Super Body Fuel

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)

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year! :D As we all ease back into our routines and schedules after the holidays, I want to offer my hope that 2024 brings more goodness and positive change for you than 2023. I mean, that could happen, right? I’m optimistic. :)

The news we have to share with you today is all (mostly) pretty good news:

• January sale: 20% off with coupon code BASICALLYEAR
• BOOST chocolate and BUILD chocolate: temporarily out of stock :(
• New manufacturer: BOOST, BUILD, and BURN chocolate on the way (no DHA)
• Basically Vitamins, Electrolytes, and Protein: now available!

First of all, here’s a little (belated) New Year’s sale to kick off 2024 – use the coupon code BASICALLYEAR for 20% off Basically Food during the month of January. :)

If you missed out on the SUPERBODYFAM coupon code in 2023, this is your chance to get the same discount this month. But if you still have an active subscription using SUPERBODYFAM, don’t cancel it – the discount will continue until you cancel! And you can reschedule, postpone, and edit the subscription in the meantime.

We don’t have any further discounts or sales planned out at the moment, so this is your best chance to get one if you’re looking for a deal! ;) Finances are very tight for us now, so we can definitely use all the non-discounted sales we can get. Personally, I’ve opted to take a pay cut to just below subsistence income, in order to maximize the chances that we won’t run out of money or inventory this year. :d But don’t worry about that. We’ll be fine. :]

Speaking of inventory, we are temporarily out of stock of BOOST chocolate and (very nearly) BUILD chocolate, as those are apparently our most popular items at the moment. But the reason we don’t have more is not for lack of funds, it’s because the new manufacturer we were going to work with turned out to be… not so great after all. :p

But the good news is, we have finally placed an order with a new new manufacturer, who so far seems to be quite promising, both in terms of pricing and quality (attention to detail). We’re very excited about it, honestly. If all continues to go well, we should have another 1000 units each of BOOST chocolate, BUILD chocolate, and also BURN chocolate (the next most popular) in… a few months, most likely? A couple months if we’re lucky.

Obviously, any number of months other than zero is less than ideal, and we’re really sorry to leave you chocolate-lovers hanging. :/ If you’re really craving your chocolate, might I suggest adding 100g of cocoa powder to a tub of vanilla-flavored Basically Food powder and shaking it up to make chocolate? :3 Or just make do with cinnamon. Your choice.

Oh, and for those of you who responded to the DHA survey a few months ago (or those who experienced the dreaded fishiness firsthand), we have analyzed the feedback and come to a tentative decision: no more DHA. Starting with the three chocolate batches we just ordered.

I was surprised to find that nearly half of all respondents had experienced fishiness at some point in the last few years of Super Body Fuel and Basically Food, and nearly half of those people were adamant that we remove the offending DHA from the formula or else they would not continue to buy our product. Many of them had already stopped! Even considering the self-selection bias in survey respondents, that’s a lot of people.

What made the decision for me, though, was this study on the shelf-life of DHA powder, which showed that it could last pretty long at room temperature, but at 122°F (50°C), literally 0% of the DHA powder remained after six months. It had all oxidized – transformed from a vital nutrient to a disgustingly fishy smell. How much DHA would remain after a few days at 122°F in a shipping truck in the summer? Probably more than 0%, but even if a small percentage oxidized during that time, it would make the whole thing unpalatably fishy.

If we can’t guarantee that the temperature will stay cool at all times, we can’t guarantee the amount of DHA in the final product, and we can’t guarantee that it won’t get fishy. :/ So no DHA.

But… there’s a bright side! Just last month I came across another study, showing that you can actually synthesize enough DHA from the plant-based omega-3 fat ALA, as long as you only get a tiny amount of ALA (alpha-linolenic acid) and a tiny amount of the plant-based omega-6 fat LA (linoleic acid, not Los Angeles). Too much omega-6 (as in seed oils), and even too much omega-3 (as in flax or chia), is actually counterproductive and blocks the conversion step. You can see relevant snippets from the full text quoted in the discussion thread here, showing that olive oil (which has a small amount of omega-6 LA, and an even smaller amount of omega-3 ALA) actually results in just as much DHA in the end as ALA-rich flaxseed oil, but without the significant oxidation risk. And similarly for milk fat – it’s even better than olive oil.

