Incidentally, Soylent is a perfect example of something that some people really love and others dismiss as a toy. Not that that is a perfect predictor of success. If only. But it is at least a positive sign.
(Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't worry so much about middlebrow dismissals floating to the top of HN threads. They probably do have some predictive value.)
It seems like you'd want to see scientific evidence of the potential harm of Soylent in order to count a comment as a non-middlebrow dismissal. But it shouldn't be on the doubters to prove that this stuff is healthy - can you give us a non-middlebrow reason to support it, other than "well, there's no proof that it's harmful in our small self-selected self-administered non-blinded non-controlled study, so let's give it a shot and market this thing to the whole world as a healthy long-term replacement for traditional food."
The middlebrow objection is not that it's somehow dangerous, but that it's not new or unique or worth getting excited over. It's just another meal-replacement shake, just marketed to a different group. I'm sure that if you use it sensibly. ("a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, then a sensible dinner" as the ultra slim-fast guy would say.) it won't hurt you. I mean, as long as the stuff isn't actively and aggressively poisonous, and as long as you get lawyers or something to mealy mouth your way out of the claims that you can live entirely on soylent, you are fine.
I guess... that's not really all that much of an objection, from a business perspective. With all this hype, I'd say it has a reasonable chance of making money. It does seem to be marketed well, and it's timed right
But, I think most of the 'middlebrow dismissals' are more a response to the hype. I mean, meal-replacement shakes are an old product; certainly at first glance, if you dismiss the fantastic claims about soylent, like the idea that you can eat it and nothing else, it looks a lot like any other meal-replacement shake packaged for a particular market. The problem is that the group they are targeting, generally speaking, identifies as more skeptical than most, and they are using the traditional snake-oil style pitch that you normally use to get a product off the ground. On an emotional level, I (and I think many in their target demographic) find that pretty offensive[1]. I think that negative emotional response to obvious hype is the core of the resistance you see here.
[1]or rather, responding positively to something sold using overly-enthusiastic sales techniques would... conflict with my self-image.
A lot of the criticism I've seen is not people dismissing Soylent as a toy, but instead being worried that it may actually have unknown negative effects on health, since it lacks any long-term clinical trials.
1) I think they already exist. They just aren't marketed to trendy 20-somethings. (This is what Soylent does well and why, I assume, they're getting investment. The actual product can be completely reformulated until it comes reasonably close to being a good meal replacement: It's the brand that's become valuable.)
2) The Soylent team sounded like such snake-oil salesmen out of the gate that they simply don't have much credibility, as far as I'm concerned. With all of the made-up benefits they touted at the start, now they have to dig themselves out a deep pit of bullshit to actually demonstrate the value of their product.
It's important that we don't treat this kind of food product like a toy. Which is why it's important to be critical of unsupported claims. (And critical of supported claims, as well.) Especially those made by young people with no particular background in the field they're purporting to be experts in. Food is not a toy. It's not Tumblr. It's not Zynga. It's something we require to survive.
Do you ask for the same level of rigorousness when McDonalds release a new item on their menu? I'd hazard a guess that more people consume that new item than anyone will ever consume in Soylent.
Remember supersize me, that guy started having liver problems from eating McDonalds... Yet nothing changes and McDonalds keeps selling crap.
Food is a toy, and Soylent are very far down the scale of "bad food products I can buy"
> "Do you ask for the same level of rigorousness when McDonalds release a new item on their menu?"
If this new menu item is intended to be eaten full-time to the exclusion of everything else: yes.
If Soylent's angle was "running late? don't have time? give Soylent a go!" I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. The claim that bothers people is that it obviates the need for any other food.
If McDonald actually advocated the diet the Supersize Me guy had, then I suspect far more people would be concerned. I don't think the food substance is what has people concerned here; rather the hype and claims surrounding it are concerning.
People are concerned about the hype? Not the product?
So does it concern you that in McDonalds ads there are always attractive slim people, when in fact at most stores you see average looking obese people?
Are we arguing truth in advertising? Or Danger in food products?
> People are concerned about the hype? Not the product?
Where 'the hype' includes claims of total meal replacement over long periods of time.. yes.
I don't think many, if any, people are concerned that this stuff is literally toxic. The concern is what will happen if you use it as advertised: constantly, exclusively, for extended periods of time.
People eating McDonalds for every meal every day of the week is troubling, I don't think anybody actually suggests you do that. McDonalds certainly doesn't suggest that you do that, though I sometimes feel that many people wish they did suggest you do that so that McDonalds would be easier to flay alive. Being appalled by McDonalds is an international sport after all...
There really isn't that much of a problem with eating a greasy deep-fried cheeseburger once in a while, and there isn't a problem with skipping a meal or two and having a shake instead. That isn't what concerns me, that isn't what seems to concern DanBC ("I think that's the worrying thing about Soylent. I really wish they'd kept it experimental, or pushed it as suitable for daily use but not all meals, or some such."), and that isn't what I see concerning other people in this thread. The literal product, the substance Solyent, is almost certainly perfectly fine to consume. So are cheeseburgers.
