Prices

Cost of ingredients are going up, what that means for the price of Keto Chow
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Cost of ingredients are going up, what that means for the price of Keto Chow

Keto Chow

Cost of ingredients are going up, what that means for the price of Keto Chow

We were notified a few months ago by our protein supplier that the cost of the Milk Protein Isolate would be increasing in 2020 and the change is now already here. It’s something that’s happening across the industry and, frankly, sucks. We received the final updated costs and the average (median) increased cost for the various flavors of Keto Chow was 20% higher due to the variations in the cost of the protein, the vitamins we are using, the flavors, and more. Some flavors are going up quite a lot more, with others the increases are only 19% or so. We’re also going to be switching from regular salt to Redmond Real Salt, fortunately, the price difference on that one is only 4 cents for 21 meals (yay!). The base powder had its costs increased by 31%.

So: what does this mean for the price of Keto Chow?

From the beginning, the goal of Keto Chow has been simply to make getting proper nutrition easier for people (mostly me, but you all get the benefits too =). It wasn’t started as a money grab, and the original recipe to make it yourself is still available for anyone to use. We are going to be raising prices, but it will be less than the 20% we are getting hit with. The Soup flavors that use the beef protein will be unaffected by this increase so their prices will be unchanged for now.

The Sweet flavors and the Savory Chicken will have their price standardized to $70 for the 21 meal bags and $4.75 for the sample size (everything’s the same price as Chocolate Peanut Butter), Base Powder price increased to $44.

This represents a 6-8% increase for the 21 meal bulk bags, a 12% increase for the sample size (as opposed to a 20% increase on all sizes which would have seen the prices go far higher), and a 4.7% increase for the Base Powder. Any cost increase sucks, but we decided that we could absorb the costs of passing on a far smaller increase to our customers.

When? Tuesday, April 14, 2020. EDIT: change is LIVE.

We waited on making the change until we started receiving product at the higher costs. Today we received our second higher-priced shipment of Chocolate Peanut Butter and we recently received several thousand of the Chocolate, also at the higher price. Those two flavors make up the bulk of our sales so it’s time to make the change. This change will go into effect throughout the day on Tuesday, April 14, 2020. ~~It won’t be at any specific time as many of the changes take hours to implement.~~ EDIT: the updated prices are currently live now..

It’s not a lot of heads-up, but it’s some. It’s a sucky time to be raising prices but it has to be done sometime and now is unfortunately it.

By Chris|2020-04-14T16:18:51-06:00April 13th, 2020|Categories: Keto Chow|Tags: ingredient costs, Prices, price|1 Comment

Update on Keto Chow 2.0 – another delay, but there’s hope!
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Update on Keto Chow 2.0 – another delay, but there’s hope!

Future Foods, Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow

Update on Keto Chow 2.0 – another delay, but there’s hope!

To recap for those who don’t live and breathe this stuff:

I’m in the final stages of having Keto Chow produced at a contract manufacturer.
Keto Chow 2.0 differs from Keto Chow 1.9 on the protein/flavor/sweetener – I’m not able to get Dymatize Elite in 500KG batches so by necessity we have to get our own stuff to replace it. The most obvious difference will be the flavoring in KC2.0 will be our own stuff.

Anyhow, we ran into a problem with the manufacturing. I had the co-packer make me some new test batches and the flavors came back really weird. Initially, I thought it was the potassium chloride we added but after extensive testing, it turned out to be a problem in the protein powder. The initial tests they did were with a random equivalent protein powder and the new samples were straight from the bulk powder they purchased for our batches. We’ve gone back and tried some different flavoring and some bitter masking agents but to no avail.

I’m not going to sell a product I don’t love. It has to have a “wow, that was really good, I want more!” going for it or it’s not going to be released.

So, as of today, we’re going to use a different protein powder from a different manufacturer. It’s likely this will add some to the cost, I’m hoping it’s less than $1-2 and we’re still aiming to have KC2.0 cost less than KC1.9. This means that Keto Chow 2.0 is going to be delayed. If we can find a direct drop-in replacement for the protein powder it may be as little as a week before we get things going.

We’re coming up on almost a year since I decided to start this endeavor – I hope we can be shipping 2.0 well before Fed 15th.

Update!

This morning we headed down to the manufacturer to work on the problem. We brought along a Keto Chow 1.9 rich chocolate in powder form, a bag of Dymatize Rich Chocolate for comparison, and a blender bottle of mixed Chocolate Peanut Butter. He had complained that it didn’t taste very good and he didn’t feel confident evaluating the mixes so when he had the Chocolate Peanut Butter (with the heavy cream) he was astonished in the extreme “Oh wow, that’s actually really good” – yep that’s the goal! We did a bunch of various tests combining different stuff together but the most telling test was when we tasted the plain whey protein in water… and the bad taste was there! After that, he said he was going to go back to the distributor and get a refund and/or exchange it for a different protein. He said the protein guys may send out a food scientist to work on the problem but ideally, we may have a solution (maybe) quickly.

By Chris|2017-01-30T14:34:41-07:00January 30th, 2017|Categories: Future Foods, Ketogenic Diet, Keto Chow|Tags: ketochow2.0, Whey Protein Isolate, ingredient costs, Prices, recipe, ketogenic, Keto Chow, flavors|2 Comments

“Build a Month*” now available

(* not actually a month, it’s 4 weeks or 28 days @ 3 meals a day) Dunno why I’m even bothering to announce this, people are already ordering it =) (more…)

By Taffiny Elrod|2021-09-17T11:11:46-06:00May 27th, 2015|Categories: Keto Chow News|Tags: Shipping, Prices, Keto Chow|0 Comments

Peanut butter, labels and bags

As I planned to do yesterday, I tried mixing the PB2 powdered peanut butter into my Keto Chow powder all at once while I was mixing a week instead of adding 12g into each individual meal. (more…)