That is a game changer. That means that the small amounts of ALA and LA in the olive oil or avocado oil or cream you add to BURN or BALANCE, or the milk you add to BOOST or BUILD, should be enough to produce sufficient DHA in your own body! That is, as long as you stay away from high-omega-6 foods like seed oils (aka, “vegetable” oils, and to a degree, nuts and lard and poultry fat) – which you really really (really) should already be doing, anyway. My health (and skin) is so much better since I started strictly cutting out seed oils a few years ago. I still eat corn chips – I just bake my own from organic corn tortillas and they’re just as crunchy. :d

Of course, if your brain is still growing, as a kid or teenager (or even young adult?) or if you are pregnant or breastfeeding, you’ll need more DHA, and it would probably be a good idea to eat seafood once in a while or take a quality DHA supplement.* If you’re craving fatty fish, you’re probably needing a bit more DHA. If not, maybe not.

Lastly, we finally have our Basically supplements available to order, with fully fleshed-out product pages and nutrition info and such – thanks for your patience. :) There’s Basically Vitamins, which is like Super Micros but mixed with cellulose to prevent it from absorbing moisture and clumping. There’s my favorite, Basically Electrolytes (Super Electrolytes), which I mix with water and Stur flavor drops to make a refreshing drink that I enjoy daily. And based on the feedback from our supplements survey, there’s Basically Protein, which is like Super Protein without the added gums and fiber. Just brown rice protein and amino acids. Doesn’t taste great, but you can mix it with something that does! ;D

We don’t have a ton of these in stock, so no pressure to go out and order them, but they’re available for those of you who can’t go without. :3

Anyway, that’s it for now – enjoy the sale (BASICALLYEAR!) and best of luck getting your January off to a good start! :)

Thanks for sticking with us. Take care, all! :D

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

* It’s not just DHA – the same goes for protein, by the way. Adults need less, kids and teenagers (and athletes) need more. The key here is “adults need less” – there’s been some fascinating discussion and experimentation in the nutrition nerd hangouts I frequent about protein-restricted diets for weight-loss, energy and longevity. And I’ve been doing my own version of the experiment, eating a loosely vegan diet consisting of mostly starch with a bit of fruit and veggies, with no added protein or fat. I’m also consuming plenty of old expired Milk Fuel samples mixed with just water, though! ;p

Maybe it’s my rice farmer ancestors, or maybe it’s the degree to which I’ve been force-feeding myself protein at every meal since I was a teenager, but my energy and sleep have been great and I’m gradually losing the little bit of belly fat that tends to show up when I eat a balanced diet while severely stressed and sleep-deprived. No cravings for meat or protein whatsoever – not yet. It’s fascinating. The traditional “peasant diet” works! Who would have thought?

Keto is certainly faster for burning off belly fat, but my energy and sleep tends to suffer whenever I restrict carbs. Eating as much starch as I want while restricting protein and fat is just… easy, for me. I noticed the same thing when I ate lots of starch and a fair amount of protein while cutting out fat completely, when I was doing hard physical labor on a daily basis, manufacturing at Super Body Fuel last year. But apparently the protein part is pretty much optional for me too. At least for now. :p

Well, I’m definitely saving a lot of money on my food bill this way! And I finally have a use for all that extra oat flour that was left when we shut down SBF manufacturing. Homemade oat crackers are quite delicious. :] And oat cakes, and oat cookies, and oat pancakes… Maybe even oat dumplings, though I haven’t tried those yet. :d

Anyway. Feel free to reach out if you want my recipes. ;)

Hi everyone,

Have you ever noticed a fishy smell or taste in your Super Body Fuel or Basically Food shakes? (tell us – take the survey here!) We’ve talked about it before. It all started around the end of 2019, beginning of 2020 – that moment that will mark our memories forever as the time that we added algae-based DHA to our formulas, and well… life has just never been the same since. :d

We were able to mitigate the fishiness issue a bit by lowering the DHA dose and adjusting our manufacturing processes, such that the problem seemed to be resolved by the end of 2020. But no – even this year we’ve had reports of entire Super Body Fuel orders ruined by fishiness, especially when shipping to places known for their hot weather, like Australia or the Southern US, as DHA can be sensitive to heat. :/

And the problem has been more prevalent again with Basically Food orders, since the rebrand. Maybe you’ve noticed! :p It’s just one of the many little disappointments we’ve had with the contract manufacturer that we hired to make these first Basically Food production runs – on top of the literal years of spurious delays since we first made the order. :s

So, as we’re starting to move forward with a shiny new manufacturer, we are faced with a big decision: Do we continue including DHA in our formulas, or do we attempt a return to our pre-DHA glory days?