> McDonalds certainly doesn't suggest that you do that
I thought part of the problem was that McDonalds /did/ suggest you /could/ do that, without any ill-effects - that their meals were healthy and you could eat breakfast, lunch and dinner there without a problem.
McDonalds never claimed that their food could be consumed to the exclusion of every other possible food. They offer breakfast options, but none of their marketing made the claim that eating at McDonalds every day was recommended.
On the other hand, soylent is making the claim that it's healthy to use soylent as a complete replacement for food. Thus, the standards are much higher in terms of truth in marketing.
I appreciate that there's a difference in marketing, and McDs isn't actively suggesting you should eat there everyday (unlike Soylent), but take a look at this page:
There's no mention of food from other places, and the final paragraph ("Variety keeps things interesting") certainly implies you could eat there daily without problem, to the exclusion of other food sources.
To me the problem is the combination. Soylent market themselves as a full meal replacement solution, no extra nutrtition required. This means they need to prove that a) it does provide everything the body needs, and b) that continuous consumption has no bad side effects.
Mcdonalds on the other hand never market their food as a complete meal replacement solution. In fact, here in the uk, they're very careful to point out you still need a healthy balanced diet (admittedly due to regulations, but still... They do it, Soylent don't)
> Do you ask for the same level of rigorousness when McDonalds release a new item on their menu?
No, because I've already dismissed McDonald's menu as not having any relevance to anything I care about.
EDIT: OTOH, were people promoting McDonald's new menu items as the solution to real problems (both personal and global), I'd react with the same kind of skepticism as I do to Soylent's claims.
McDonalds or any fast food company isn't making bread or meat in their labs from some chemicals in the factory. All they are doing modifying naturally occurring foods and optimizing them for taste. As unhealthy as they might be, they are still don't fall on under the category of something that has potential to harm your body fatally in an irreversible way.
And prolonged exposure to anything. I mean anything will cause harm to your body. Its not just McDonalds.
Soylent is a bit like a drug company releasing a new drug.
Do you think it's possible people are taking food too seriously?
Empirically, Soylent has been on the market without causing any problems for a few months. What if it doesn't cause problems for a few years?
I'm interested to understand why people choose food to get so passionate about. When a new source control system comes out, people don't get so heated. Why for a food company?
- Food is a major component of identity. It conveys things about your values and belief systems. Thus, like other identity factors (race, religion, political position, sexual orientation, socio-economic class), when this is challenged, some people are particularly sensitive and respond very defensively.
- As food choices are widely accepted to be a major factor in overall health (and thus, susceptibility to serious illness, life-expectancy, etc), it's natural for there to be a significant amount of fear behind people's positions in the discussion. I.e., when someone says "this diet will give you a greater chance of positive health outcomes than the one you currently follow", that can be frightening to people who harbour fears - conscious or subconscious - about their health and their expected lifespan.
I have vigorously criticised Soylent in the past. I've tried hard to turn that down.
The reason I hate Soylent is, as several other people mention in this thread, the over-blown claims made in their crowd-funding drive.
Before any work with nutritionists or dietitians the Soylent team were claiming:
> "You can finally join the easy, healthy, and affordable future of nutrition."
> "What if you never had to worry about food again?"
> "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you."
> "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health,"
> "By taking years to spoil"
> "there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet."
Some of these are just enthusiastic US marketing. I'm in the UK where we have stricter rules for advertising, so there's some cultural clash there.
But some of them are sleazy and not truthy.
That bad-feeling is retained by many people, even though the Soylent team are now working with real food scientists and being more careful with the claims.
You have some choice quotes, but here's the smoking gun:
>Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.
Not just easy and healthy. No. Perfectly optimized... Automatically puts you at an optimal weight They've toned down the language since saying this, but I think anyone has good reason to be upset over such claims.
Tim Ferriss gave a platform to Soylent on his blog recently, which is one of the best things you can have happen for your product: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2012/01/11/the-t... Rhinehart wasn't very grateful, simply because Ferriss showed some healthy skepticism. Here's the whole event:
One of the last things Ferriss says? I don't want you to fail and explicitly stated otherwise in my piece... That mimics the same attitude a lot of us here have.
Being skeptical of bogus claims isn't the same thing as dismissing something. Or calling it a toy. That accusation is a dismissal of reasonable skepticism.
I hadn't seen that. What a horrible response from Rhinehart. His whole tone is of "I know better than you, and am more rational than you"... It made me wonder if he didn't know who Tim Ferriss was nor what experience he's had.
I'm neither For/Against Soylent, but after reading that I have a fairly negative view on Rhinehart.
As an extra: His response to 1-size-fits-all is laughable, is he forgetting about the 1000s of eating issues people have (gluten, lactose, allergies, diabetes)... Sorry ranting now.
