flavors

Update to Keto Chow review, seems he liked it

This entry is part 124 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

In his own words:

Overall, I would probably give Keto Chow a 4 out of 5. The top flavors are fantastic, and I only give 5 out of 5 for things that really blow my mind. Chris commented that the “build a month” deals are cheaper, so I’ll take a look at that. It comes to around $4 a meal after shipping, so there is quite a bit of value in ordering Keto Chow.

Honestly, if you are looking for a keto soylent option, you are probably more worried about time and health than money. The amount of hassle saved from fewer dishes, decreased time going through security at work, and cooking is worth the money. Don’t listen to me though. I’m a guy that prefers Five Guys over Eleven Madison Park and has a suitcase that hasn’t been unpacked for half a year because I hate laundry.

Jefferey Zhou posted a review of Keto Chow back on March 19. A few days ago he posted an update. While I think he’s completely crazy for scoring SnickerDoodle lowest =) it was a nice review. The clumpiness he mentions does indeed happen if you don’t mix it up a second time:

I find that after 10 minutes or so, the fiber collects in the bottom; give it a good shake to stir things up. If you don’t mix it up, you might get some clumps of fiber which are a bit weird, it’s also the #1 complaint so make sure you mix it up!

By |2016-04-01T12:20:02-06:00April 1st, 2016|Keto Chow, Ketogenic|Comments Off on Update to Keto Chow review, seems he liked it
Read More

Day 079 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 65 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.3
  • Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

Yesterday evening I spent some time discussing the possible packaging for “Keto Chow 2.0” with my wife. The company I’ll likely be using can package into “Stick Pack” and tubs/bottles, they aren’t able to handle the stand-up pouches I’m currently using (“yet”) so it’s likely I’ll be using tubs for bulk size and stick packs for the samples. The question now comes to what to do for the days – I don’t have a good solution for that yet. A smaller “day” tub would cost almost as much as the large bulk one, both the cost of the container and the cost of putting it into the container (but x7). I think the solution is going to be to up the volume of the sample size (the “single meal”) enough that the cost of 3 meals is lower than what the “day” used to cost – and just eliminate it entirely because it wouldn’t be necessary.

We’re also hitting some issues with the bulk size container. 7 days/21 meals for most of the flavors is a little too much to fit into a half-gallon size bottle. It fits into a standard 1 gallon (2 lb of protein) size bottle but there’s a bunch of extra space at the top. Since Peanut Butter is the “largest” flavor by volume I used it as my “worst case scenario” trial and found that I could actually get 10 days/30 meals of chocolate peanut butter into a gallon size container. Likely that is what we will do: no more “weeks” – they would be 30 meal/10 day packages. A round gallon size container is an awful waste of space as far as shipping goes so we’re looking into using “square” bottles instead, like these:

Square

This all presents a problem though: Shipping. We currently use a LOT of USPS flat rate boxes; they’re free(ish) and offer low shipping rates where we don’t have to care how much stuff weighs, only how big it is. With these larger, fixed dimension, containers we would be able to fit half as many bottles into the same box as the week bags. A Medium FRB would hold 1 instead of 2-3. A Large FRB would only hold 2 bottles instead of the current 4 weeks (20 days worth compared to 28). It’s likely we’ll have to find our own boxes that fit 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the bottles. It kinda sucks but will be better for FedEx and possibly UPS shipping with all 3 services using the same boxes. Time will tell.

We also hashed out the flavors that will be part of the initial round: Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate Peanut butter, Cookie & Cream and Strawberry.

Flavor Graph

Those first five represent 73% of the total sales of Keto Chow all by themselves, so I think it’s a good starting point; especially with the apparent discontinuation of the different flavors by Dymatize. I found some Chocolate Fudge and some Butter Cream Toffee yesterday but still no joy with Banana and Piña Colada, it may not be long before They go out of stock in the weeks, though we have a nice inventory of days and samples. Cinnamon bun is currently down to just samples remaining, the last day pack sold on Saturday.

