Or a surgeon. "Sorry, but surgery is hard and we all make mistakes along the way!"

The statement is actually true... but you need to hold yourself to a higher standard when your product can have an impact on people's health. Of course, stopping the product while investigating the cause sounds like they are taking it seriously, so hopefully it will all work out in the end.

But I'm not worried either way - meal replacement shakes have been around a long time, and despite the marketing, Soylent isn't that different than its competitors. So hit GNC on the way home and get whatever works for ya.

But we have made surgery mistakes along the way. We have made food mistakes along the way. And drug mistakes, and flight mistakes, and war mistakes.

It hurts to get better. But it should also hurt the companies making the mistakes themselves, and for companies that make things like food and drugs there should be balanced regulations. Iteration should happen on small scales, but licenses and inspections should be enforced as you grow.

Comparing this with surgery is not fair, I think. Here (with a food like soylent) the gains are low and the risks are high. With surgery, the risks are high but so are the gains. Before you go into surgery you're given a list of 10 ways you might die if something goes wrong. Oftentimes, though, the alternative is certain death (in the very near future).

Edit: I was replying to "But we have made surgery mistakes along the way". On a second reading, I notice that you did not actually mean to imply "it was necessary there so it's necessary here".

You should go talk to some surgeons during residency. There are systems in place to mitigate the possibility of mistakes, but they do happen during the learning process for new surgeons.

Go look into health inspection reports. Restaurants of all kinds routinely violate health codes.

Yes, and we don't accept "hygiene is hard!" as an excuse when they violate health codes.

Restaurants don't get shut down for every little violation.

I used to follow these quite closely. In my experience in Silicon Valley, there was a decent correlation between how good the food was and how badly they perform in those inspections :)

Not because health codes are a hard problem to solve, it's because the proprietors are lazy pieces of shit who make up their margin by storing their bleach next to their raw chicken.

Even the biggest restaurant chains follow this approach when things go wrong. You just fix the problem and hope customers stick with you.

Using the term "hard" over and over is getting really old. It seems to be a SV thing. Not sure.