Soylent officially dropping powder sales in the UK

Surprising news this ain’t; but in response to a question on reddit around ‘what the hell is happening with the UK availability of soylent,’ the team have, in a rare moment, broken cover to explain.

The focus on retail expansion is news in itself. I’ve not heard or seen anything about that so far, but Soylent do seem to do things differently, take their UK launch for example, odd right from the get go.

Instead of opening a .co.uk website to great fanfare and, you know, doing some marketing, they instead opted for selling via Amazon with the only real news about it appearing behind a paywall in the Telegraph. Then it was a few days late and ever since stock levels have been up and down and the pricing was crazy.

It felt like testing demand ahead of a proper launch but the proper launch never came – and of course they were new comers in a heavily saturated market with a lot of well established brands. It was always going to take a lot of effort to gain a foothold here with powder, but it seems they’re happy to not bother.

But things seem to be changing with powders in the States as well, so who knows?

Huel have certainly shown that a retail focus can pay off and are expanding nationally throughout Sainsbury’s pretty quickly – but they have the right people onboard to make it happen – I wonder if the company that started it all can catch up in bricks and mortar after they’ve pulled out of the largest digital retail space?

Way Out image courtesy of Ashley Coates.