We want to know what you think. What you’ve experienced so far, and what you care about.

So we made this DHA survey, so you can tell us. Please take the survey now if you have a minute! :3

Are you so fed up with the fishiness that you won’t buy again until the DHA is removed? Let us know. Is DHA your favorite nutrient and the entire reason that you started trying Super Body Fuel (or Basically Food) in the first place? Let us know! Think we should compromise and cut the dose in half again (down to the minimum DHA intake described here)? Please let us know in the survey.

In other news…

Plain flavors are available to order on the Basically Food site, yay! :D

We made them ourselves in small batches at the Super Body Fuel facility, and they finally have been received at the Basically Food warehouse in Illinois and added to the website. :d Aww yeah… No monk fruit, no flavor, no problems. B)

Because we made them ourselves, we used bags instead of tubs but with a Basically Food makeover! :) (Thanks to Arrow for hopping onto Illustrator to make the labels!) Our intention is still to switch over to HDPE tubs for future production runs, so, uh, enjoy (or endure) it while it lasts, I guess. :d

But also, now that we’re done with the last of our manufacturing, we’re been looking for someone who wants to take over our San Francisco production and warehouse space! We’re still on the hook for rent (not just any rent, Bay Area rent, people) until our lease expires at the end of January. :p

So, we’ve been looking for two months now, and still haven’t found a tenant to replace us. For a few days it was looking like we’d found the perfect replacement in the form of Final Foods, a plant-based meat manufacturer whose lease was up right when we wanted to leave our space, by the end of August. But at the last minute, it turned out that there was literally not enough electricity going into our unit to power their custom pea-protein meat-making machine. :o

On the bright side, I did convince them to move away from using seed oils in their products to minimize linoleic acid content (inflammatory omega-6) and transition from sunflower oil to high-oleic sunflower oil to, ultimately, avocado or coconut oil. So, you’re welcome, vegans. ;d

But overall, the main challenge is that most businesses that would want to move into our space are food businesses, that need more equipment or ventilation systems than are currently built in, and can’t afford the time and expense to make those modifications themselves. :/ Theoretically, it could also be good for biotech or cosmetics (or, you know, supplements), or of course warehouse storage, but there’s just not as many of those businesses around. At least, not that we know of.

Do you know of any? :3 Please let us know! We really need to find someone to take over our lease. If you have any suggestions or leads, we’d love to hear from you.

Heck, if you want to start your own ‘lent company in San Francisco, you can have our old mixer. And a bunch of stainless steel scoops. And a stainless steel work table if we haven’t sold it by then. :d I might even help you set up a bunch of spreadsheets to manage your operations, if I’m feeling generous. Please reach out. We have the perfect space for you. ;)

It will be a huge relief once we have said goodbye to our old Super Body Fuel space after eight long years of service. Ready to pour our energy into new things with Basically Food. :]

I’ve been hanging back for the past month, trying to find a new tenant and sell off all our old equipment while the rest of the team has been taking a well-deserved month-or-so off (paid, of course – don’t worry!) after years of grinding. Hopefully when Rhodel and Arrow come back refreshed in a couple weeks, we’ll have a clean slate with an empty warehouse and no rent to pay. :)

If you can help us with that (or if you’re in SF and you want a mixer for cheap, or a very powerful but slightly dusty fan, or a new, unopened chalkboard…) please get in touch. Thanks.

And take the DHA survey. ;3

Also, don’t forget to use the coupon code SUPERBODYFAM for 20% off all orders and subscriptions of $100 or more at Basically Food until the end of this year.

