The Case Against Ready-To-Drink

Originally posted on  https://genesisfoods.co/blog/a-case-against-ready-to-drink/24/10/2019.

As many of you know the meal replacement space has changed drastically over the past few years. What started out as a space where there were only a few options, all of which being powders that you add water to has blossomed into many different companies offering everything from bars, to powders and even chocolate spread!

We’re very interested in offering more than just our shakes, but there’s one product we’re unlikely to consider any time in the near future and that is the ready to drink market. Ready to drink for those of you who aren’t aware is an option where the shake comes pre-mixed and pre-bottled. Although these are great for convienience they are one of the more flawed forms of complete meals and we’re going to detail why.

Packaging:

Ready to drink shakes obviously have to be bottled in some form, especially as the main selling point is that they are convenient. The cost of the convenience however involves using packaging that is difficult to recycle. Be it either a plastic bottle that is most likely going to end up in the ocean (even if you put it into recycling!), or a similar type of packaging often used in cartons that is also not likely to be able to be recycled. This may not seem like a big deal to the average customer; but for a company that would be directly responsible for countless bottles being disregarded after one use, that is just something we would feel uncomfortable with.

Our current packaging has a similar problem of being hard to recycle, but one 5-day bag takes up very little space when compared to 15 to 20 bottles needed to contain the same number of calories. In terms of waste production, there’s no comparison here.

Space Efficiency:

This is probably a point that not a lot of people think of, but the water in these shakes take up a lot of space. One of our 5 day bags of keto would need 6L of water and one of our glyco bags would need 8L of water for a ready to drink counterpart. As you can see this would take up a lot of space to store all of this stock, which would increase the size of warehouse we would need drastically, which in turn increases our cost and would affect the cost of all of our products.

This would affect shipping too. Packages being sent out would weigh more and therefore would cost more to ship across Europe, which would not also increase the cost drastically but would be seriously more polluting due to the extra fuel needed to ship the water weight. We don’t understand why shipping a bulky product that is mostly water across the world is a good idea when our powder can easily be pre-weighed and made into a drink with only a minimal effect on convenience, and clean water is readily available everywhere we sell to…

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