MealSquares (the company I’m starting with fellow LW user RomeoStevens) is searching for nutrition experts to join our advisory team. The ideal person has a combination of formally recognized nutrition expertise & also at least a casual interest in things like study methodology and effect sizes (this unfortunately seems to be a rare combination). Advising us will be an opportunity to improve the diets of many people, it should not be much work, you’ll get a small stake in our company, and you’ll help us earn money for effective giving. Please get in touch with us (ideally using this page) if you or someone you know might be interested!
I’m not the right person at all, but if you ever want an amateur data enthusiast to help clean and present research results, I’d be willing to donate my time. The project is interesting and I would like to start stretching my skill set. I am pretty good at graphing in R, have a solid understanding of probability theory (undergrad level). I also have a good intuition for cleaning data sets.
All of that evaluation is based on what other math nerds have told me, so I understand if you’re not interested!
We’ve experimented with doing international shipping. It gets expensive, and it’s also a bit of a hassle. It makes more sense if you’re doing a group buy (90+ squares). If you really want MealSquares and you’re willing to pay a bunch extra for international shipping, contact us and we can work out details. Long term we would love to set up production facilities in foreign countries like a regular multinational, but that won’t be for a while.
I realize you are in the startup phase now, and so it probably makes sense for you to put any surplus funds into growth rather than donating now. However, 2 questions:
Once you finish with your growth phase, about what percent of your net proceeds do you expect to donate?
What sorts of EA charities are you interested in?
I’ve been using MealSquares regularly, without realizing that that you guys were LWers or EAs. As such, I’ve been using mostly s/Soylent because of the cost difference. (A 400 Calorie MealSquare is ~$3, a 400 Calorie jug of Soylent 2.0 is ~$2.83, 400 Calories worth of unmixed Soylent powder is ~$1.83, and the ingredients for 400 Calories worth of DIY People Chow are ~$0.70. All these are slightly cheaper with a subscription/large purchase.)
I ask, because if you happen to be interested in similar EA causes to me, and expect to eventually donate X% of proceeds, then I should be budgeting my expenses to factor that in. If (100%-X%) * MealSquares_Cost < soylent_Cost, then I would buy much less soylent and much (/many?) more MealSquares. I’d be paying a premium to Soylent in order to add a bit more culinary variety. (Also, I realize this X isn’t equal to the expected altruistic return on investment, but that would be even harder to estimate.)
I realize you are in the startup phase now, and so it probably makes sense for you to put any surplus funds into growth rather than donating now.
Yep, that’s what we’ve been doing. (We’ve been providing free MealSquares to some EA organizations, but we haven’t been donating a significant portion of our profits directly.)
Once you finish with your growth phase, about what percent of your net proceeds do you expect to donate?
At least 10%, hopefully significantly more.
What sorts of EA charities are you interested in?
We’ve been trying to focus on growing our business rather than evaluating EA giving opportunities. If we actually do make a lot of money to donate, it will make sense to spend a lot of time thinking about where to give it. And we’ll try & focus on identifying opportunities that we have a comparative advantage in (opportunities that are more suited to large donors, like funding a new organization from scratch).
I’m not exactly sure why, but for some reason the idea of people buying our product because we are EAs makes me uncomfortable. I would much rather people buy it because it’s good for you, convenient, tasty, etc. As you point out, we are less than 10% more expensive on a per-calorie basis than jug form Soylent. Would you say that you are not interested in paying more for a healthier product, not convinced that MealSquares is better for you, something else?
the idea of people buying our product because we are EAs makes me uncomfortable.
In retrospect, I think that would make me uncomfortable too. In your position, I’d probably feel like I’d delivered an ultimatum to someone else, even if they were the one who actually made the suggestion. On the other hand, maybe a deep feeling of obligation to charity isn’t a bad thing?
Would you say that you are not interested in paying more for a healthier product, not convinced that MealSquares is better for you, something else?
