A Self-Taught Programmer Now Wants to Change How People Eat | 100 Entrepreneurs

Ruofan wants to localize Soylent, the meal-replacement food, for China — which means taking on eating habits built by traditional food.

"100 Entrepreneurs" is a new QDaily column. We follow people who want to make something, and the creativity they bring to it, and we share their stories with you.

At the end of 2013, Shao Wei went in for a physical and was told he might have a fatty liver. The doctor told him to eat lighter. Besides running a bit more, Shao found a new way to eat: a powdered food called Soylent, an American product you mix with water and drink.

Think of Soylent as meal-replacement powder. Powdered nutrients — protein, sugar, fat, fiber — are mixed in set proportions to supply the energy and calories the body needs. Everything you eat is pure nutrition; you don't swallow the heavy oil and salt of a delivery meal just because your body wants protein. Shao and a friend ordered a box of seven packets through an overseas shopping site, splitting each packet into four servings.

Apart from tasting like "dirt mixed with water," Soylent met Shao's two goals: a stable eating schedule and balanced nutrition. Powder you just add water to also fit his work pace.

Over the three and a half years from 2011 to the first half of 2014, Shao worked as a technical partner on projects at more than a dozen startups, leading their development teams. He put in up to 15 hours a day and, at the busiest, tracked five projects at once. Sometimes he worked into the early morning and could only grab a fourth meal at a roadside stall.

Because overseas shipping cost more than the powder itself, Shao didn't eat Soylent for long. In 2014 he had a nutritionist friend put together a low-fat formula, bought several hundred kilograms of raw materials, weighed and mixed them himself, and made it the everyday food for himself and a few friends.

This new food, which he first tried for his own health, became his startup.

In July 2014, Shao and his partner Qian Xuwei put up 2 million yuan between them to found Ruofan, which sells a Soylent-like powdered food. Some call Ruofan "the Chinese version of Soylent" outright; Shao positions it as "a food that delivers complete, healthy nutrition as an actual meal." He now runs a team of 13 or 14 people, based in Hangzhou.

Shao has made Ruofan his own working meal. He says he has tested more than 100 formulas himself. In a typical week he eats Ruofan five days and ordinary food two, and his workday starts with it.

"I usually don't get up and start working until around 10 in the morning. Breakfast at that hour used to be a headache. Now I eat about 50 grams of Ruofan and I'm fine, and at noon I can have a full meal of Ruofan."

A Niche Business in Healthy Food

Founding Ruofan looked like a gamble taken without much preparation.

He and Qian Xuwei decided to start the company in a Hangzhou café at the end of 2014, entering the food business. But they prepared very little — both had worked on open-source Linux projects, a world far from food. Before they formally committed, they ran a single small presale last May to test the market.

The presale worked like a crowdfunding campaign. Shao spent two months building Ruofan's website and order system and linking it to a WeChat official account, then presold Ruofan's first product: chewable tablets pressed into round discs.

The formula was adjusted from Shao's low-fat version, and the presale price was a fairly cheap 69 yuan.

Shao doesn't seem to have worried much about the risk that it wouldn't sell. "If it doesn't sell, worst case I keep eating it myself — no harm done," he said.

The early presale copy called the chewable tablets "dog food for single dogs," a joke that came from where the shape came from. Shao got the idea for the easy-to-take tablet while feeding his two dogs: no mixing, just swallow it with water.

To control costs and limit exposure to market swings, Ruofan makes to order. Each month it places an order with a factory, which processes, mixes and packages the product. Ruofan buys raw materials such as whey protein directly from suppliers like Fonterra.

Shao and his friends sold within their own circles, and in under a month they sold more than a thousand units. WeChat is still an important channel for reaching users, accounting for half of sales.

In Shao's view, Ruofan's core users are the ones who have bought it twice or more and gradually formed the habit of eating it. That group now numbers close to 10,000. Shao himself is curious what these users who genuinely need Ruofan do for a living, and why they eat it.

The texture, after all, is close to inhuman. Beyond a faint soy-milk sweetness from the soy protein, Ruofan tastes bad, and you have to get through a fair amount in one sitting. By Ruofan's own calculator, an average person drinks a 400ml cup of nearly flavorless liquid — close to a can and a half of cola. That's about 140 grams of Ruofan powder in 400ml of water.

In July 2015, Shao overhauled Ruofan again. The chewable tablets crumbled into powder in transit, and holding their shape required additives, so he switched to a powder — the Ruofan we see today.

