100 days of keto

• Weight: 205.3
• Blood ketones: 0.2 mmol/L

Yesterday evening I spent some time discussing the possible packaging for “Keto Chow 2.0” with my wife. The company I’ll likely be using can package into “Stick Pack” and tubs/bottles, they aren’t able to handle the stand-up pouches I’m currently using (“yet”) so it’s likely I’ll be using tubs for bulk size and stick packs for the samples. The question now comes to what to do for the days – I don’t have a good solution for that yet. A smaller “day” tub would cost almost as much as the large bulk one, both the cost of the container and the cost of putting it into the container (but x7). I think the solution is going to be to up the volume of the sample size (the “single meal”) enough that the cost of 3 meals is lower than what the “day” used to cost – and just eliminate it entirely because it wouldn’t be necessary.

We’re also hitting some issues with the bulk size container. 7 days/21 meals for most of the flavors is a little too much to fit into a half-gallon size bottle. It fits into a standard 1 gallon (2 lb of protein) size bottle but there’s a bunch of extra space at the top. Since Peanut Butter is the “largest” flavor by volume I used it as my “worst case scenario” trial and found that I could actually get 10 days/30 meals of chocolate peanut butter into a gallon size container. Likely that is what we will do: no more “weeks” – they would be 30 meal/10 day packages. A round gallon size container is an awful waste of space as far as shipping goes so we’re looking into using “square” bottles instead, like these:

This all presents a problem though: Shipping. We currently use a LOT of USPS flat rate boxes; they’re free(ish) and offer low shipping rates where we don’t have to care how much stuff weighs, only how big it is. With these larger, fixed dimension, containers we would be able to fit half as many bottles into the same box as the week bags. A Medium FRB would hold 1 instead of 2-3. A Large FRB would only hold 2 bottles instead of the current 4 weeks (20 days worth compared to 28). It’s likely we’ll have to find our own boxes that fit 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the bottles. It kinda sucks but will be better for FedEx and possibly UPS shipping with all 3 services using the same boxes. Time will tell.

We also hashed out the flavors that will be part of the initial round: Chocolate, Vanilla, Chocolate Peanut butter, Cookie & Cream and Strawberry.

Those first five represent 73% of the total sales of Keto Chow all by themselves, so I think it’s a good starting point; especially with the apparent discontinuation of the different flavors by Dymatize. I found some Chocolate Fudge and some Butter Cream Toffee yesterday but still no joy with Banana and Piña Colada, it may not be long before They go out of stock in the weeks, though we have a nice inventory of days and samples. Cinnamon bun is currently down to just samples remaining, the last day pack sold on Saturday.