Based on my (fairly limited) understanding of nutrition, I suspect that any marginal difference between your products is fairly small. I suspect humans get strongly diminishing returns (in the form of increased lifespan) once we have our basic nutritional requirements met in bio-available forms and without huge amounts of anything harmful. After that, I’d expect the noise to overpower the signal. For example, perhaps unmeasured factors like my mood or eating habits change as a function of my Soylent/MealSquares choice, and I wind up getting fast food more often, or get less work done or something. Let’s say it would take me a month of solid researching and reading nutrition textbooks to make a semi-educated decision of which of two good things is best. Would the added health benefit give me an additional month of life? What if I value my healthy life, here and now, far more than 1 more month spent senile in a nursing home? What if I also apply hyperbolic discounting?
I’ve probably done more directed health-related reading than most people. (Maybe 24 hours total, over the pasty year or so?) Enough to minimize the biggest causes of death, and have some vague idea of what “healthy” might look like. Enough to start fooling around with my own DIY soylent, even if I wouldn’t want to eat that every day without more research. If someone who sounds knowledgeable sits down and does an independent review, I’d probably read it and scan the comments for critiques of the review.
Thanks for the explanation. I wrote up some of the details of our approach here. Nutrition is far from being settled, and major discoveries have been made just in the past 50 years. Therefore we take an approach that’s fairly conservative, which means (among other things) getting most of our nutrients from whole foods, the way humans have been eating for virtually all of our species’ history. We think the burden of proof should be on Soylent to show that their approach is a good one.
the idea of people buying our product because we are EAs makes me uncomfortable.
I’d probably feel like I’d delivered an ultimatum to someone else, even if they were the one who actually made the suggestion.
I think many people would run the equation the other way—buying from a company that gives a potion to charity is a way to pressure competing companies to do the same. In other words, MealSquares give consumers a way to put pressure on the industry. Of course, there are a lot of ways that that model could be flawed, but you’re hardly abusing the people who make that choice.
MealSquares are nutritionally complete--5 MealSquares contain all the vitamins & minerals you need to survive for a day, in the amounts you need them. In principle you could eat only MealSquares and do quite well, although we don’t officially recommend this. It’s more about having an easy “default meal” that you can eat with confidence once or twice a day when you don’t have something more interesting to do like get dinner with friends.
MealSquares is made from a variety of whole foods, and almost all of the vitamins and minerals are from whole food sources (as opposed to competing products like Soylent that use dubious vitamin powders). Virtually every nutrition expert in the past century has recommended eating a variety of whole foods, and MealSquares stuffs more than 10 whole food ingredients in to a single convenient package, including 3 different fruits and 3 different vegetables.
We’ve put a lot of research in to MealSquares to make it better for you than most or all competing products on the market. For example, the first ingredient in Clif Bar is brown rice syrup (basically a glorified form of sugar), and they get their protein from rice and soy (not as bioavailable as other sources). MealSquares contains only a bit of added sugar (dark chocolate chips) and bioavailable protein sources. I’m having a hard time finding solid nutrition info on the One Square Meal website. But you can see that our 400 calorie bar (120 grams) has only 12 grams of sugar, so 10% sugar by weight, whereas their bar is 17.1% sugar by weight.
Most competing meal bars are similar: non-bioavailable protein sources and lots of sugar, generally added sugar. Clif Bar is basically a candy bar disguised to be healthy: it has 23 grams of sugar in a 230 calorie bar, and a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate with Almonds bar has 19 grams of sugar in a 210 calorie bar. Most meal bar makers are doing the nutritional equivalent of taking a Hershey bar, adding in some vitamin powders and soy protein isolate, and telling their customers that it’s a healthy snack.
The biggest practical difference between us and One Square Meal is probably that we are available in the US and they are available in New Zealand.
Interesting, thanks for the info. Yes most meal replacement bars seem to be simply soy-augmented candy bars, however there is of course a practical reason for this: sweet foods sell better.
