Hi everyone,
In case you haven’t heard, we’re rebranding. New name, new logo (yes, we actually have a logo now!), new website, new packaging. Same formula. :)
Super Body Fuel is now… Basically Food (or basicallyfood, if you want to be fancy).
Milk Fuel is now BOOST (the yellow one).
Athlete Fuel is now BUILD (the green one).
Super Fuel is now BALANCE (the blue one).
Keto Fuel is now BURN (the red one).
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Air. Earth. Water. Fire. Long ago, the four macro ratios lived together in harmony… Yes, I’m a nerd. Sorry not sorry. :p
Over the next month or two we’d like everyone to switch over to the new website so we can phase out of superbodyfuel.com completely. If you have a subscription, please start a new one at basicallyfood.com and cancel your old one when you’re ready – ideally before it renews!
Use the coupon code SUPERBODYFAM for 20% off subscriptions of $100 or more. It expires at the end of this year, but if you enter the code before then, you’ll get to keep the discount indefinitely – or at least until you cancel your subscription. ;)
So far we have chocolate, vanilla, and cinnamon available at the new site, with plans to add plain in a couple months. Original will be merged with our plain flavors – just add a touch of monkfruit or maple syrup or whatever sweetener you prefer, and you can turn plain into original. We’d like to bring strawberry back at some point but we’re not sure when we’ll be able to make that happen – feel free to stock up now. Yes, I know – it’s my favorite flavor too. :/
One-time orders will continue to be available on the old site until we’ve cleared out all our old inventory, but we’ll be raising the prices a bit on Super Body Fuel chocolate, vanilla, and cinnamon as a little nudge to switch over to the new site. Please switch over. Did we mention that US shipping is free? :3
We’re working on making international shipping available on our new site, hopefully coming soon! If you’re outside the US, you can continue to order on Super Body Fuel and we’ll let you know when the new site is ready for you. If you want to be a guinea pig and help us test out some cheaper international shipping options, let us know and we’ll get in touch. :)
By the way, the new packaging in rigid tubs means that the powder is a bit fluffier than usual, since we’re not squeezing all the air out by hand like we do with every Super Body Fuel bag. For the most part, measuring out a heaping scoop instead of a level scoop is enough to compensate for this difference in density.
If you’re a Keto Fuel customer though, note that the BURN powder turned out quite a bit fluffier than expected (probably because of the MCT oil powder), throwing off the scoop sizes. If you don’t use a scale to measure your powder, you’ll want to use two scoops of a standard 1/4 cup measuring cup per meal instead of the included 90cc scoop. Otherwise, your BURN will be inexplicably watery and flavorless. :x
…Then, everything changed when the ketogenic diet attacked.
Okay, sorry! I’m actually sorry this time. :o
Anyway, that’s the important stuff – good job for getting through it! :] Now here’s a bit of backstory, for those of you who like to read…
It’s been a long road.
We started out as Custom Body Fuel, back in 2014. Then we dropped the whole “custom” thing and became Super Body Fuel in 2015. You know, like Super Mario. Because videogames. But to be honest, the name was always a placeholder. I’d personally brainstormed hundreds of potential names in that first year, each more awkward than the last (Neosylt, anyone?), before giving up and settling on Super Body Fuel, figuring I’d come back to it later.
Eventually I did come back to it, and well, we’ve been at this for a long time – this was years ago, still. As in 2017. We did some surveys, concluded that “Super Body Fuel” really conveyed the opposite of what people liked about our implicit “brand” – or how we’ve always done things. I mean, it’s not the worst name ever, but “Super Body Fuel” sounds hyperbolic, sounds like the sort of overpriced, dubious supplement you’d buy at a gas station and see generic gym bros using, as more than one customer put it on our surveys! (No offense to the upstanding bros out there bulking with Athlete Fuel or getting shredded with Keto Fuel, of course.)
We’ve always been the opposite. I’ve always been the opposite, and the people on the team here who have stuck with me have always been the opposite too. We’re understated. We underpromise and overdeliver – at least when it comes to optimal nutrition and value for price, if not, well, packaging aesthetics and polish. :p We’re down-to-earth, approachable, relatable even – not puffed up in the slightest. Maybe a little silly – we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Even though we take the important stuff – nutrition and quality ingredients – very seriously. Of course. This is what people like you told us, in our survey back in 2017.
“Hey, what’s that stuff you always drink for lunch?”
“Oh, this? It’s basically… food.”
“Yeah, sure, but… like what is it, exactly? What’s it called?”
“Oh, I mean, that’s what it’s called! Basically Food.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, really. Check it out. Basically Food dot com. It’s good stuff. Tastes pretty good too!”