Here’s the Basically Food announcement post if you missed it, or in case this wasn’t long enough and you really just want to keep reading, for some reason. :d

Okay. Thanks for reading. Take care. :)

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

We’re getting ready to start bringing our supplements and DIY ‘lent ingredients over to Basically Food, and we need your feedback to help guide us! :D

If you’ve tried our custom vitamin mix Super Micros, our electrolyte mix Super Electrolytes, or our hypoallergenic complete protein mix Super Protein, we want to hear from you. Or if you might want to order one in the future, or want to suggest some other supplement that you wish we had available – we want to hear from you too! :)

Please take this survey now if you have a minute! c:

It’s split up into sections, so you can easily skip to the page relevant to the supplements you want to weigh in on. :d

For the vitamin mix we’re thinking of calling Basically Vitamins, we need to find a way to keep it from clumping up and solidifying as it pulls moisture from the air (mostly thanks to that pesky Choline Bitartrate, which is extremely hygroscopic, as they call it). Or rather, we need your help in deciding which method to use – should we add cellulose, or mix it with electrolytes, or just go back to adding… (gasp) xanthan gum? :O

Let us know in the survey! :D

For Basically Protein, should we include glucomannan (or, dare I say, xanthan gum?) for stability and smoothness of taste and texture as we currently do in Super Protein, or just keep it pure and simple (and bitter and gritty and chalky and separate-y)? Should we add taurine and glutamine as well, or should we just cap the amino acid additions at lysine and glycine? Would you like a flavored version? Are we asking too many questions?

You tell us – take the survey! :3

Anyway, here’s the obligatory reminder to cancel your Super Body Fuel subscription and create a new one at Basically Food if you haven’t already – and thank you to the majority of you who already have! :]

And yes, if you have a plain or strawberry subscription, you can hold off – we’re working on the Basically Food plain batches right now. They’re looking good! B)

Anyway, don’t forget to use the coupon code SUPERBODYFAM for 20% off all orders and subscriptions of $100 or more until the end of this year. :d

Oh, and if you’re still wondering what Basically Food is, check out our last update on the blog. Short answer: it’s our shiny new rebrand of Super Body Fuel. :]

As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know how the new product compares! Your feedback is very helpful for us, and we want to make sure you have a good experience. :) We’re still offering free replacements for any tubs that smell or taste off in any way, and we’ll continue to do so. :d

Also, take the supplements survey! Please. :3

Thank you! :)

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that we’ve started to experiment with international shipping for Basically Food! :D

Currently the costs are about the same as they’ve been with Super Body Fuel, meaning not too bad if you’re in Canada (or the US, of course), and pretty darn expensive for everywhere else. Sorry. :p

We’re still working with our new fulfillment center to see if we can find any cheaper rates, but since many of you have been asking and waiting patiently, we thought we’d just go ahead and open the doors to international shipping. And if better prices become available, we’ll update the site accordingly. :)

Don’t forget to use the coupon code SUPERBODYFAM for 20% off all orders and subscriptions of $100 or more until the end of this year. ;)

In other news, we’ve finished up the final batches that we’ll ever do at Super Body Fuel last week, so orders on the SBF site are now restricted to products that are in stock – no more backorders! :o

If you have a subscription still active with Super Body Fuel, please cancel it and start a new one with Basically Food at your earliest convenience! If you’ve got a plain or strawberry subscription, no rush though – you can keep those going until further notice. :d

We’re about to start making our plain batches for Basically Food, which we’ll be busy with for the next several weeks. They’ll be in bags instead of tubs, since we’re filling them by hand ourselves, but with the colorful new Basically Food look. We’ll let you know when those are available to order on the new site! :)

Oh, and if you’re still wondering what Basically Food is, check out our last update on the blog. Short answer: it’s our shiny new rebrand of Super Body Fuel. :]

Please don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know how the new product compares! Your feedback is very helpful for us, and we want to make sure you have a good experience. :) We’re still offering free replacements for any tubs that smell or taste off in any way, and we’ll continue to do so. :d

Thank you! :)

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

If you’ve been waiting for the option to try Basically Food without starting a subscription, now is your chance to try it. :)

If you have already started a subscription, thank you, and please let us know how the ordering process and subscription-editing interface has been for you! There’s still time to change things around. :d

If you’re wondering what Basically Food is, check out our last update on the blog. Short answer: it’s our shiny new rebrand of Super Body Fuel. :]

Behold…

Anyway. Aside from the whole “most people really don’t want to create a subscription” thing, we’ve heard that some of the tubs are turning out fishy from the DHA somehow. Initially it seemed like this was specific to BALANCE chocolate, but it turns out that it’s just a small percentage of tubs across all flavors and product lines that have the issue. :o

And there’s no way to know which ones will have it, until you open them and smell. :p

Sadly we don’t seem to have any recourse or leverage with the manufacturer that screwed this up, but we’re working on it. Like we said before, next time, we’re trying a new manufacturer. Sigh.

