ABOUT

At Basically Food, we make it easy for you to take control of your health and achieve your ideal diet, regardless of time, money, or dietary restrictions. That is, we make nutritionally complete, powdered meals available in diet plans ranging from ketogenic to high-protein. And more on the way.

Our products are engineered for optimal nutrition and the widest possible accessibility. That means they are not only affordable and tasty, but also vegan, hypoallergenic, and free of artificial sweeteners and added sugar. We choose our ingredients carefully and take pride in our custom micronutrient mix.

We believe that healthy food is a human right. Optimal nutrition for all. We'll get there someday. :)

OUR STORY

2013 - intrigued by Soylent - I first heard about Rob Rhinehart's Soylent experiment back in 2013 when I was eating a strict, home-cooked Paleo diet, largely on account of my many food allergies. I thought it was an intriguing concept, though I was skeptical about how well it could work in practice. I liked the food I was already eating, and I felt really good on it, health-wise, but as the year wore on I started to resent the hours I spent cooking and cleaning every day, and wonder how much more I could accomplish on my indie game side projects if I had some of that time back. I mean, I liked food, but I didn't necessarily feel the need to tantalize my taste buds three times a day...

2014 - started Custom Body Fuel - Eventually I decided to check out the DIY soylent scene that had emerged in response to Rob’s initial blog post. Experimenting with chalky concoctions became a hobby, and then a side business, as people began spontaneously asking me to sell them some of my DIY mixes. After a few months, I quit my software engineering day job to focus on Custom Body Fuel full-time. My initial plan was to quickly come up with one good recipe and a brand name that would do it justice, and just outsource everything else to a bigger manufacturer a la Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek so I could live my dream of being an independent artist - an indie game developer - but it was not to be. Turns out I’m too much of a perfectionist.

2015 - founded Super Body Fuel - So I turned it into Super Body Fuel and went inside the cocoon to iterate on formula, brand, and learning to be a manager and leader for the next several years, with the help of my employees and our thousands of customers. And when I say "inside the cocoon" I mean no marketing, no outreach, no nothing. Not even a logo. Just cranking out our own powders in a little commercial kitchen space in San Francisco, working that feedback loop with our own customers, learning from experience what processes, ingredients, and formulations make the most sense. Trying to make the best product we can within our "optimal nutrition for all" mission. Optimal and inclusive.

2019 - designed Basically Food - After many frugal years of drinking my own shakes for the majority of my diet and living with roommates, we had finally saved up enough money to pay for an initial production run with one of those bigger manufacturers. We were doing our best to keep up with demand, but there was no way we could scale to a sustainable size making our own product in the most expensive city in the country. On top of that, we needed a name that actually evoked what our customers liked about us, and graphic design that matched the quality of our formula after years of improvement. So we spent a chunk of our savings and a year of back-and-forth with Double Six Design to come up with a brand that fit our simple, sincere, and silly-yet-serious style: Basically Food.

2023 - launched Basically Food - Despite our eagerness to launch our new brand, the manufacturer we'd hired to make our first batch of Basically Food hit setback after setback, delay after delay, until finally delivering on our order, years late. We half expected to have nothing to show for the vast sum we'd paid upfront, but the reality was almost as bad: thousands of units of poorly mixed product that didn't smell or taste right, and no one responding to emails as the manufacturer imploded under a predatory private equity acquisition. Still, we did not have the money to redo these orders, and by the time we realized, we'd already phased out manufacturing at Super Body Fuel. What was meant to be a triumphant step forward turned into a profoundly demoralizing time for me as the founder.

2025 - survived Basically Food - We immediately made a smaller order with a new manufacturer to ensure we wouldn't run out of inventory. Sadly, it did not. Instead, we stumbled through one failed manufacturer relationship after another, each delaying our order by months at a time, until we were out of stock on most of our products. Not to mention, nearly out of money. No inventory, no income. But I wasn't ready to give up yet, and put all my savings from my few years in tech into ingredients for future batches. We learned from our bad luck and did the work to find manufacturers that would be a better fit, letting us order ingredients from our own suppliers and just charging a fee to mix and package the product. Free of the quality issues and delays of the past, we could finally start to rebuild.

[under construction]

OUR TEAM

Alex Cho Snyder - formulation, writing, design - I'm not just a nutrition nerd with a lot of food allergies, I also love learning and teaching various martial arts, and playing a number of musical instruments from around the world. Every martial art, dance form, or musical style is a different language to express and play in, and I want to learn them all. :)

Also, I still really want to get back to making indie games - there is so much more that can be done with the medium of games than we've seen so far, and I want to do my part in making that happen. Maybe save the world while we're at it. ;) You can find me on reddit as axcho.

Arrow - logistics, purchasing, graphic design - [Arrow's cool bio goes here]

Rhodel - video content, production, editing - [Rhodel's cool bio goes here]