New start-up aims to disrupt food industry (and bowels) with weird little food cubes
SquarEat is a meal delivery service that wants people to eat their food in the form of jiggly pucks
Aux Features Food
For too long, humanity has eaten food that tastes good and requires more than a minute to chew. We’ve wasted so much precious time that could’ve been spent being productive by buying recognizable ingredients, cooking meals that take up entire plates, and sitting down to dinner with friends.
The tyranny of that age, we’re happy to say, has passed. We’ve now entered the era of the food cube.
As described in an exceptional video that plays like dystopian satire, SquarEat would like you to start buying your food in the form of small squares that natural instinct would tell you to avoid putting anywhere near your mouth, but that the company promises will revolutionize eating.
Chief Marketing Officer Maria Laura Vacaflores asks us to imagine the possibilities of her company’s ability to “transform regular food … into squares,” holding some broccoli in one hand and a gelatinous beige chunk of what looks like chilled vomit in the other. We know which one we want!
In a Vice article about SquarEat, we learn that the whole thing works by having customers select the flavor (“from ‘Fisherman’ to ‘Sweet Break’ or ‘Treat’) and “meal size” they’d like before having the appropriate number of boxes delivered to their home. For reference, a “small” meal consists of four squares while a “regular” meal includes six of what a SquarEat pitch deck appetizingly describes as “standardized squared modular food.” That same deck “also says the company can use an algorithm to tell customers what they should eat,” which is nice, we guess, for when you just can’t make up your mind whether you’re in the mood for Brown or Off-White.
The rest of the advertisement shows us employees preparing their dread squares, people happily munching away on nutrient bricks together, and a buff man, muscles powered by delicious cubes, preparing to deliver boxes of the terrible squares to their destination.
Many people, from the makers of Soylent to the creators of the ill-fated Dilberito, have tried to defeat nature in the pursuit of a more efficient way to eat. None of them have cracked the code but none of them served their nasty innovations in the form of little squares either, so we’ll just have to wait and see if that bold idea allows SquarEat to finally, at long last convert humanity into bipedal livestock nibbling at our outsized mineral licks.
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108 Comments
Soylent Green is people, man.
I think these freaky square things are too.
“Fisherman” flavor.
Who doesn’t love the combined taste of brine, rollies, sour sweat, fish musk and diesel fumes?
Try the new Soylent Clear.Clearly more taste.Clearly less people.
“Two thumbs up!” *vomiting sounds*- The LA Beast
You know, I laughed at Soylent but it’s hanging on. Never underestimate the demographic of people who truly don’t want to put any effort into preparing food or even having to decide what to eat.
Soylent makes more sense in that it’s just something you can chug down that contains the nutrients you need and quickly replaces a meal. I love food but there are times when I’d like to just not be hungry and I don’t have time to cook.Why anyone would want to replace eating real food with eating weird gelatin cubes eludes me.
A coworker of mine would keep some of it at work, but he used it more as a supplement rather than a replacement. He is vegan, and admitted that sometimes he couldn’t get enough nutrients in whatever he’d brought for lunch that day so he’d break out the Soylent. He’s a marvelous cook, incidentally, and he always had the best lunches, when he had any leftovers!
I’m a picky eater and I live alone (so a lot of cooking isn’t always worth the effort) – so there are times when I’d happily turn to a meal replacement shake/square(?). These look kinda gross and weird though. Soylent isn’t too bad though.I pick up a Soylent a few times a year when I’m going to be driving a while. I don’t want to stop and eat and it’s easier to drink a Soylent in the car than try to eat something on the go. They aren’t terrible – chocolate is the best, then Strawberry. The normal version is kinda bland and with a nutty taste to it.
I’ve also been tempted to try out Huel. I’m super active – so there are days where I’ve already hit my protein/nurtrient goals from other food and I’m like “shit I need to eat another 1,000 calories and it’s already 1 in the morning.” If it wasn’t such an expensive buy-in to try it out I probably would have done so by now.
There are a sizeable number of people who simply do not enjoy anything about eating, but realize they can’t do shit without it, so they approach it as a task to finish quickly and be over with it. Shockingly, a lot of the people I know who are like this are ether creatives or tech workers and they range along “I just eat to live, sometimes it’s alright” to the sort that buys Ensure and it’s ilk in bulkOnce Soylent got the biggest issues out of the way (I believe one of them was massive gas and days of unending shits), which they had to fix or go under, they are the go to for people like that. And well, while I can’t fully understand their feelings, if it works, it works.
I have a variation of this problem. And it is a problem, I hate it and don’t know how to fix it.Basically, I have something wrong with me where if I try unfamiliar food, I can’t do it. I basically choke on it. Even if I adore the flavor, eating something new or unexpected is impossible. This really sucks! It has done bad things to my diet! It has annoyed my partner who really likes trying new food! So I totally understand the gravitation towards taking the food out of food. Because I can’t do it with food, even though I want to.