>As an extra: His response to 1-size-fits-all is laughable, is he forgetting about the 1000s of eating issues people have (gluten, lactose, allergies, diabetes)... Sorry ranting now.
As the word is used on The Colbert Report, "truthy" is somewhat sleazy. It means something that sounds like it's true, but which isn't necessarily based on facts.
The Soylent folks brought it on themselves by making completely unverified claims on their Kickstarter (and other) pages. Had they presented themselves and what they were doing in a more honest fashion, there wouldn't be near as much criticism. As it is they have presented themselves as having far more research behind them than they do.
Frankly, if they were doing something other than food, it probably wouldn't be an issue either. They are playing with people's health and wellbeing.
A toy food would be something that tastes excellent or fun to consume but no real health benefit, e.g., you could run a toy car in your basement but not use for commuting.
The worry with soylent or other food replacement is that it could outright harm you. Pfizer was developing Torcetrapib as a successor to multi-billion dollar Lipitor and it was on in Phase III that it was found to have adverse effect. It took 16 years of development, and close to $1B expense before the side-effects were discovered.
The soylent effort is great but if there are any health issues, they may come to the surface much later.
Perhaps, but my fear is that Soylent's cavalier attitude is how you cause the next asbestos or thalidomide: things that seemed great, were rolled out extensively, and ended up being huge health disasters.
Thoughtful critics should probably have the same things (or worse) to say about McDonalds & Friends as Soylent.
The science will come around in time. But the idea that this could eventually make nutrition available to people who wouldn't otherwise eat is amazing.
No one sells Big Macs as the only meal you'll ever need though, or even claim it's good for your health.
The idea is sound, even though it's nothing new, and I make use of something similar (Ensure) daily. The critics of Soylent mainly criticize the outrageous claims made based on an inconclusive experiment of N=1, which is an amateur way of proposing solutions to health related issues to being with.
Considering how they raised their money now, I won't touch it even if they get an FDA seal of approval.
I agree, although that's a strawman since the comments are attached to threads about Soylent. I'm sure there would be worse (different) things said on threads about fast food. I do very much hope that the science does come around because I completely agree that the potential for nutrition to reach people in need is exciting.
And this is why progress in medicine is so absolutely glacial and expensive. When it costs $4 billion dollars on average to get a new drug past the FDA, is it any wonder why they cost so much?
Now, the FDA process may be inefficient or unnecessarily expensive, but long term clinical trials are not something that we should be eager to dispose of.
I hated how most of the critiques on HN were centered around "loving to cook" or "loving food." I think that's a moot point.
I love the idea of Soylent and meal replacements in general. The critique I had for it was that everywhere I looked for the recipe, I saw references to maltodextrin. I don't want to fill my diet with maltodextrin instead of whole weat bread/oats. I hope in the future there are varieties where I can have more control over the carb source I consume a lot of in my daily meals.
You can already find such recipes on the DIY Soylent sites. There was one based on Chia seeds, peanut butter, and a few things you can find in the grocery store.
Well if it's DIY then it's taking all the time to get the ingredients and put it in a blender. I can make a DIY meal replacement now -- I was just talking in context of Soylent's merits. However, if Soylent can be cheap enough to help solve some issues in terms of world hunger, then I'm all for it.
The World Food Program has several nutrition foods. The problem tends not to be cost (which is already very low) but distribution and awareness.
One of the problems of Soylent is the need for water. About one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. Problems with water cause very many infant deaths.
It's exciting seeing this get some awareness in tech culture. Maybe people can design and develop easier cheaper better methods of water purification or desalination; or cooking; or whatever.
You can imagine that the cost of the product from this huge NGO is going to have been driven down as far as possible.
> One of the problems of Soylent is the need for water. About one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water.
Why does Soylent need water? Could the same ingredients be prepared as a Soylent power bar?
That is a crowded product market, but Soylent might have an interesting pitch. A cashier at Trader Joe's told me that power bars were the store's best selling items.
In combatting world hunger, are you thinking of a factor other than price, like transportability, perishability, predictability, controlability, preparationability?
Given that the cheapest DIY soylent appear to be primarily based traditional staples like rice, oats, peas, soy, and flax seeds, it doesn't seem very likely to be cheaper. The initial price for the official one is $9/day, while the cost of the cheapest DIY based on traditional foods is $2/day.
You can get DIY soylent down to between $5-$6 a day without too much effort. There are some that are a bit lower, but you're not going to beat DIY traditional cooking by any means. It's meant to be a time optimization.
That's a good point, I should have calculated the daily price. I was just thinking of the convenience of an all-in-one nutrient rich meal replacement being easier to transport and not go bad.
> Well if it's DIY then it's taking all the time to get the ingredients and put it in a blender.