I crack myself up sometimes. XD
Seriously though. That was it. Simple, understated, unpretentious to the point of being pretentious, a bit silly – self-deprecating, even. That’s me – that’s us. Breaking food down into its most basic components. Basically Food.
It took a while to find the right name and to find designers who could translate that into a visual identity that did it justice. You see, Super Body Fuel’s “no aesthetic” aesthetic isn’t a result of me not caring about graphic design. It’s about me caring too much. I can’t do it halfway – it’s 0% or 100% for me. I’m an artist at heart, and a perfectionist with very strong opinions about how things should look and feel, and turns out I’m a very hands-on client when it comes to graphic design and branding projects. :d Shout out to Double Six Design for their patience in putting up with me! ;D
Their work (our work, if I may be so bold) speaks for itself. It literally looks like some of my indie game prototypes, if it were a really classy food and nutrition brand. :o It’s so… me, so aligned with my artistic style and soul in a way I never imagined possible before this. It’s like they plucked it right out of my dreams. I mean, I just wanted to have a website and packaging that I wasn’t actively embarrassed to show people. :p
Look, I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here, Double Six Design deserves the credit – I’m just trying to convey how stunned I was at what ultimately came out of the year-long process of working with them… and how agonizing it has been to be sitting on this for the last five years since then, waiting for all the logistical pieces to come together to actually launch it – particularly the made-from-scratch custom designed website, which we… ended up scrapping and are now working to rebuild, in Shopify. 8|
So many delays and setbacks…
Anyway, one thing you may be wondering about is the packaging. Looks different – a tub instead of a bag? :o Yes, and despite the deceptively natural look of the Super Body Fuel bags, they’re actually neither compostable, recyclable, nor reusable, and they often break during shipping when handled roughly, which is immensely wasteful of the resources bound up in their precious nutrient cargo! Because the bags are made of plastic, metal, and paper fused together, there’s no way to un-fuse those materials and recycle them.
With Basically Food, we want to do things better. Using only the most food-safe type of plastic available, HDPE (the bags use the inferior PET plastic), the tubs hold up much better during shipping, reducing waste, and can be recycled or reused safely for food storage (unlike other plastics). They’re also more amenable to automated filling, since we currently have to squeeze the air out of every Super Body Fuel bag by hand to get the powder to fit. :p
Which brings us to our next point. We’re not filling these tubs by hand. And we’re not mixing them, either. We’re not even storing them in our tiny San Francisco warehouse. We’ve finally hired a contract manufacturer to mix up a literal ton of powder at a time, with their fancy equipment (no clumps!), and crank out thousands of tubs to cover all our product lines. The most immediate benefit to you will be next-day shipping (no more backlog!) but it should also help provide a buffer against the global supply chain disruptions that seem to be happening much more frequently these days. :o
Finding a contract manufacturer and getting them to produce a product to our exacting specification, with all the exact same suppliers and ingredients that we’ve spent years fine-tuning, has been a challenge, to put it lightly. :p There have been a lot of delays and setbacks. Suffice it to say that we will be trying out a different manufacturer for our next run.
Our plan for the plain flavors in the meantime is to make a bunch ourselves in San Francisco, using the new packaging design, and ship them to the warehouse in Illinois that’s handling fulfillment for Basically Food. We just can’t afford the minimums required to get a contract manufacturer to mix these flavors for us – not when we sell so few. Same for ingredients like Super Micros and Super Electrolytes (Basically Vitamins, anyone?). :]
Also, since we finalized the product labels and had them printed back in 2021 (it’s been a long road), we got stuck with the pre-glycine formula from that year. So this first version of Basically Food does not include the added glycine that I’ve grown to love, sadly. :c But fortunately for some of you, it still uses xanthan gum instead of the konjac root glucomannan we’ve started using this year.
Glucomannan is great but it has resulted in shakes that are thicker yet tend to separate more into layers, often including a sludgy layer at the bottom – as you may have noticed. :p So far, it seems that shaking again 30-60 minutes after mixing is the best defense against this abomination, if you can manage it.
We’re still cranking out the batches by hand at Super Body Fuel, but the goal will be to get everyone switched over to the new site and the new brand in the next month or two. The more people switch over, the less time we’ll have to spend scooping powders and moving heavy objects around, and the more time we can devote to fleshing out the new website.
Long-term, we would like to phase out of Super Body Fuel entirely – the sooner the better. We’re all very excited to have our time freed up to make educational nutrition content (articles, videos, podcasts…) as well as to better support and inspire DIYers with guides and resources. It’s been nine long years now – about time for part two. I think you’ll like it. :]
Thanks so much to all of you for your support across these very long years. <3
Please let us know how it goes with the new website and the rebranded product – we’ll be standing by to address any issues that come up. Hope to hear from you soon! :D
Thanks again,
Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)