By |2016-10-13T07:27:44-06:00March 22nd, 2016|100 days of keto, Site or Store Stuff, Keto Chow|Comments Off on Day 079 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
Read More

Days 070 & 071 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)

This entry is part 58 of 81 in the series 100 days of keto
  • Weight: 205.9
  • Blood ketones: 0.3 mmol/L
  • Weight: 204.3
  • Blood ketones: <0.1 mmol/L

 

I’m apparently broken or something, when I finally ate yesterday around 5:00 PM my ketone levels were only at 0.3 mmol/L, they should have been up there in the 1.0-1.5 range; and today they’re non-detectable? This is why I would NOT recommend people check their blood ketone levels every day: if you thought stressing over the ups and downs of the scale are bad, this is even worse (plus it costs $2 EVERY TIME YOU TEST).

Whatever. I have three Keto Chows for today (Rich Chocolate), I’m re-testing the vitamin/mineral mixture and so far it does indeed look like the weird flavor was in the protein powder not the mix, I suppose it should be encouraging that I’m still the only one that could taste it. I’m also the only one aside from my mom that I know that doesn’t like cucumbers since, you know, they smell like ammonia. Tomorrow I’ll be mixing up a batch of Keto Chow right off the shelf as a control but it’s looking like I’ll be ordering 100kg of the vitamin mix sometime soon if that tests OK.

On a sad note: I’m still having problems sourcing certain flavors of the Dymatize protein powder. Rich Chocolate is finally becoming available in the 10 lb boxes again (which is nice). But I haven’t been able to find any Cinnamon Bun for over a month and Pina Colada and Banana are getting harder and harder to find. Most of the distributors I get it from are reporting that those 3 (cinnamon, banana and pina colada) have been discontinued by the manufacturer. Now, they also said that about Rich Chocolate a few months ago and it came back just fine so I’m not sure what’s actually going on. Regardless, as of this morning I’ve removed Cinnamon Bun from the “Sample all the things” bundle and I’ll be tracking the remaining inventory of the samples and days closely for removal from the site, week packages of cinnamon bun have been out for the last 2 weeks or so (Snicker Doodle is still available, and yummy).

By |2016-10-13T07:27:44-06:00March 14th, 2016|100 days of keto, Keto Chow|Comments Off on Days 070 & 071 – 100 days of Keto (Chow)
Read More

New flavor of Keto Chow available: SnickerDoodle

This entry is part 107 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

With the (maybe temporary) demise of Mocha, I decided to bring on a new flavor for Keto Chow so there would still be 12. Introducing SnickerDoodle! It tastes very much like one of the cookies with a much better flavor than cinnamon bun. Personally I’ve never liked cinnamon bun but others do. This one is decidedly good. We’re finishing up the Day packages and have about 2 dozen of the Week packages already done. In a few minutes we’ll be starting on samples too.

By |2015-11-20T16:06:11-07:00November 20th, 2015|Keto Chow, Site or Store Stuff|Comments Off on New flavor of Keto Chow available: SnickerDoodle
Read More

Video of mixing up a big batch of Chocolate Peanut Butter Keto Chow

This entry is part 86 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I decided to take a video of mixing up a batch of Chocolate Peanut Butter Keto Chow. The mixing device was sparkling clean before I dumped the powder into it, that powder is messy stuff man. For this video I let off the cover that normally keeps the dust down a bit. I will sometimes get requests for custom blends of Keto Chow (less salt, less fiber, etc…) that I used to be able to accommodate when I was mixing each batch individually, measuring out each individual ingredient as I show in my mixing video. That approach works fine for 1-8 weeks at a time but it doesn’t scale very well (yesterday I did 34 weeks of just Vanilla, 5 of those being destined for day pouches in addition to that many more of other flavors). So now I measure out the minerals into small bags that match a 10lb bag of Dymatize; a bag of minerals for each batch. I do a quick pre-mix of the minerals before adding them to the mixer because otherwise the calcium/magnesium citrates tend to clump. For the Peanut Butter flavor I also add the peanut flour and then start the mixer. You can see why I’m not able to reduce a single ingredient for 1 week pack.