It's practical to do certain stuff with Soylent that's a little more difficult with traditional food. With the appropriate containers, I can, for example, very easily "package" a week's worth of breakfast and lunch. The only operation involved is measuring dry powders and cleanup is very minimal in comparison to traditional cooking. I can do the same thing with ordinary cooked meals, containers, and a freezer, but that's quite a bit more involved.
pg, nice reference to Chris Dixon's talk at Startup School. Agree.
However, in this case we're "playing" with human health, and the good/bad effects of Soylent can take years to be clear.
I have the feeling that Soylent, or this particular area of business, is going to be huge in the coming years. Not surprisingly, A16Z has invested in it :)
I only eat because I'm hungry; the taste, as long as it's bearable, is always an afterthought. I find grocery shopping, cooking and especially doing the dishes to be insanely inconvenient in my daily life, and eating out is far too expensive. My wife asked me the other day, "It's not that you expect me to make dinner for you, it's just that if I didn't, you'd likely eat either a frozen pizza or boil some pasta every night, right?"
I would absolutely love for this Soylent project to become a reality. The convenience of getting a well balanced diet served in one small dose is something I only dreamed of coming true; fingers crossed they can pull it off.
When Soylent was first a guy's "garage project," I too wanted it to work, or, to be clear, I do still want the idea of Soylent to work. However, Soylent went from being a simple meal replacement, to a snake oil miracle food nearly overnight.
Once the internet buzz started swimming around their milkshake idea, it felt like the developers saw green and threw their standards out the window. Their Kick Starter page read like something out of the Patent Medicine era of the early 1900's. "Do feel tired, groggy, or have ailment X?" Soylent with cure it!
Obviously, I'm a cranky minority, but the absolute lack of intellectual honesty and rigor presented in the claims on their Kick Starter put a sour taste in my mouth over the whole thing.
You're saying you liked Soylent because it was a "garage project", but you no longer like it because it's using marketing and has become popular? But you'd like the product if it weren't associated with the marketing? Does like == buy here or is this just fashion for ideas?
Soylent as a simple meal replacement makes quite a bit of sense. It's the same as Weight Watcher shakes and the like-something you can eat to replace a meal once a day at most. That product can get away with not being perfectly nutritionally balanced because it's not meant to be eaten every meal. You can use the other meals to fill the nutritional holes left by it, even if you're using it to replace one meal a day.
Soylent as a total food replacement brings a LOT more scrutiny. It means that they have to prove that it IS perfectly nutritionally balanced, and that there aren't any adverse side effects for long-term consumption. That's where the snake oil responses come in, because the burden of proof is so much higher.
The post I responded to treated a business with a real product as fashion. They liked Soylent because it was "garage" and then didn't when it became popular... it's the cliched hipster who only likes bands you've never heard of. I am probably frustrated with the the consumer vs critic chasm. I will probably purchase Soylent when it's available, at least to try it out. It will probably never replace all of my meals (I don't think they really suggest that it SHOULD, although they may suggest that it COULD) but I'd try. The post I responded to was purely critical and only focused on the presentation of the product not the use of the product.
Well, No. I didn't say anything like that. In fact, I'm not quite sure how you got that interpretation from what I wrote (assuming you read the whole thing, and not just the first sentence).
For clarification, the problem is not that it's now being marketed, it's that it is marketed along with unverified medical claims.
I am more or less a foodie, and yet am watching Soylent intently for exactly the opposite reason: I could conceivably only eat when I'm able to have an excellent meal. Maybe that means setting aside time to cook an exquisite dinner a few times a month, and only going out to eat when I want to try a new restaurant or to socialize.
I could actually see Soylent as the hardcore foodie's dream come true: Never eat a boring meal again, because you don't have to eat until your next feast.
I'm not sure if anyone is so binary with their food that they will only give themselves a choice between an exquisite meal or powdered, bland goop. Maybe I'm just not "hardcore" enough.
I can crack a few eggs in the morning, toss in some veggies and have a hot, delicious breakfast to enjoy with plenty of protein and it all cooks in just a few minutes.
For the most part with "weekday cooking", the most time consuming part is the prep work and that stuff can be easily batched as long as you plan ahead.
I just don't see how anyone who would consider themselves as foodies could be happy drinking this stuff for the majority of their meals.
If you can effortless get healthy, whole foods into your body whenever you want then you probably have cooking/shopping/organizing skills well outside the norm.
I love to cook, and am good at it. But I run out of food all the time, or have weird random stuff lying around that doesn't fit easily into a quick recipe. I wish I had your skills/organization.
Can't you already use Ensure, the stuff people drink after they have stomach surgery and the like? I thought people could survive indefinitely on that.
It's generally not marketed that way and it's unclear if it would work like that. Possibly the relatively new "Ensure Complete" (announced less than a year ago) might work.
Good point. Nobody has the time, money, and energy to construct perfectly-sourced and meticulously prepared meals three times a day. I cook a lot and I get to do a fun experimental food project maybe every second week - most of the time I'm falling back to the grind of stand-by stuff since I've got a family of 5 to take care of.