I’d do a search for eating disorder therapists and go from there. Eating disorders isn’t just limited to barely eating or vomitting it all up after a meal, there’s a wide range.
i only recently found out about ARFID. it’s fascinating.
Could be an eating disorder.Could be a sensory issue. Many forms of neurodivergence such as autism come with sensitivity to certain kinds of sensory experiences such as taste, texture or smell, to name a few possibilities.Could be a neurological issue. Some kind of hyper activity in the insular cortex.
Brains are complex and it could be one, more or none of those possibilities. But it might help you to find strategies for dealing with it if you can figure out what’s going on. I’d suggest investigating each of those topics in the order I mentioned. That said, as long as you’re getting what you need nutritionally, it really doesn’t matter whether you have a diverse diet or not. For most of human history we ate the same shit we could get within a 5 mile radius from birth to death. If the people around you want to be more adventurous in their eating habit there’s nothing stopping them. Sharing a meal doesn’t have to mean eating the exact same thing.
Just an fyi that in kids this sort of thing is sometimes treated with what is referred to as occupational therapy. That has always struck me as a weird name for it, but that’s what it is called. I have absolutely no idea what the equivalent therapy is for adults. But you say that you hate the situation that you’re in and don’t know how to fix it, so it seems worth doing some investigation. OT for kids is short-term, easy, and apparently quite effective. Maybe there’s something similar for adults.
My grandfather was a Great Depression survivor and this was very much his approach to food. “It all looks the same coming out the other end” was a favorite saying of his. Unsurprisingly my dad ended up on the other extreme and has struggled with weight issues his entire life.
I didn’t want to generalize but exactly: I work as a developer and just about every developer I know finds cooking and meal planning an arduous chore and either resort to a no-work, all-in-one solution like this or eat nothing but chicken sandwiches.
I don’t think it’s all or nothing though. Lotsa folks, me included, love a good meal… But would also love to only have to deal with taking time out (and paying for) one good meal on a typical day.Figuring out what to do about lunch when I have a million other things to do on a Thursday can get really old and if I could take a safe and filling food pill to hold me over to dinner I probably would.
I love cooking. I love prep. I even love doing the shopping.Meal planning fucking sucks though.
In other hobbies, people get excited about the planning but don’t want to put in the work. But with cooking, it’s all “I don’t care what we’re making, I just want to stand at the counter and peel potatoes”.Anyways, for tonight if you’re feeling lazy, perogies. Less lazy and love lettuce? Make a PF Chang lettuce wrap clone. I think most of the recipes say chicken but ground pork works as well. Get yourself some of those water chestnuts.
Doing dishes can go to Hell too.
To be fair, I am one of those people who only likes to cook when they don’t feel rushed to do so (so basically the weekend). I would consider something like this and soylent if all the right factors align (cost, taste, no one outside my family knowing).
Depression-eating is also a thing. If you’re clinically depressed, staying well-nourished helps you feel better, but is also a somedays-impossible investment of energy.
So the easier it is to get something well-balanced and nutritious into you, the better.
My brother had major dental surgery a few years ago, and wasn’t allowed to eat solid food for a few months. He ate nothing but Soylent during that time. So, it has its uses.
I had to check the calendar to see if was April 1.It’s not.But assuming this is actually real and not some elaborate prank, I give this 2 months until it goes under.
I’m on an all-rhombus diet, so…
Technically a square is a rhombus. It just happens to also be a rectangle.
It was an Other Space reference.
I’m allergic to angles less than 60 degrees
That’s an acute condition.
Of course! How could I be so obtuse as to not see that?!
The meaning of “four squares” in regards to meals sure has changed.
That’s why I think they missed out on an opportunity to make them five-sided. They can say “For centuries humanity has thought the peak of eating was square meals. But technology has improved. Behold the pentagonal meal!”
Fuck it, we’re doing five meals
I get that reference:
https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036
The Future of Food: Heralded in by Huey Lewis and the News.
Marketing perfection!
I used to read a lot of classic science fiction, and a lot of those authors envisioned a future when we would all be free of the tyranny of food – no more cooking, no more cuisine, just a handful of tablets to wash down with a glass of water. Seems like that spirit lives on, and I can only assume that these people have been eating some really shitty food.
To be fair, I could see a point to having meals that would have exactly the caloric and nutritional requirements to be an ideal meal even if they were boring. Maybe you’d eat them 5 days of the week and you’d have more exciting fare the other two days. The problem with this (and the real life Soylent, not to be confused with the fictitious one) is that they are created by scammy startup bros who know jack shit about biology or nutrition.