It might be worth mentioning on your site that your product is more healthy and has less sugar than the alternatives. Another problem is soy protein. Some research hints at soy protein having undesirable hormone-imitating effects: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074428/ so this could be a selling point as well as I presume you do not use soy protein.
MealSquares (the company I’m starting with fellow LW user RomeoStevens) is searching for nutrition experts to join our advisory team. The ideal person has a combination of formally recognized nutrition expertise & also at least a casual interest in things like study methodology and effect sizes (this unfortunately seems to be a rare combination). Advising us will be an opportunity to improve the diets of many people, it should not be much work, you’ll get a small stake in our company, and you’ll help us earn money for effective giving. Please get in touch with us (ideally using this page) if you or someone you know might be interested!
I’m not the right person at all, but if you ever want an amateur data enthusiast to help clean and present research results, I’d be willing to donate my time. The project is interesting and I would like to start stretching my skill set. I am pretty good at graphing in R, have a solid understanding of probability theory (undergrad level). I also have a good intuition for cleaning data sets.
All of that evaluation is based on what other math nerds have told me, so I understand if you’re not interested!
Do you have any plans for international shipping? (Say, the UK)
We’ve experimented with doing international shipping. It gets expensive, and it’s also a bit of a hassle. It makes more sense if you’re doing a group buy (90+ squares). If you really want MealSquares and you’re willing to pay a bunch extra for international shipping, contact us and we can work out details. Long term we would love to set up production facilities in foreign countries like a regular multinational, but that won’t be for a while.
I realize you are in the startup phase now, and so it probably makes sense for you to put any surplus funds into growth rather than donating now. However, 2 questions:
Once you finish with your growth phase, about what percent of your net proceeds do you expect to donate?
What sorts of EA charities are you interested in?
I’ve been using MealSquares regularly, without realizing that that you guys were LWers or EAs. As such, I’ve been using mostly s/Soylent because of the cost difference. (A 400 Calorie MealSquare is ~$3, a 400 Calorie jug of Soylent 2.0 is ~$2.83, 400 Calories worth of unmixed Soylent powder is ~$1.83, and the ingredients for 400 Calories worth of DIY People Chow are ~$0.70. All these are slightly cheaper with a subscription/large purchase.)
I ask, because if you happen to be interested in similar EA causes to me, and expect to eventually donate X% of proceeds, then I should be budgeting my expenses to factor that in. If (100%-X%) * MealSquares_Cost < soylent_Cost, then I would buy much less soylent and much (/many?) more MealSquares. I’d be paying a premium to Soylent in order to add a bit more culinary variety. (Also, I realize this X isn’t equal to the expected altruistic return on investment, but that would be even harder to estimate.)
Yep, that’s what we’ve been doing. (We’ve been providing free MealSquares to some EA organizations, but we haven’t been donating a significant portion of our profits directly.)
At least 10%, hopefully significantly more.
We’ve been trying to focus on growing our business rather than evaluating EA giving opportunities. If we actually do make a lot of money to donate, it will make sense to spend a lot of time thinking about where to give it. And we’ll try & focus on identifying opportunities that we have a comparative advantage in (opportunities that are more suited to large donors, like funding a new organization from scratch).
I’m not exactly sure why, but for some reason the idea of people buying our product because we are EAs makes me uncomfortable. I would much rather people buy it because it’s good for you, convenient, tasty, etc. As you point out, we are less than 10% more expensive on a per-calorie basis than jug form Soylent. Would you say that you are not interested in paying more for a healthier product, not convinced that MealSquares is better for you, something else?
In retrospect, I think that would make me uncomfortable too. In your position, I’d probably feel like I’d delivered an ultimatum to someone else, even if they were the one who actually made the suggestion. On the other hand, maybe a deep feeling of obligation to charity isn’t a bad thing?