Obviously it wouldn't work for my case because there's no way I'd feed this stuff to my kids, but I can't really blame folks - even food-lovers - for wanting to just skip the effort with a big chunk of their meals.
Soylent is the first... to specifically target the market segment that is fawning over it. Ensure and the like are not seen as products for young active SV desk jockeys; instead it is that shit that old or ill people drink.
It doesn't hurt that Soylent has a distinct "anti-authoritarian" vibe going on with it, that tickles the "techies can solve any problem, everyone else isn't as clever as we are"-bone.
> Soylent is the first... to specifically target the market segment that is fawning over it. Ensure and the like are not seen as products for young active SV desk jockeys
There are actually lots of meal replacement powdered shakes that are marketed to young, active, middle-to-upper-class people.
Sure, but are they marketed to nerds? That I can think of, products like this tend to be marketed towards health enthusiasts, gym goers, body builders, hikers etc. Techies may be any or all of those things, but those products don't categorically stroke the egos of "techies" by playing into their preconceived image of themselves. I've got some protein shake mix (not quite the same thing, but close enough) above my sink, but nobody on HN cares about that stuff; it's not marketed like Soylent is.
The last time I discussed Soylent on this site, I compared the marketing phenomenon around it to the "School Teacher discovers [whatever], Doctors hate her!" ads. I think everyone is fawning over soylent because they are techies, Rhinehart is a techie, and a techie somehow 'disrupting' a non-tech field fits their mental image of superiority. If Rhinehart were a nutritionist and if he were marketing this to, say, people into cardio, then this product wouldn't be notable.
(Note that this isn't me saying the product will sell poorly. It is just my reason for not, say, thinking that this is going to "Change Everything"(tm))
I'd say this is a fair assessment. It's a pure marketing play, not a tech company in any meaningful sense of the word, any more than 5-Hour-Energy is a tech product.
From what I can tell, it's fairly new and unique. The closest thing I'm aware of both feature-wise and marketing-wise is "Ensure Complete" which was announced less than a year ago and still isn't marketed in quite the same way.
In Australia we have Sustagen. They also make a medically approved "Sustagen Hospital Formula" which is used by hospitals as a full meal replacement for extended periods (I've lived of it for multiple multi-month periods due to health issues). It is available in all supermarkets, and most corner stores and convenience stores.
As someone with serious medical issues who depends on meal replacements regularly, and through that experience has learned how important the right mixes are, I wouldn't touch Soylent with a ten foot pole. I'm really really worried (and convinced) people are going to end up with pretty serious health issues from Soylent but the fanboyistic reception it gets saps my energy to bother arguing with people about it.
> From what I can tell, it's fairly new and unique ...
It isn't, and it looks there was even an American company which tried to sell something similar (total meal replacement) in the past and failed. Maybe someone HNer will remember the name, as it was commented on a previous Soylent article.
> ... and still isn't marketed in quite the same way.
It isn't marketed in quite the same way because Abbott (the manufacturer) is a responsible company and is well aware a fully enteral diet has drawbacks.
Powdered shake meal replacements are all over Amazon. Moreover we've already seen Soylent's alternate pitch as a two meal replacement product which makes it little different than the Slim Fast delicious shake for breakfast, another for lunch and whatever you want for dinner that Tommy Lasorda and other people have hawked on TV for decades.
Meal replacement is almost always marketed as missing an occasional meal or up to 1 or (max) 2 meals in a day for up to a few consecutive days. Soylent is marketing 14-21 meals/week for several/many/all? months.
I'm pretty sure this was exactly my point. Soylent's original angle was as a total replacement and they've already started moving the goalposts to 14. 14 meals a week is the same thing that Slim Fast has pitched since the late 70's and no this wasn't just for occasional meals or 2-3 days at a time, customers were encouraged to follow Slim Fast's 2 shakes a day as a long term solution.
I haven't seen them market 14 meals/week, I was just putting out what I thought was a reasonable range. I don't think it's moving the goal posts. Rob said in the very first post that Soylent allowed him to enjoy regular meals much more.
Slim Fast, of course, is strictly marketed for weight loss. Soylent, not really at all.
I think that's the worrying thing about Soylent. I really wish they'd kept it experimental, or pushed it as suitable for daily use but not all meals, or some such.
If you can't make a tasty meal out of pasta or a frozen pizza, I would suggest the possibility that you are doing something wrong.
All frozen pizzas are not created equal. Shop around and try different brands and styles. Do not microwave them.
Pasta should be an exciting meal every time. You are probably using a low quality sauce, or overcooking it, or rinsing it after draining it (never do this). Use enough salt.
You can also doctor things up. A cheap box of macaroni and cheese is transformed by crumbling a couple slices of high quality bacon onto it.
You can dress up a frozen pizza with some extra toppings. Even canned black olives make a difference.