But tablet or powder, replacing meals this way is a radical challenge to Chinese ideas about eating. People have long treated food, meat above all, as a source of "pleasure." That makes Ruofan, at least for now, a niche product.

"We're definitely a niche market right now, and a smaller one than Soylent. Soylent actually isn't that niche, because more people in the tech world can accept it. That's probably where we differ from traditional eating habits here. But with Ruofan it's hard for us to draw a precise picture of who our users are. We're still working that out ourselves — what kind of person can accept this."

Shao has also tried collecting delivery addresses. About half of his core users are in creative parks, office buildings and the like — likely startups — with the rest in hospitals or at school.

A Food Experiment That Started With Geeks

Soylent, like Ruofan, began with an open-source formula that iterated on user feedback, and it started in tech circles too.

In early 2013, Rob Rhinehart, a 24-year-old engineer whose startup had failed, developed the powdered food Soylent, making food the way you develop open-source software. Soylent's nutrient formula was public and open-source; anyone could mix their own to suit their needs. Early users tested it on themselves and posted the results on their personal websites.

Silicon Valley saw Soylent as the future of food. In January last year the prominent venture firm A16Z led a $20 million Series A round for Soylent. Partner Chris Dixon argued that Soylent's greatest value was the community that had gathered around the food — people interested in using technology to improve food and nutrition.

It was around then that Shao read about Soylent in the Chinese press. One reason he liked it from the start, he says, was precisely that it was open-source.

That fit his hacker instincts.

Before founding Ruofan he spent seven years on LUPA, an open-source Linux project, and idolized Richard Stallman, the American open-source software leader.

But Shao majored in physics as an undergraduate at Zhejiang University of Technology; he taught himself to code. He had been interested in programming since high school, and in his sophomore year a computer-lab teacher introduced him to Linux development. He spent an entire winter break alone in the school lab, tinkering with forty or fifty machines, reading about Linux online and building systems by hand. His undergraduate thesis project was software too.

Though he believes in open source and a sense of the future, the powder was adjusted for Chinese users. Shao says he made quite a few changes to suit Chinese eating habits: a small-packet version, so the powder fits through the narrow mouth of a smaller cup, and a sachet of cocoa powder to improve the taste. Americans, he reckons, are more used to mixing a big cup and keeping it in the office fridge.

Ruofan and Soylent resemble each other in more than how the product is developed. They have run into the same problems, too.

In October, two Soylent products in a row went wrong, leaving a number of users sick after eating them, vomiting and with diarrhea. Soylent said publicly that this might be a food intolerance, but pulled the products quickly anyway. A month later the company said it had found the cause — an algae ingredient grown on the seafloor — and planned to drop it from later versions.

The same thing has happened to Ruofan. Shao says roughly a dozen users have reported similar discomfort after eating it. Both Ruofan itself and the raw materials that go into it passed quality checks, he says, and all the company could do was tell those users to cut back or stop for a while.

Ruofan Hasn't Taken Investment Because It Doesn't Want to Be a "Fitness Meal"

Soylent has been chased by capital in the United States. Ruofan has kept a much lower profile and has taken no venture money at all.

Beyond the 2 million yuan the two founders put in themselves, the company has taken 250,000 yuan from a few individual users who invested their own money, plus 200,000 yuan in non-equity investment from the Hangzhou municipal government.

They would like venture money to grow faster and reach more users, but there are things Shao won't do. The first VC firm approached them in July last year. Some investors suggested marketing Ruofan around fitness meals and weight loss to win more users. Shao thinks that would undercut Ruofan's position as a healthy food and wouldn't build its core user base.

"I've talked about the scale we're growing at, and some of our thinking probably doesn't suit venture capital's appetite. What they want is explosive growth and a target audience with a huge amount of room to imagine. We have to hold to our principle: when you're making food, pushing a change in eating culture forward is never fast. Otherwise you end up with something everyone tries once out of curiosity, and then the users are gone. That's no good."

"I often ask myself one question: if we took investment, what exactly would we spend it on? I haven't worked that out. At our current pace, moving the market forward step by step is enough."

The main way they spread the Ruofan idea now is online crowdfunding; over the past year and a half they have worked through JD.com, Taobao and Weibo one after another. Offline, they hold tastings.

They also talk with users in WeChat groups to find out how well new formulas go down. Gathering that feedback is part of Shao's daily work: besides developing new formulas, he handles some customer service and talks to users himself.

Is This the Future of Food?

