February 2018 Update

Hi everyone,

We made it to February, phew! :D I don’t know about you, but my New Year’s resolutions went out the window immediately when I got sick for a whole month and we got swamped with a huge backlog, after the rush of January orders combined with a delayed vitamin mix shipment and working past midnight became the new normal. But I hear February is the new January (okay, actually I just made that up), so I’m looking forward to a fresh start this month. :)

Here’s the news:

• The sale continues: reduced prices extended through February!
• New vitamin mix: updated for 2018 Nutrition Facts and more.
• Should we skip the scoops sometimes? Take the survey!

In January, we experimented with lowering prices to the absolute minimum while still covering our costs. I was curious to see if volume would increase, potentially carving out some profit margin again because of lower overhead.

So what happened? Long story short, January sales were up 50% from the monthly average last year, and the number of orders was double that of December! Needless to say, we’ve been very busy. :p And to my pleasant surprise, the increase in volume pretty closely balanced out the decrease in prices, and the overall profit* for January ended up being comparable to that of a typical month last year!

However, it’s hard to say whether this increase is due to the reduced prices, or because it’s January, with the New Year and all that. Clearly, the only way to know for sure is to keep the sale going for February, yay! ;D So that’s what we’re doing. The sale lives on!

http://superbodyfuel.com/shop/

I promise it will end for real when March rolls around, though, because we honestly cannot keep going at this pace without a break! :p We have become so busy that we’ve had to introduce a new role dedicated to shipping orders full-time (congrats to Kunjal on her promotion!) and add a third person to the manufacturing team (welcome to the team, Rhodel!). But I have a feeling the sale will return someday, perhaps even permanently…

In other news, we finally got the new version of our vitamin mix, updated for the revised 2018 Nutrition Facts and some other cool things, like better B vitamins. :) Of course, it came a month late, which put us behind by about two weeks on some of your orders (maybe you noticed!). Fortunately, we’ve been working overtime to bring our wait times back down to a week or less, which should continue to improve throughout the month of February until we can get back to next-day shipping on all orders.

With the new vitamin mix, we’ve introduced activated forms of many B vitamins, while eliminating the forms that can cause problems for those with methylation issues due to a MTHFR gene mutation, such as Folic Acid. Other changes include adding Menaquinone-4 in addition to Menaquinone-7, two complementary forms of Vitamin K2, as well as increasing Vitamin D further from 2400 IU daily to 3200 IU, given mounting evidence that current Vitamin D recommendations are way too low. However, because of the 2018 revisions to the Nutrition Facts label, it may look like there is less Vitamin D, because 3200 IU is now displayed as 80 mcg, which is considered to be 400% of the new Daily Value, in fact a third more than the previous version’s 600% even though it looks like a third less!

Generally speaking, vitamin recommendations have increased slightly for 2018, while minerals and B vitamins have decreased, so 100% DV no longer means the same thing as it used to. But we’ve tried to keep to what is reasonable and optimal, within these constraints. And the new format allows us to show more detailed information about the nutrition in our products, which is certainly a good thing. :) I do plan on doing a detailed writeup of all the vitamins and minerals in the formula, explaining why we chose the exact amounts and forms we have included – hopefully soon if things actually ease up a bit in February! Of course, I’ve been meaning to do the same with all the ingredients in our products, so stay tuned.

The DIYers among you will be pleased to hear that Super Micros has been updated with this new formula as well, and even Super Electrolytes has been updated with more calcium and phosphorus (and slightly more magnesium) to better align with the new recommendations. And because our tests have determined that our latest crop of rice protein is actually quite low in manganese, we can now add Manganese Glycinate to the mix without worrying about overdosing. As a number of you have requested, this finally makes Super Micros a complete solution even for grain-free recipes that lack a natural source of this mineral! :)

Lastly, a number of you have mentioned your dismay at the mountain of scoops that you’ve been accumulated as your Super Body Fuel shipments come in, month after month. We like reducing waste as much as possible, so we definitely like the idea of making scoops optional, for those of you who don’t need another one! But that’s easier said than done – there are quite a few logistical challenges here that may not be obvious at first. So we need your feedback on how to proceed! If you have a moment, please take this super short survey to let us know how you’d like your scoops… or a lack thereof, as the case may be.

By the way, I’ve noticed that cinnamon has finally overtaken vanilla as the number two flavor (after chocolate, that perennial favorite) of all our products! I find this fascinating, and I suspect that because we’ve added the option to order samples that are not currently in stock, more people are trying samples of all the flavors before deciding what to buy, and naturally, discovering that the cinnamon is actually really good – better than our vanilla.

But what do you think? Is cinnamon an underrated gem, or an unworthy usurper of vanilla’s rightful place? Send us a reply and let us know! :) And take the scoop survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfk1mIDHZTxPhEnqLcH49NPVuLfLe8qGIXn0FSD-r7pfjufKw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Thanks for making this sale so successful. We’ll do our best to survive it. ;)

Alex Cho Snyder (axcho)

* In case you’re wondering, my approach to paying myself from the company’s profits is basically the same as my approach to feeding myself from the company’s products. That is, I scrape together all the leftovers from each batch that would otherwise get thrown away, mix them all together, and drink it for lunch when I’m at work (and breakfast, and dinner, depending on how busy I am). I call it Mystery Mix. :D That way, I get free food, and no paying customer has to give up their place in line for me when there’s a backlog. ;) You can use your imagination as to how that translates to compensation.