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No Soylent for Santa after key ingredient supply is choked off

Toilet pebbledashing not our fault, says TerraVia

If you were planning to leave out cookies and a generous glass of Soylent for Santa, you should forget all that and hoard your stocks for yourself. A key supplier has announced it is cutting off the super-gruel maker.

TerraVia, which provides the algae-based flour and oils used in Soylent, said that it was unhappy with being blamed for a series of problems with the "food" that have left some customers hugging the toilet bowl calling out to Huey and Ralph. It accuses Soylent of hanging it out to dry and has lowered the boom.

"We are surprised and disappointed that Soylent rushed to imply that algal flour is to blame and removed the ingredient without providing any evidence that they conducted a full investigation of their formulations and the more than 40 ingredients in their products, as would be standard practice in the food industry," said TerraVia CEO Apu Mody.

"As a company, we work every day to ensure the integrity of our ingredients and our customers' high-quality products. We uphold food industry best practices and remain committed to partnering with our valued customers who align with these same principles."

Mody noted that less than 0.1 per cent of Soylent slurpers had suffered from the severe gastrointestinal issues that caused the "food" firm to change its recipe and temporarily halt supplies of some of its products. TerraVia's algal flour is certified as "generally recognized as safe" by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Soylent announced it was cutting the flour out of the new version 1.7 of its product after a two-month investigation into the cause of the bowel-blasting upset that version 1.6 stimulated in some synthetic slime scoffers. It has also cut the amount of Xanthan gum, sucralose, and artificial sweeteners in the recipe, and increased the amount of sodium.

Soylent has yet to comment on this bust up with TerraVia, and on how the boycott will affect supplies to people who think that chewing is too much like hard work. ®

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