My name is Matt and I am the founder and CEO of YUAR. The initial inspiration for YUAR came to me during my freshman year of college. I had been trying every meal replacement option I could get my hands on. The sad thing is that I liked most of them. Then, during a particular unit in my natural sciences course concerning world hunger and nutritional sustainability, I decided to take a closer look at the different meal replacement options I had been trying. Suffice to say, I was appalled. Not only was I paying nearly $3 for a “meal” (which I would have had to eat four or five of per day for the prescribed “2,000-calorie diet”), but I was also getting far too much of certain some nutrients and far too little of others. I was determined to do better.
For a brief time, I will admit I considered going the chemical route, engineering the perfect blend of those supposedly nutritious, lab-synthesized compounds. I decided against this for two reasons. The first is that it would have been nearly impossible to experiment, both practically (due to the availability and cost of these chemicals) and safely (if I can’t pronounce it, there’s a good chance I might not know how much of it to use). The second reason is that these chemicals do not represent real food in production or consumption. The less complexity in producing my ingredients the better and who would prefer consuming a tablespoon of a synthetic, bitter powder over biting into a firm, jaw-satisfying piece of cornbread (the preliminary recipe for YUAR bars is similar to a dense cornbread).
Anyway, YUAR was born and I decided only to use natural and readily available products (ingredients you could buy in a supermarket). I began compiling very large files of nutritional data for hundreds of different foods and began using different algorithms to narrow down a perfectly nutritious recipe.
I am ever-iterating the algorithms and am continuing to add to my stores of data so I can further refine YUAR into a final product. Currently, I am seeking seed funding to start full-time on research and development to bring YUAR to market. You should expect a Kickstarter campaign coming soon, with the first commercial batch of YUAR going out in winter 2017-18.
Please feel free to reach out through our contact page with comments, questions, suggestions, or business inquiries!
YUAR Foods 