Hate cooking? N.B. entrepreneurs create futuristic food replacement

A New Brunswick startupis embracing a future where people actually want to live without food.

UNB graduates Mostafa Shaker, DavidBrown and Marc Gauvin have created Tudo, a futuristic food replacementtheycall a "balanced meal for our unbalanced lives."

Shakerdescribes sitting at a restaurant withBrown, a 27-year-old biotech entrepreneur, talking about how "many young professionals working 65 to 80 hours a week are just so busy that often we end up missing breakfast or lunch," he said.

"While there are a lot of alternative meals out there, none of it is as healthy as what we were looking for," said Shaker, 23.

The pair teamed up with accounting and marketing graduate Marc Gauvin, 24, to developa blend of micro-milled flaxseed, rice protein, fruit powder and other whole-food ingredients.

Mix it up with 500 millilitres of water and you are, supposedly, good to go, nutrition-wise.

Youcould, according to Shaker, replace up to two meals every day with a flax-y, fruity drink and never resort to Kraft Dinner again.

Not your mama's SlimFast

Meal-replacement bars and shakes havebeen around for decades.

But efficiency-obsessed millennials have been experimenting with instant meals that can be safely used long term as a lifestyle not just temporarily or for weight-loss purposes.

The best-known such product is Soylent, the Silicon Valley "open source meal replacement" that made headlines in 2013 for both itsdystopianbranding, and for raking in $754,498 in a record-smashing crowd-funding campaign.

Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart even lived exclusively off the product for 30 days and blogged about the experience (claiming, among other things, that the all-Soylent diet cured his dandruff, made his teeth whiter and his skin clearer.)

But Soylent, despite its media darling status, has experienced issues with quality control.

• Soylent meal replacement bars recalled after illnesses reported
• Soylentdesigned to replace food and save time

The bar version was recalled in October 2016 after some customers claimed the nutrition barsmade them sick andRedditorsreported a"vomit-inducing texture and salty taste"in some versions of the product.

Yeah, but what does it taste like?

Soylent and Tudo are like "night and day," according to Gauvin, the chief operations officer at Tudo.

"You can taste the fruit, it's flavourful, and you have the added benefit of no additives," he said of his company's product.

Tudoisn't a drug or supplement and doesn't need federal approval to be sold.

Brown, the chief technology officer, said the onus is on the company to produce Tudo in a safe, clean way.

"Like any food product, it has to meet some different safety standards," Brown said. "But we're not using any dangerous ingredients or any kind of nuts."

While it would be best to use Tudo to replace only one or two meals per day, he said,"there would be no safety risk with eating this for every meal."

International appeal

Tudo, which had its soft launch earlier this month, is one of only a few such products being sold in Canada.

Recently, a Toronto-based startup, Hol Food,launched a chocolate-flavoured shake. European incarnations include Joylent and Huel.

But unlike competing products, Brown said, Tudo is vegan, dairy-free, soy-free, gluten-free and nut-free.

And each package produces a drink with 500 calories.

Once the trio have secured more funding, they'd like to "use local New Brunswick blueberries, cranberries, and apples"in Tudo, Brown said.

"For now, we're focused on getting out there," he said. "But hopefully in the future, we're looking at using more local ingredients."

"One thing that I feel very strongly about is growing the business here in New Brunswick," said Shaker, who immigrated from Egypt to New Brunswick seven years ago.

"I feel like this is our way of giving back to N.B. It's not just about building a business, but it's about doing it here."

Futuristic food needs investment

While Tudo is "a very small operation" for now, Brown said, the idea is to scale up production and market it online using a subscription model.

Tudo is currently being made in a kitchen in Fredericton as the creators seekcommercial space forlarger-scale manufacturing.

"Our hope is to branch out throughout the Maritimes and across Canada," Shaker said.

Tudo has allocated $3,500 from the Pond Deshpande Centre's catalyst fund to research and development, he said.

The group hopes to raise $50,000 over the next three months to jump-start operations in New Brunswick.

Tech-sector appeal

The futuristic food-like substance might, Brown said, appeal to busy minimalist types.

"The province just announced CyberNB to grow our existing tech centre," Shaker said.

"We have IBM, Radian6, and other big companies in that sector where people are aware of this type of product. There is a market. We just need to hone in on it."

The idea of instant, nutritionally sound, food-unitscooking is, they say, an untapped market even in anhistorically unhealthy place likeNew Brunswick.

Shaker said the company has tested the product among "business people who are motivated, entrepreneurial, and on-the-go," and the reaction has been "really exciting."

But they're not targetingultra-busy worker bees. The entrepreneurs are also hopingToduwill appeal to"people who want to curb their hunger, who aren't good at cooking, and to university students, which we have in abundance in this province."