Tech thinks everything has to be new, unique, novel, and the-best-in-the-world.
Business is all about differentiation and marketing and getting inside customer minds. Even if Soylent was Ensure re-branded, they can still have a business by being "fuel for the tech crowd" instead of "feeding tube fuel" http://www.amazon.com/Nestle-Healthcare-Nutrition-85140100-U...
It's all the same product. You're paying to belong to a brand/cult for a personal enjoyment experience (I drink the same sludge as VCs! I'm awesome!!), not because the products are substantially different.
What's the end-game with Soylent anyway? Soylent will be sold to Nestle, the feeding tube people, not to Tesla or Apple or Microsoft or Adobe.
Are you serious? The products are substantially different.
If you look at the nutritional info for Ensure[1] and Soylent[2] you'll see that Soylent has more calories, more fat, no cholesterol, more sodium, more potassium, less sugar, more protein.
Most important, Soylent has a more even distribution of the daily % of vitamins and minerals. If you drink 3 bottles of Ensure you're up to 180% daily value of Vitamin C, 240% of Vitamin D, 180% Manganese. The even distribution makes it easier for it to act as a complete meal replacement not just a diet or sports supplement.
My feeling is also that Soylent measures more and tweaks their formula more. Their goal is to be a good cheap meal for everyone:
Soylent is a food product (classified as a food, not a supplement, by the FDA) designed for use as a staple meal by all adults. Each serving of Soylent provides maximum nutrition with minimum effort.
In a paycheck or two I'll buy a bunch of these and they'll be my lunch and breakfast replacement. Things like Ensure don't cut it as a staple meal.
> Most important, Soylent has a more even distribution of the daily % of vitamins and minerals.
Which is actually what you don't want, since the daily % isn't consistent in meaning. In some cases its a target which most people should meet or exceed. It some cases its a target most people should be around. It some cases (e.g., sodium) its nearly the maximum recommended for the majority of the population, and above the maximum recommended for a substantial minority.
> My feeling is also that Soylent measures more and tweaks their formula more.
Soylent is tweaking it more because they are moving it around fairly rapidly to deal with component prices and feedback from unanticipated negative impacts on consumers.
Are ensure et al nutritionally complete? As in - you can live off ensure and nothing else?
My understanding is that soylent (and clones) are able to be full replacements for food in general, whereas ensure, muscle milk, etc, are meant to be purely supplemental
When Ensure markets itself to the general public the makers responsibly say it's a supplement. But if you're a medical professional you get the other marketing - which is clear that ensure etc can be used as a sole source of nutrition under medical supervision. They have a variety of products to cover a variet of needs. They have ensure plus which has more calories than ensure; they have products for NG tubes; they have low protien versions; there are version for children; etc.
The fact that they limit this marketing to registered healthcare professionals and have a bunch of caveats about "under medical supervision", and Soylent doesn't, is something you can draw your own conclusions about.
Some people will see this as disruptive and an example of a small nimble supplier filling a niche; other people will see it as SV pathologically avoiding reasonable regulation.
Given the number of people under close medical supervision who are using Ensure for meal replacement, why hasn't vitamin poisoning from Ensure been observed or reported?
The others are designed to do that, but the jury is still out on if any specific product and completely replace food with one shake/formula. Be it Ensure, or Soylent.
> The Ensure family of products provides active adults with a source of nutrition that can help them focus on specific nutritional goals. Such goals include helping to rebuild muscle and strength naturally lost over time, supporting digestive tract health and the immune system, and helping build strong bones. Ensure is available in a variety of uniquely formulated, ready-to-drink, shakes in popular flavors, as well as in pudding and powder forms. Intended for oral consumption, Ensure is ideal for supplemental use with or between meals and for interim sole-source feeding in convenient, ready-to-drink, bottles.