I'm not sure I'd use the word convenient either. Your protypical cheap bachelor microwave meal of pizza, burritos or pot pies beats soylent on both prep and cleanup. It also tastes better and is cheaper. A bowl of cereal or oatmeal ties on cleanup and price but wins on prep and taste. Energy bars for a lunch snack win on all counts.
At the end of day 2, he says that Rhinehart encouraged him to only eat as much as he needs, and only when hungry. The logs of days 3, 4 and 5 are much more positive once he starts eating only when he's hungry.
The chopping, prep, cooking part and eating I enjoy. It's the work involved in buying ingredients, bringing them to my home, as well as cleaning up the kitchen and doing dishes (even with a dishwasher!) afterwards that are the real inconvenience. Selecting which ingredients to buy and what dish to prepare also take up a lot of mental bandwidth. I don't like ordering/eating out excessively because it's too expensive, often unhygienic, with poor quality ingredients. I grew up on high-quality home cooked meals so I'm simply not used to it.
> The experiment drove enough interest that Rhinehart decided to do a pivot, and change his YC-backed startup from working on wireless networking to making Soylent full-time.
Yeah, that caught my eye too. I think the start-up world needs a better word for "we're completely abandoning our entire product direction and moving into a new industry" than "pivot". I'd suggest "reboot" but even that's a stretch.
"pivot" as commonly used now is code for "we did not pull an @ev (i.e. undo existing investment on change of direction such as odeo->twitter) and chose to continue using the $incubator brand licensing arrangement"
> They’re also relocating the company to Los Angeles because Rhinehart said the costs of operating in San Francisco were too high to have an office and manufacturing facilities.
Random snippet, but glad to hear this. It's exciting to watch to LA startup scene grow and thrive.
If you just want to save time but the Soylent thing creeps you out, try this: stop eating as often. I've been eating in a 5-hour window every day (5pm-10pm) and basically save 2 hours a day: I have no need for breakfast and have replaced lunch hour with a HIIT workout. More and more people seem to be doing this as well [1], so it might be a bit more trustworthy than some dude's magic all-in-one concoction.
What I think with absolutely no deep research into this is that if the ingredients are all foods or powders that are already on the market in other foods, it probably won't do short term damage to the body, as a lot of fast-food eating people probably would get the same amount of nutrition at the very least.
I would imagine long term damage would come from the mere fact that you're eating the same combination of foods/powders day in and day out. I'm pretty sure there are periods throughout history of people eating only one food and surviving (ie Irish in 1800s with potatoes, 3rd world countries with rice/beans) but it's not ideal or good long term.
Exactly. Eating a potato is fine. You can even survive eating only potatoes (so long as you vary the preparation, I believe), that isn't too controversial.
The problem comes if you try to tell me that surviving on only potatoes is a good idea. For that claim, I am going to demand some serious legwork. The potato salesman and a few potato enthusiasts claiming that he does it and feels fine isn't going to cut it.
> He gave it the self-deprecating name Soylent — after the dystopian movie Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers that society has been living off rations made of humans.
I wish he had chosen another name, not because I dislike the name Soylent but because people will always make this association with the movie. Any time I tell people about this project I get 'hur hur is it made of people?'
Regarding the quote, the name is not self-deprecating (at least by my understanding it is not intended to be), and Rob's influence is the book, not the movie.
> Actually, in the original book Make Room! Make Room! Soylent is made of soya and lentil. The movie changed many aspects of the book, though it's still one of my favourite movies. My Soylent is human-free.
How long until the lawsuits from someone who tries to live on Soylent alone and ends up doing damage to their body?
Are they going to use some of the money to hire people who know about nutrition?
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea and have lived off various meal replacement methods for short periods of time, but this still seems to me like 40% "custom meal replacement shake mix that I can order at TrueNutrition" and 60% marketing hype.
I drink Ensure Complete to replace about one meal per day (and I do that because I learned about Soylent and I thougt it was great and I wanted to cut my expenses and fatty greasy breakfast food intake). It's not cheap and not readily available (but not too hard to find), but it tastes fine. If Soylent is the same and can compete on accessibility, cost, convenience, or how it makes me feel then I'll probably buy it... and I'm a very common demographic. Investigating in Soylent seems like a smart bet.
What are the overhead/barriers to entry for this? If they are making a food/nutrition product, I imagine they'd have to hire people for food safety/regulatory compliance. Plus additional FDA compliance if they want to market this as a competitor to current inpatient GI tube feeding solutions/nutrition shakes (i.e. make it billable to insurance companies).
Remarkably few, which I found interesting. Food safety compliance has primarily been achieved by only using ingredients that are already identified as 'food safe'. And a lot of what Rhinehart has done is exactly what someone like 'Sara Lee' might do except they weren't trying to make it seem like a pie, rather its just goop.
If you're a person who likes eating, this will be a horrible thing, but if you're a utilitarian it can be quite reasonable. Presuming it is successful there is also a huge opportunity in prisons. By eliminating food preparation and eating utensils you mitigate both costs and threats.
