mixed in, as in Basically Vitamins, to protect from humidity and extend the shelf life.

It takes two months (they say) for our premix manufacturer to make a new batch of vitamins and send it to our product manufacturer, at which point they should already have the other ingredients they need and can start manufacturing pretty much immediately, if all goes well. That means that we should have BOOST chocolate back in stock in early September, with BOOST vanilla, BUILD chocolate, and BURN chocolate to follow soon after (all without DHA). I know that’s not exactly “soon” and I feel really bad because I thought we’d have all this stuff done months ago. :( But that’s where we’re at.

You know the children’s book series A Series of Unfortunate Events? It’s been feeling kind of like that, with setback after setback. :p

As many of you have also pointed out, the website is still a neglected mess, and I apologize for that. I know it’s hard to feel confident about what you’re eating when the website still says “under construction” and that makes it hard to recommend it to new people, too. But given our manufacturing challenges, we’ve chosen to focus on the key behind-the-scenes things like replenishing our inventory for existing customers, rather than making the website more trustworthy and appealing to new customers. It makes me feel bad every time I think about it, but these are the tradeoffs we’ve had to make under the circumstances. :/

Here at Basically Food, we’re all itching to have an abundance of quality product available so that we can focus on the fun stuff – sharing with you all and reaching out to new customers with interesting, informative, inspiring content about nutrition, my weird biohacking experiments, DIY ‘lents and cooking, and how Basically Food fits into different people’s lives and hopefully makes a positive difference.

It’s so frustrating for that to still be just out of reach, even a year into the rebrand. I feel the tension of waiting, where things are mostly out of your control and in the hands of people who don’t care as much as you do, moving so infuriatingly and inexplicably slowly. That’s been our experience, trying to get manufacturing going for the last year. But we care. And we’re here to answer any questions if you want to reach out to us. Send us an email. :)

Thanks for hanging in there with us. Things will get better soon. <3

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)