If they can make these meal squares tastier, more nutritious, and less filled with preservatives than typical prepacked foods, they’d do a great business selling to the military, astronauts, survivalists, hikers, field researchers, etc. Their pitch deck doesn’t reflect that at all. The fact that they’re trying to make it all streamlined and Apple-ish is…stupid.
That’s what I was thinking watching this: it would be great for the military, refugee camps, people dealing with natural disasters, etc. But why the heck market this as a fun and awesome alternative to regular food for ordinary situations?
I agree. I was thinking more like for lunches, especially for someone who has to work away from home. It saves you having to spend money on at a restaurant and might even be healthier than what you’d get there. For those who take their lunches with them to work, this means not having to lunch prep. You just eat these midday and save the tasty meals for dinner/weekends.That said, these people clearly fail to understand how important texture is as part of the eating process for so many people. There are people (including myself) who dislike certain foods simply because the texture is off-putting. And think of kids, who tend to be far more prone to that shit. At best, this would be a niche item for a small percentage of the population. I suspect we’ll never see anything like this become super mainstream.
i thought that was justpart of the dystopian trappings of a lot of that era of sci-fi
The key there was most of these places was that the rich still ate food, while the poor ate tablets, in most cases.
One of the most cogent points I ever read was someone noting that the key thing about the Jetsons and their food-pill ilk was that everyone seemed to get the same enjoyment out of their food pills as they would from a full meal.
Beware the food pill.
My first thought was the Observers from MST3K, who have food pills, but you have to eat several large bowls of the pills a day.
I think the idea of a “food pill” appeals to writers because they’re always broke, always writing for long hours and would love to not have to take three breaks a day for meals.
That’s funny – I’m a writer, and one of my favorite things is taking a break to eat something. That’s actually part of my reward system: “Just write for one more hour, and then you get to eat!”
I think the experiences of Depression Era starvation followed by wartime rationing and/or military rations, combined with the explosion of boxed and frozen foodstuffs, new food products and new appliances postwar pretty much destroyed a lot of people’s understanding of food’s taste and preparation. Poverty pushed low income people towards cheap food that lasted a long time and could be prepared with a minimum of equipment, the middle class bought better versions of the same thing just to have enough time for all their responsibilities. Especially in areas far from agriculture. And advertising told everyone it was all better living through chemistry, like astronaut food and MREs for our boys fighting the Cold War.
Neckbeards who failed at basic life skills trying to spin that into being technologically advanced and thus “cool” as well as being too “busy” to be able to do stuff the normies do – that’s who these startups are aimed at.
I don’t care what you say, I can taste the newspaper.
Somebody left their soap bars on the hot plate too long.
I’ll stick with White Castle’s squares, TYVM.
Excellent point – there are already gelatinous cubes of a diarrhea-inducing approximation of food, and they’re called sliders.
When they get that 3-course dinner chewing gum worked out, I’m all in.
Watch out for the blueberry pie.
All I hear is how bad processed food it. This seems MEGA processed, no?
Not that I’d touch these with a ten-foot pole, but the whole concept of “processed food is bad” is kind of a meaningless phrase, just like the idea of “natural” things being inherently healthy is (“here, drink this all-organic hemlock!”). What is true is a lot of prepackaged food is full of salt and sugar and not that great for you. But it isn’t bad because it isn’t “natural”.
I wouldn’t say it’s a meaningless phrase. Imprecise maybe but I think people get the point.
Yeah, but I hate that sort of lazy imprecision. It’s like Michael Pollan and his “don’t eat foods with ingredients you can’t pronounce” rubbish. Because I’m a scientist who has taken organic chemistry and biochemistry courses and know what things are called, does that mean I can eat more things than somebody with a liberal arts degree? (Yes, I know he means avoid scary-sounding chemicals but even that is kind of rubbish because everything is chemicals and can be described as such, like the famous joke about the lethality of dihydrogen monoxide — after all, people drown).
I assume when most people talk about “processed” food they’re referring to all of the highly refined carbs (sucrose/HFCS, AP flour, white rice, etc.) we end up eating, which have been stripped of all fiber and nutrients, are digested almost instantly, and thus wreak havoc on our metabolism and blood sugar.
I would think that most people wouldn’t count something like white rice or flour as “processed” (although they are to a degree). Normally what is meant by the term is something like Doritos.
“Processed food” is an idiomatic term for food that was prepared before packaging, usually by adding fat and/or sugar and/or salt. Obviously all commercially available food has to be processed, but that doesn’t make all of it “processed food.” Similarly, all plant and animal products contain carbon, but that doesn’t make them “organic food,” and preparing healthy food quickly doesn’t make it “fast food.” They’re idioms, and they communicate a pretty consistent meaning.