Awesome link there, I had not heard of 'nutraloaf' (which is a good thing I guess). That suggests that if you wanted to use it in prisons it would have to be the 'standard' meal for everyone. Interesting.
Early in its 'development', if I'm remembering correctly, not long. But that's only once it's mixed. In it's dry form, I believe it'll last quite some time.
This suggests that shelf life is around 6 months to 24 months. Obviously this would be at suitable storage conditions - not too hot, etc. And I don't know what happens when the packet is opened. Some nutrients will degrade in contact with oxygen.
So if they get it worked out and good packets it could be long time.
$65/week seems like a remarkable amount of money for this. I have a wife, and a kid, so that's $10K a year to go full Soylent. (I'm not really planning on this, of course, but that's the idea, right?)
If you only "eat" Soylent, you're doing $9.29-ish a day. At 2.5 meals a day (breakfast is usually pretty cheap, so I count it at half), $3.71 a meal is not bad. If you do a lot of scratch cooking you may be spending less, depending on how fancy. It's about the same as other prepared foods (frozen dinners, etc.) If you eat out much, it's way less. Many people pay more than $65 for a single meal out.
I'd imagine it's similar to or cheaper than most people's food expenditures. If they actually can make it significantly cheaper, it could be a big deal.
I suppose sending it all to one place in big chunks makes it seem scarier, price-wise, which could be a problem for them. Food expenditures usually dribble out. They may want emulate that in their sales model, at least initially (weekly recurring transactions, or something.)
You're down to $3 a meal. Unless you're eating fast food or nothing but pasta... good luck finding another way to get to $3/meal.
[edit- Important clarification: I'm talking about a nutritionally complete, paleo-ish diet of healthy foods (which is what this is targeting to replace).
Of course you can eat for less than $3/meal, but you start to include less healthy things like chips, breads, pastas, etc. This is not the meal Soylent is intended to replace.]
$3.00 per person. That's $12.00 for a family of four. So let's compare. Last night I made for dinner:
1) 4-pack of boneless pork chops, about $5.00
2) 1 cup (2 cups cooked) yellow rice (rice with some seasonings) -- less that 50 cents
3) A couple potatoes sliced up. About 50 cents worth of potatoes (got the 10 lb bag for 5 bucks)
Browned the meat, put the rice in a skillet, cut up meat and put it on top, put potato slices on top of that, covered and baked for 45 minutes. Total prep time, 5 minutes, cost about 6 bucks. Feeds family of four, and had leftovers.
Some other recipes include things like a ham and noodles w/ cheese casserole (egg noodles, and a ham steak cut up on top), for around $6 to $7 or so; beef stew -- $4 to $6 for the stew meat, plus $1 - $2 for a bag of frozen mixed veggies and a couple potatoes; and variations on chicken fried rice, and even fajitas are all less than $10 a meal. Actually, the fajitas can go up to $15 if you get beef instead of chicken. And these all feed a family.
No one talks about it because the cost is negligible. Running a 1.5kW stovetop full blast for an hour costs 19 cents at the average electricity price in the US.
You may have missed the part where he said after browning the meat he baked it for 40 minutes. That is pretty near an hour. But I can't say what level it was being run for that near hour. And shipping is included in my Soylent order.
I don't really understand the downvotes. The person that talked about the meal they cooked listed items that were "less than 50 cents" as being important enough to list the cost of. However it seems that 19 cents is not important enough to list the cost of. Am I missing something that makes my statement factually incorrect and worthy of a downvote? or do people just not like the facts?
If we are talking about refrigerating the left overs then that would be after the fact. Lots of meals that people cook will need to be refrigerated if there is left overs. I think that is a wash. The Soylent itself does not require refrigeration.
Morning meal: granola or oatmeal (cost: $0.25-0.50 per person).
Afternoon meal: sandwich, maybe bag of chips ($1.00-2.00 per person).
Evening meal: meat, vegetables, carb ($2.00-3.00 per person).
I guess if you compare it to eating out it's pretty cheap, but if you compare it to cooking (although there isn't much cooking in the mealplan above, really just dinner), it looks pretty pricey.
This is interesting - are we sticking to $3 per meal, or $65 per week? Because bulk buying rice and grains and pulses, tins, stocks, spices, etc helps a lot. You then buy fruit and veg daily / weekly. You use meat that can be turned into several meals - buy a chicken and roast it. Use the left overs for sandwiches. Boil the carcass for soup.
While it is definitely possible to go below $3/meal (perhaps even $1/meal if you are willing to subsist on ramen and multivitamins), it is very likely that GP already spends much more than that - except he never did the math.
The largest problem to long term success of Soylent must be that people will grow weary of eating the same tasting food. You can add a couple of flavors but that is it. Try eating exclusively your favorite food, I doubt you would enjoy it after 6 months.
