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.

Production Costs:

In order to be sure our products last when being shipped we would need to have the shakes aseptically sealed, and maybe add in stablisers to ensure freshness. Not only are both of these steps not needed for our powders, but both would increase the cost and one would be adding preservatives. The increased cost of production would also affect the cost of the final product when we come to sell. We are already not the cheapest shake on the market due to our high quality ingredients, these extra production costs would just make the shakes an unreasonable price.

Product Compatability:

Finally we have the compatability of the ready to drink format with our shakes. One of the great things about KetoGenesis is how customisable the calories are. Unlike with Glyco, you could have such a wide range for your daily calories and still be receiving at least 100% RDAs. If we were to make a ready to drink Keto shake then that customisability is lost as we’d have to add a fat in ourselves to truly make it ready to drink.

The issue we would have with Glyco is that our source for omega fats is ground flaxseed. Anyone with some baking knowledge knows that ground flaxseed in water is an amazing binding agent and works as a great egg substitute in baking as when it’s left in water, the water thickens drastically. This means we’d need a complete reformulation of our macros for Glyco, and we may have to make ingredient compromises that we otherwise wouldn’t really consider purely to make the drinks store well as a liquid.

You may think that as a result of this that we’re not considering a more convenient option, but you’d be wrong. Complete meal bars solve most of the problems listed above while being just as convenient. Where they contain little to no water shipping them would be easy, and they are almost as space effective as powdered shakes.

We have been looking into bars for a while and experimenting with what works; they still will be more expensive than the equivalent of powder as that is just the nature of having more steps to make it, but we do hope to eventually offer a more convenient option for those who don’t always have the time to prep up a shake.