But it clearly it doesn’t have a consistent definition. I agree with your definition — I think of adding fat/sugar/salt to make addictive snack foods. But I have heard from from the sorts of people like Liebkartoffel who think even normal things like white rice are “processed” and to be avoided (how that fits in with the Japanese eating tons of the stuff and yet living the longest I have no idea).
No, I said when people refer to processed foods they often refer to refined carbs, and white rice is very much a refined grain. White rice is not inherently “bad” for you, or to be necessarily avoided, but it is empty calories, for the most part, and has little nutritional value beyond filling you up fast. Eating a cup of brown rice instead of white is, objectively, better for you in most circumstances, just like eating whole wheat bread is better for you than eating white bread. As for the Japanese eating tons of the stuff but still living longer: I’d hazard to guess that’s less due to the rice and more due to the fact that they also eat tons of vegetables, fresh fish, and soy protein. Or we could consider cultural and social factors such as portion sizes and access to healthcare. Just speculation, of course—I might not be a highly trained scientist such as you, but I try to avoid confusing correlation for causation.
What you brought me today is worth…. one quarter portion.
What is the purpose of this?
The demographic slice of people with
-Too much money-No sense of taste-Vague futurism FOMO
still require daily caloric intake too
People who lost the sense of taste from covid?
Me, drunk at night: Man, I could really go for a bunch of weird cubes right now…
Capitalism was a mistake
The sodium content in these is HUUUGE!
I can’t remember the last time I bought an ingredient. Maybe food squares are my future. I think I’ll wait until they come to my grocery store, though.
That’s…depressing.
You think you’re depressed. I have to live with me.
Every time they’re photographed ready to eat on a plate in that video, the plate is on a shiny table to offset how offputtingly shiny those things are. They’re just SO shiny. I will, of course, try them, because I just gotta know, but blegh they look nasty.
I want to mock/hate it, but the more I think about it, the more I like it, weird as it is. I’d expect the price to be terrible, but from what I found, the meals start at a decent price ($6.50-$8 range for small). Having the little sauce syringes helps. I dunno….it’s like gourmet MREs from the future.
No.
You had me at margin controls.
I’m thrilled to see someone managed to make “food” look even more like Soylent Green than the company that ripped off the name. That said, there’s a market for this. I can’t imagine Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg eating Beef Wellington or, like, a carrot. Food, after all, is the oldest of legacy techs.
They just look like bagel bites to me – one egg, two regular, and a pumpernickel. I bet they’d be better with a bit of melted butter poured over them (what isn’t?).
I could absolutely see a role for something like this as a super-portable lunch or camping/hiking ration. It’s certainly more appealing than the liquid “soylent” stuff, but I have kind of fond memories of “space food sticks” and Carnation breakfast bars.
So presumably this is just a combination of ingredients pureed, piped into a mold, and cooked sous vide in order to sterilize/set it. So if you’re relying on the mold to give it the final shape, why not choose something more fun? Cubes would give you six sides to sear and pack just as well as these, while tetrahedra would absolutely be more appealing.
Can’t wait for the Dollop episode about how this failed spectacularly.
There goes the tech sector, solving a “problem” that doesn’t really exist. Again.
You’d think that these companies will be formed in countries famous for bad cuisine, like England or something. Or, is America one of those countries??
Thanks, but I’ll stick to my Bachelor Chow.
Now with flavor!
I’ll bet dimes to dollars at some point McCarter wrote an article where he said, “And where’s my meal in pill form? We were promised food pills in the future!”
But they have a huge team with 10 years of experience! (that seems to total out to about .5 to 1 year per person)
Shit, my new company Circleat now has competition.
You both better watch your back, because my startup TrianglEat is about to upend the entire food pyramid!
start-up aims to disrupt food industryDisrupt, no. Add to, sure. Slightly.
This is nothing really new and people already like the food they like.
I only found one blatant error in this article:“from ‘Fisherman’ to ‘Sweet Break’ or ‘Treat’ —> “from ‘Fisherman’ to ‘Sweet Break’ or ‘Treat’”
The nails and the meathead loading the van sold me!
Soon it will be even smaller and in pill form.
That woman’s last name can be translated as “Cowflowers”. That’s all.
https://comb.io/Fjcbv4
I’ve seen her somewhere before.
Or how about just get dimsum. Roughly the same size and with enough variety to keep everyone happy.
Cool, another disgusting product meant to “hack” basic biological functions or whatever.
Well now I can’t get the phrase “jiggly pucks” sang to the tune of Jigglypuff’s signature lullaby out of my head and I feel they are missing a good crossover marketing opportunity.
Farscape did it.