The first attempts to develop Bivo
We have started to work on this project almost three years ago already. In this brief article we want to tell you about an episode, which at the time represented a moment of great difficulty, but about which we smile today.
From some months we had started to consume some European complete foods and we even managed to have Soylent sent to us from the United States. We were sure that a healthy and quick product would have been the future of World nutrition and we are even more convinced now than ever. Anyhow, we were not satisfied by the taste of those products and for this reason we decided to see if we could make something better (the classic “I can do it better” approach). Even before establishing the company, we wanted to understand if our project was realizable. And before involving nutritionists and food technologists, Taddeo and I wanted to understand by ourselves if we could make a complete food in Italy, even if home made and with an approximate formula.
The idea we had was copying the formulas of the other products, trying to take the positive things of every each of the ones we had tried until that moment.
To make a long story short, we managed in some days to collect the different ingredients we needed. We bought them, not without difficulties, from various supplement shops and other stores specialized in biological products.
After having bought the different ingredients, it was time to meet at home and make the first great attempt to create a complete food made in Italy. That evening we even called our great friend Simone, who had liked our idea since the beginning. We were totally exited, thrilled to the idea to be close to the first important result!
Mixing all the ingredients we had collected we obtained a quite homogeneous powder. For me and Taddeo it was the moment of truth: we took a normal gym shaker (we didn’t have the great Bivo shaker at the time), we poured water in it, we added the powder and… a total disaster! We had created a sort of mush with a terrible appearance, which we called “Slimer” (more than one of you will for sure remember the mythical character from Ghost Busters). We had the courage to taste it: really disgusting! At the end, Simone’s ingenious idea: let’s try to put Slimer in the oven. At that point we opened some cold beers and waited for the mush to be cooked, like a cake. The result after some minutes was clear: we needed hours to clean up the oven… Slimer had decided to explode!
Only after several months, after having created the real development team for Bivo, made by two food technologist, a biologist and a food nutritionist (the same team which developed Bivo 1.0 and the current Bivo 2.0) we understood the many mistakes we make in that crazy home made attempt. It is not by chance that nutritionists and food technologists have to study for years to become experts in their field. We had picked the wrong types of ingredients, quantities, preparation… to sum up: everything we did was wrong.
Thinking about that first attempt, we are happy with the path that we have walked so far.
The first Bivo (1.0) had been a success. The second, the current one (2.0), is more and more appreciated. We are working right now to the next varieties (a new flavour is on its way after the summer!) and to future versions, which is too soon to speak about. All of this would not have been possible without our wonderful team of experts (and without Slimer, of course), which we will never thank enough!
Davide