Based on my (fairly limited) understanding of nutrition, I suspect that any marginal difference between your products is fairly small. I suspect humans get strongly diminishing returns (in the form of increased lifespan) once we have our basic nutritional requirements met in bio-available forms and without huge amounts of anything harmful. After that, I’d expect the noise to overpower the signal. For example, perhaps unmeasured factors like my mood or eating habits change as a function of my Soylent/MealSquares choice, and I wind up getting fast food more often, or get less work done or something. Let’s say it would take me a month of solid researching and reading nutrition textbooks to make a semi-educated decision of which of two good things is best. Would the added health benefit give me an additional month of life? What if I value my healthy life, here and now, far more than 1 more month spent senile in a nursing home? What if I also apply hyperbolic discounting?
I’ve probably done more directed health-related reading than most people. (Maybe 24 hours total, over the pasty year or so?) Enough to minimize the biggest causes of death, and have some vague idea of what “healthy” might look like. Enough to start fooling around with my own DIY soylent, even if I wouldn’t want to eat that every day without more research. If someone who sounds knowledgeable sits down and does an independent review, I’d probably read it and scan the comments for critiques of the review.
Thanks for the explanation. I wrote up some of the details of our approach here. Nutrition is far from being settled, and major discoveries have been made just in the past 50 years. Therefore we take an approach that’s fairly conservative, which means (among other things) getting most of our nutrients from whole foods, the way humans have been eating for virtually all of our species’ history. We think the burden of proof should be on Soylent to show that their approach is a good one.
I think many people would run the equation the other way—buying from a company that gives a potion to charity is a way to pressure competing companies to do the same. In other words, MealSquares give consumers a way to put pressure on the industry. Of course, there are a lot of ways that that model could be flawed, but you’re hardly abusing the people who make that choice.
/chokes on his foie gras X-D
Someone gave you a downvote. If it was on my behalf or on the behalf of Soylent, then for the record I thought it was funny. :)
How does your product compare to widely-available meal replacement foods, like, say: http://www.cookietime.co.nz/osm.html ?
MealSquares are nutritionally complete--5 MealSquares contain all the vitamins & minerals you need to survive for a day, in the amounts you need them. In principle you could eat only MealSquares and do quite well, although we don’t officially recommend this. It’s more about having an easy “default meal” that you can eat with confidence once or twice a day when you don’t have something more interesting to do like get dinner with friends.
MealSquares is made from a variety of whole foods, and almost all of the vitamins and minerals are from whole food sources (as opposed to competing products like Soylent that use dubious vitamin powders). Virtually every nutrition expert in the past century has recommended eating a variety of whole foods, and MealSquares stuffs more than 10 whole food ingredients in to a single convenient package, including 3 different fruits and 3 different vegetables.
We’ve put a lot of research in to MealSquares to make it better for you than most or all competing products on the market. For example, the first ingredient in Clif Bar is brown rice syrup (basically a glorified form of sugar), and they get their protein from rice and soy (not as bioavailable as other sources). MealSquares contains only a bit of added sugar (dark chocolate chips) and bioavailable protein sources. I’m having a hard time finding solid nutrition info on the One Square Meal website. But you can see that our 400 calorie bar (120 grams) has only 12 grams of sugar, so 10% sugar by weight, whereas their bar is 17.1% sugar by weight.
Most competing meal bars are similar: non-bioavailable protein sources and lots of sugar, generally added sugar. Clif Bar is basically a candy bar disguised to be healthy: it has 23 grams of sugar in a 230 calorie bar, and a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate with Almonds bar has 19 grams of sugar in a 210 calorie bar. Most meal bar makers are doing the nutritional equivalent of taking a Hershey bar, adding in some vitamin powders and soy protein isolate, and telling their customers that it’s a healthy snack.
The biggest practical difference between us and One Square Meal is probably that we are available in the US and they are available in New Zealand.
Interesting, thanks for the info. Yes most meal replacement bars seem to be simply soy-augmented candy bars, however there is of course a practical reason for this: sweet foods sell better.
It might be worth mentioning on your site that your product is more healthy and has less sugar than the alternatives. Another problem is soy protein. Some research hints at soy protein having undesirable hormone-imitating effects: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074428/ so this could be a selling point as well as I presume you do not use soy protein.