So… the way we’re thinking of handling this is just to send out free replacements for fishy tubs, no questions asked (except for, “how many tubs?” or “what’s your order number?” and stuff like that). Same with any mixing inconsistencies that might arise – if it tastes weird, send us an email. It’s supposed to taste good. Most tubs taste good. :|

We’ve added some guidance and clarification to the FAQ – feel free to check there first if you’re not sure.

For all our customers outside the US, we’re still trying to work with our new fulfillment center to find an international shipping option that will not be prohibitively expensive. It seems that there may be an option to bundle multiple shipments to the same country together to reduce costs a bit, but we’re still waiting on the bundled price quotes so we can see if it will actually be viable. Stay tuned. :d

Anyway, if you still have a subscription on Super Body Fuel, please start a new one on Basically Food this month if you can. If you don’t do subscriptions, please try placing a one-off order with Basically Food and let us know what you think! :D

Thank you all!

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

Hi everyone,

In our last email update, we announced that we’d run out of our custom vitamin and mineral mix and had to switch back to placeholder vitamins, again.

Now, I’m happy to announce that we got our custom vitamin mix back, and it’s a new and improved formula! :D That means that Super Micros is available to order again, and soon, new orders of all products will be shipped out with the new vitamins instead of the placeholders we’d been using. :)

You can see the full supplement facts here, but changes to the formula include using only Vitamin D3 (from a vegan, algal source) instead of D2, increasing some B vitamin amounts to cover 100% DV with a single meal (while still staying within safe limits), adding the phytonutrient Quercetin (which is supposed to help reduce inflammation and allergies), and including Myo-Inositol in the mix (previously included in our meals but not Super Micros). Now that we’re adding Glycine directly to our protein blend, we’ve also swapped out some mineral glycinates for citrates, which should be similarly bioavailable but more readily available to source given supply chain challenges. :d

I did consider many other phytonutrients as well (inspired by PhytoGenesis), but Quercetin was one of the few that were generally safe and beneficial in all circumstances, when dosed appropriately. Others may have benefits, but also drawbacks in certain situations, or aren’t safe for certain people – like Lycopene, which may be unsafe to take while pregnant or breastfeeding! Or like Curcumin and Piperine, which can interfere with certain medications. Some, on the other hand, were just not available or affordable to include.

I did want to add Lutein and Zeaxanthin for eye health, but they’re extremely expensive and would have disproportionately increased the cost in a way that the majority of people would most likely not want to pay for. :p As it is, with the improvements we are including, along with inflation and supply chain cost increases, the cost to us from the manufacturer is already twice that of the previous version! :O

Happy to answer any other questions about the new formula – just let me know. :)

We’ve also removed the Xanthan Gum from Super Micros, so you can add it to drinks and soups without it clumping or getting thick. This means it is much more susceptible to humidity damage, however, so be very careful to keep it in a dry environment! :o

Next, we are actually replacing Xanthan Gum entirely with a more natural (and more expensive) alternative: Glucomannan from konjac root, which is what shirataki noodles are traditionally made of. :) Based on my tests, with a 95% or higher Glucomannan extract, the resulting texture and stability is almost indistinguishable from Xanthan Gum! This is for the small number of people who have sensitivities to Xanthan Gum or otherwise prefer an alternative. We’d love to have you. :)

Apparently there are a fair number of studies on the health benefits of Glucomannan as a dietary supplement, as well, and it seems to stack up favorably against both Xanthan Gum and Psyllium Husk in that respect. So, probably a good move all around. :]

Oh, also, as I just posted here over at r/SaturatedFat, we’ve got an experimental vegan 50% stearic acid powder available now as Super Saturated, to go along with our Super MCT, Super Protein, Super Electrolytes, and of course, Super Micros. If you’re wondering why anyone would want more saturated fat (aside from that it’s a zero-carb powdered fat source!) you can read this little writeup I did back in 2021. Short answer is that not all saturated fat (or fat in general) is created equal, and stearic acid stimulates mitochondrial fusion and fat-burning. Kind of like how MCT oil (another saturated fat) stimulates the generation of ketones even outside of a zero-carb ketogenic state. Anyway, feel free to check it out – and please let us know how it goes, if you do!

We hope you like the new changes. Happy Holidays, and thanks as always for your support! :)

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)