I guess you could mix it with 1/3 of normal food, but still two out of three meals are the same always.
I’ve mostly lived of my ‘standard meal’ (eggs, ham, tomatoes and pasta fried in a pan for breakfast and dinner) now for the past four-or-so years and I still like it.
Many other people eat bread with assorted cold cuts daily for dinner throughout their life.
Yes you are correct, i forgot to mention that Soylent is a basically a drink and has uniform taste, compared to a normal meal in which you chew many ingredients and get the individual taste of them.
I currently require over 5000 calories a day and I am doing 4/7 days entirely with Soylent. It is really hard. However, I am surprised I can even do it some days and think about how much harder it would be if I picked some other nutritionally complete dish that tastes better.
I doubt anyone opting for a meal replacement drink is expecting it to taste great day-in day-out. It serves a (utilitarian) purpose, that's all. Enjoyment's barely a concern, it's liquid food.
I would love to see Soylent someday include a strong feedback loop into tweaking/improving the product over time based on a stream of measured data from regular users. i.e. Pay some users to use the product in varying amounts and pay them to live a measured life with regular blood tests, fitness tests, etc.
It would be awesome if they reach the scale where there are always a certain percentage of Soylent users that are a constantly measured population used to see how changes in the soylent formula affects overall health. This way they could provably show a formula improving every year instead of settling for a product that is "perfected" and then never really messed with once it achieves market success.
Food is a major part of our culture. It doubt that it will be completely replaced by supplements like this. However I can see genuine use cases for this. I can see this might be useful for certain military operations, such as reconnaissance missions, which require troops be travel lightly without support for prolonged periods, and long term space missions where the marginal cost of extra space and weight is very expensive. Athletes on specialized diets may also use this to control their nutritional intake more precisely.
Our culture might even shift to a situation where we take supplements for our routine nutritional needs and enjoy traditional meals for special occasions, like when we have guests over.
One thing that might hurt Soylent long term is that it doesn't taste very good when it is not chilled. It might work well for stay at home/office startup people with a fridge, but when you are traveling the taste suffers greatly.
We were discussing the traveling problem, not the poor. But, I think it actually just tastes worse when it's not cold, so it could still potentially help.
If this doesn't take off with mass public adoption, I bet there's a great application here for people who are traveling and can't afford to bring a full kitchen with them (multi-day hikes, soldiers, road trips, etc).
There's clearly some market for this. The food giants haven't yet entered because it's risky, and the supply chains for the ingredients still being developed. As soon as Soylent is successfully shipping safe product, however, the big companies will jump in and crush Soylent Corp with their lower pricing and higher profit margins due to their scale of production.
This is what I don't understand about Soylent: assuming that these are similar products and offer similar nutritional profiles, no one would reccomend that you base 90% of your diet on ensure. It sounds crazy. Is this mostly about rebranding/recontextualizing a similar product for another audience? Otherwise I don't see why it's innovative.
Abbott and Nestle and other companies only offer replacements meant for 90%+ diet use for people under medical supervision. I don't think we totally know how to create a reliable replacement without missing something - and everyone's needs are different - so until someone figures out how to solve that problem it's not going to exist in a form you can buy off supermarket shelves.
The idea of drinking Ensure for 90% of my meals scares me for the same reason Soylent does. The unknowns are too much - small startup or major pharmaceutical company alike.
Add Sustagen to that list, who make meal replacement shakes, including a medically certified "hospital formula" used by hospitals and health services as a full time long term meal replacement. Very popular here in Australia and available in all supermarkets.
Branding. Though I'd be a little surprised if they don't ultimately get sued over the Soylent name. They'd be smarter to change it now before they have mass recognition and it gets a lot costlier to do so.
They can compete too on "nutrition". Talk about how the big corps cut corners (which they will) and how that reduces the utility of their finely tuned formula.
Doesn't have to make sense, just has to sound plausible.
I'd be worried about that too. First-mover has some advantages, but look at what has happened with Greek yogurt. I'm sure the Chobani people are doing well, but they weren't exclusive for long. Even worse outcome is Powerbar - their name is essentially genericized, but they got beat by everybody and their brother.
Once this is out in the wild, I'll be curious to see how people who adopt this for the majority of their diet handle themselves when eating "real" food. It's pretty common for dieters to have serious eating binges when they break their diet, and I could see the same thing happening with people who choose to use these sorts of meal replacements for the bulk of their diet.
Does soylent contain actual soy or not? If not is it still going to affect estrogen like soy? What are the actual facts on excess soy (or anything in its makeup that's included in soylent) and estrogen? What are any hormonal changes that have been seen in the months of testing so far if this has been tested?
Why does the author of the article take $1.5 million in funding and somehow turn that into "$1.5 million in pre-orders"? Or do they actually have $1.5M in pre-orders in addition to funding for the business?
(Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't worry so much about middlebrow dismissals floating to the top of HN threads. They probably do have some predictive value.)