Because of the peanut flour, every time I do the Chocolate Peanut butter flavor I have to spend 15 minutes or so cleaning everything (bins, scale, scoops) because even though my bags say “may contain peanuts” in the allergy section, I don’t want anybody to get sick.

In completely unrelated news I decided I should set up some social media accounts so there’s now one for “the” Facebook and the tweeter Twitter.

By |2015-08-21T09:48:25-06:00August 21st, 2015|Keto Chow|6 Comments
Read More

Major problem with Chocolate Peanut Butter Keto Chow…

This entry is part 83 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

I start drinking one and suddenly my blender bottle is empty and that makes me sad because I want MOAR. Breakfast and lunch today I was testing the “Peanut Flour Light 28 %” that finally arrived yesterday and both times I ended up drinking the whole thing down without even thinking about it and then it’s gone =( For those wanting to play along at home, here is the recipe.  I’ve also added it as a flavor to the weeks and samples of Keto Chow, though the weeks are on backorder while I’m waiting for more peanut flour to arrive this week (I’ll add it to days next week if it fits in the bags, it might not; the space is pretty tight without an extra 30g of stuff). The nutrition information is a combination of the detailed nutrition info I got from the manufacturer, coupled with the USDA info for peanut flour. I’ve tried 3 different ways of adding peanut to the mix: PB2, peanut flour and this new “28%” peanut flour. Of the three I like the 28% best. It has more peanut taste, has less carbohydrates and mixes up smoother with little to no chunks.

How good is Chocolate Peanut Butter Keto Chow? Let me put it this way: we were camping this last week and one of the children in our group kept complaining he was hungry. The sandwiches were gone and he wanted food. I told him “well, there’s some peanut butter chocolate keto chow in the cooler, you can have that” So he did. He drank most of it and commented that “it isn’t that bad, it’s kinda good”. From an 11 year old I’m going to consider that a ringing endorsement.

2015-08-01 17.49.00

I even got his parent’s permission to post this =)

By |2016-10-13T07:28:05-06:00August 4th, 2015|Soylent, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|1 Comment
Read More

Single day packs are coming

Some time ago I asked for feedback on the viability of doing 3-meal single day packs of Keto Chow. Then I went on a couple vacations but now I’m back and ready to go. I sourced the bags back in May and have had them for quite a while but I just didn’t have the time to figure out the logistics of packaging them and whatnot. This last weekend I finally got that done. I have initial runs of Rich Chocolate and Chocolate Mint already to go and I’ll be getting the rest of the flavors done soon. Once I have some inventory I’ll launch it though that probably won’t be until Wednesday or Thursday.

One of the big questions I had was how much could I ship in the priority mail boxes I’m using. With my test run I was able to answer that:

  • I can fit one into a small first class envelope that I currently use for samples.
  • I can fit two in a small flat rate box.
  • I can fit 7 into the padded flat rate envelopes I’m using to ship the week bags currently.
  • I can fit 14 into a medium flat rate box.
  • I cannot 28 into a large flat rate box, this sucks because that’s how I typically ship the “Build a Month*” with 4 of the week packages, the most I could fit was 27.
  • I can only fit 23 into a Regional Rate B box (useful for closer destinations like California), which sucks since a B will also hold 4 weeks of the larger bags:

2015-07-25 21.37.57The only real big question I have yet to figure out is the multi-vitamin situation. In the future I expect that I’ll replace the individual meal samples with these 1-day packs (I’m still toying with pricing but depending on the flavor it’s about 24% less than buying 3 of the samples) so People will be using them to try out the flavors. If you’re just doing a sample then the vitamin really isn’t vital and putting 1-3 vitamins in a shipment doesn’t sound hard but it gets messy pretty quickly. It’s not a money thing but simply logistics. My initial thought is to include the pills in the upcoming “Build a week” package and probably include the full bag with the seven vitamins if 5 or more days get ordered. Order 1-4 and you wouldn’t get the vitamins. But this is still up in the air right now.

Oh, and for the record: the week packs aren’t going away.

 

By |2016-10-13T07:28:05-06:00July 27th, 2015|Site or Store Stuff, Keto Chow, Ketogenic, Soylent|6 Comments
Read More
Toggle Sliding Bar Area