Why has Canada banned Soylent?

Already dealing with slightly higher prices than their American cousins, Soylent’s Canadian customers are to be cut off completely as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) steps in to force a cessation of all Soylent shipments to, well, Canada.

Soylent began shipping to Canada in July 2015 and now, over two years on, it turns out that Soylent doesn’t meet an unspecified CFIA requirements for a “meal replacement” and whilst Rosa Foods were made aware of the problem back in October’ they’ve been unable to resolve it and so, shipments have to stop.

As far as we can tell, it appears that CFIA limits the amount of calories that are from fats in meal replacements to no more than 30% per meal, whilst Soylent Powder has 45% of its calories from fats and Soylent Drink, Coffiest, and Bar being 47% from fat.

30% seems incredibly arbitrary, particularly with more recent research suggesting that a high-fat rather than high-carbohydrate diet can help you live longer, but the CFIA make the rules and until Rosa Foods can work to them, it seems Soylent’s availability in Canada is over.

I do wonder how, if at all, this will affect the other brands that ship to Canada.

Rosa Foods full statement below.

Since June 2015, Soylent has been proud to sell and locally distribute our products in Canada. We are fortunate to have so many loyal customers who have supported our brand and community, even before we were officially available in the market. It’s been quite the journey we’ve taken together through some proud successes and startup growing pains, and today I need to share an unfortunate situation impacting our Canadian business.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) recently informed us that our products do not meet a select few of the CFIA requirements for a meal replacement. Although we feel strongly that these requirements do not reflect the current understanding of human nutritional needs, we respect the CFIA’s regulations and will fully comply with any regulatory action they deem appropriate. Unfortunately, this means we are unable to ship any additional product to our Canadian warehouses or sell Soylent to our Canadian customers until this is resolved.

I want to reiterate that we are absolutely committed to working with Health Canada and the CFIA to resolve this as quickly as possible, but we don’t have enough information at this time to share any timing. In order to keep all of you fully up to speed on our progress, we will be sending out regular updates. In the meantime, we have posted a detailed FAQ here to share all the information we have at our disposal. We sincerely apologize for this product disruption, and we hope to be back selling in our favorite country to the North soon.

We want to hear from you, so please feel free to contact us anytime with questions, concerns and suggestions at info@soylent.com. Thank you for your continued support.

– Rob Rhinehart
Founder & CEO, Rosa Foods, Inc.