The first problem this new food ran into was making people interested enough to want to eat it, which meant first getting past worries about food safety. Shao says that when they were selling the chewable tablets, some customers who had bought them held the little yellow discs in their hands and didn't dare eat them.

The bigger problem came next: getting users to try it and build the new habit. This food runs against habits people have held for a long time — a powder that doesn't look appetizing and doesn't taste good either. The most common feedback, Shao says, is about taste; users want something to flavor it, and the company's answer was to ship cocoa powder with Ruofan as a seasoning.

"The most common feedback conflicts with our own thinking. We believe that with something like Ruofan you shouldn't have to care about taste or flavor. But in fact a lot of people tell us that while they can accept the current taste, after eating it for a month or two straight they still wish something would turn up to flavor it."

Soylent and its imitators, Ruofan included, are what Shao calls humanity's third generation of food, the future of food. The first two generations, by his account, were raw food and processed food.

"The third generation uses all kinds of food-processing technology to extract pure nutrients directly, then mixes them into what the human body needs. Down the road we might not even have kitchens — or the kitchen is just a tap you turn on, and out flows everything nutritious. That would be even more convenient. The kitchen is a bit redundant, really."

He admits that Soylent and Ruofan are still fairly early. They supply enough nutrition, but the eating experience — the sense of chewing, for one — has room to improve.

Expecting good taste, Shao says, is one of the misconceptions people have about Ruofan. The other big one is that a food that controls calorie intake must be for losing weight and getting fit. Both miss what Ruofan is meant to be: an everyday meal. Its greatest value, in his view, lies in providing safe food and enough nutrition, not in satisfying the pleasure of taste.

"We've put forward a concept, or drawn a distinction. Eating splits into spiritual needs and physical needs. Spiritual needs are pleasure, social function and so on; physical needs are nutrition and calories. We position Ruofan as a food that purely meets physical needs."

Q = QDaily

A = Shao Wei

Q: When it comes to food, what do people get wrong about Ruofan?

The biggest misconception is that this is for losing weight. So we go the other way — we've even promoted the idea that eating Ruofan can help you gain weight. There really are people eating Ruofan to put on weight, that's real. It's not just a slogan either; we've used the weight-gain idea in some local press coverage. Because if you quantify the nutrition: if your BMR is 2,000 calories a day and you eat 2,500 calories of Ruofan, you'll definitely gain weight.

With the traditional kind of diet meal replacement, you could never get to 2,500 calories, because they're all extremely low-calorie, and the nutrition is unbalanced too — just a bit of fiber. One gram of fiber is only 2 calories, so to eat enough of it you'd have to get through several kilograms a day. That isn't realistic.

Q: Where do you think programmers in China are most misunderstood?

Two areas. One, put simply, is that people think every programmer can fix a computer.

The other is that people with a bit of internet-industry background who aren't programmers themselves think building something — especially making a small change to it later — is simple. That's baffling, and it's painful.

Sometimes one requirement, one small change, involves extremely complicated questions for a programmer to work through. To them it looks like a minor tweak, a change you can see on the interface, but the logic behind it takes the programmer a lot of time to rethink, and a lot of questions to answer. This gets misunderstood all the time, which is why people ask why the program still isn't done.

Q: Do you think you're a typical programmer?

A: I'm not really like the very pure geeks, or the hacker type of programmer. Part of my personality really wants to share and talk with people — I wouldn't say I love socializing exactly, but I do like sharing. With Linux, whenever some news came out, I was happy to write a tutorial so a lot of people would hear about it. Back then I had a lot of posts on Sina Blog, on all kinds of technical topics, all kinds of arguments.

Q: Do you worry people will say you're copying Soylent?

A: I don't resist that at all. When it comes to making open-source food, I won't deny the inspiration came from them, but our aim is to offer something of value — China needs something like this too. Europe has it, and this year Japan and Korea have both put out this kind of food. I have no objection to the description at all. A lot of the time we say it ourselves: this is the Chinese version of Soylent.

Q: How big a company does Ruofan want to become?

A: I honestly haven't thought about it. We haven't looked that far ahead either — first make the product good, serve the users who need it, it's that simple. This is a brand-new category, after all. Ruofan has its advantages, and its drawbacks are just as plain: it can't compete with traditional food unless ideas about eating shift, or unless some natural disaster hits the planet. We're trying to teach users that when you eat Ruofan, you don't think about the experience in other respects — you just know it's giving your body the nutrition it needs.

Cover image from: Pixabay