The popularity of meal replacement drinks has been surging in the United States over the past few years, driven by the obesity epidemic and Americans’ diminishing amount of leisure time, according to market research firm CB Insights. In Silicon Valley, techies and tech investors alike have embraced the trend. Soylent is the best known meal replacement startup, thanks in part to a 2014 New Yorker feature titled “The End of Food” and a $20m investment round in January 2015, led by storied venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.



This week, the startup made headlines for a different reason after consumer advocacy group As You Sow filed a notice of legal action, alleging that the company’s products contain levels of lead and cadmium that would require a warning under California law.

Soylent is just the latest meal replacement product in which As You Sow has found higher levels of heavy metals than allowed under California law without a warning. The organization has filed similar notices under California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act with half a dozen other companies, including Garden of Life, the number-one seller on Whole Foods shelves.

Many of these products are classified as supplements, a category of food that is largely self regulated. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) leaves it up to manufacturers to adhere to safety guidelines and label their products appropriately. It only intervenes on products that are mislabeled or have generate multiple consumer health complaints.

Soylent is classified as a food by the FDA, and the company told the Guardian that the levels of lead found in its products are below FDA guidance. The agency only tests products for lead after they are on the market, and only has the capacity to test a dozen or so products per year – typically in the same category, so that it can issue guidance related to an entire food category. The agency has not yet tested meal replacement products.

According to As You Sow CEO Andy Behar, the problem tends to be consistent across food substitutes: galvanized pipes in the factories supplying rice powder or other protein powders. “It usually comes down to something fairly simple to find and fix in these cases,” he says.

In its response to As You Sow’s filing, Garden of Life wrote on its website in June that chemicals found in tests were “only present because they naturally occur in these plant-based foods”. As part of a settlement with As You Sow, the company agreed to not to sell any products in California that do not meet the state’s warning requirements without posting a warning.

In a response over the weekend, Soylent insisted its products are safe and that it already displays sufficient warnings.

In a post on its blog, the company accused As You Sow of mercenary motivations: “As You Sow has been involved in scores of lawsuits against food companies and collected millions in revenue from legal settlements.”

Behar says As You Sow’s interest in meal replacement drinks was spurred by the increase in their popularity.

“We started to see a boom of these powdered drinks, and a lot of media coverage around how much people were embracing this trend, and so we thought we should test these products,” he says.

When it did, the organization says it found high lead and cadmium levels across multiple powdered protein and meal replacement drinks.

A 2012 report on protein powder drinks from Consumer Reports found high levels based on probably daily consumption.

“The amount of lead in a single daily serving of eight of the protein supplements we tested would require that the products carry a warning in California,” Consumer Reports found. It also noted that most products are missing a warning label.

Independent lab tests commissioned by As You Sow found that each serving of Soylent comes with 12 to 25 times the level of lead that would require a warning under California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act (also known as Prop 65) and four times the cadmium concentration deemed acceptable by the state’s laws without a warning. Given that many of Soylent’s customers consume its meal replacement drinks three times a day, that could equate to 36 to 75 times lead levels deemed acceptable under California law without a warning and 12 times the level of cadmium.

Lead exposure, even at low levels, is linked to various neurological impacts, including nerve damage and lower IQ, as well as reproductive problems, such as decreased sperm count. Chronic exposure to cadmium has been linked to kidney, liver, and bone damage.

Danielle Fugere, senior attorney with As You Sow, says even when meal replacement products include a Prop 65 warning, it’s often insufficient. “In order to see the Prop 65 warning for Soylent, customers have to find the link on the sales page, click it, and then read through a lot of statements that undermine the warning before seeing the actual Prop 65 warning,” she says.

On the Prop 65 warning on its checkout page, Soylent has posted a paragraph of information about the wholesomeness of its product, followed by the following description of Prop 65 before listing the warning itself:



Proposition 65 is a California law enacted in 1986. Fundamentally, the law requires that a warning be provided in situations where someone could be exposed to one of more than 800 listed chemicals or heavy metals above a limit established by the law. A Proposition 65 warning does not mean a product is in violation of any product-safety standards or requirements, or that the “exposure” from the product exceeds established levels. Soylent contains heavy metals that are included on the Proposition 65 list, so the following warning must be provided.

Behar says he’d like to see a more emphatic warning, but he’d prefer that Soylent reduce or eliminate the metals in its products.

In response to the As You Sow notice, spokeswoman Nicole Myers told the Guardian: “Soylent is completely safe and nutritious ... We stand by the quality and safety of our product.”

“We share our lab data and we verify it,” Behar says. “Our aim is to get in there and help the company pinpoint where in their supply chain this stuff is getting in, and how to get it out.”

However Soylent responds to the Prop 65 notice in the next 56 days, Soylent 2.0 might remove the company from the As You Sow’s offenders list. In its next iteration, Soylent plans to replace its brown rice-based formula with a soy-based formula, and since rice powder is likely to be the heavy metal culprit, the Prop 65 argument may be rendered moot.