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.<p>(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.)
Call me an anti-foodie<p>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?"<p>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.
> 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.<p>That's really stretching what pivoting is, no?
> <i>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.</i><p>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.<p>[1]<p><a href="http://fast-5.org/content/summary" rel="nofollow">http://fast-5.org/content/summary</a><p><a href="http://www.leangains.com/2010/04/leangains-guide.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.leangains.com/2010/04/leangains-guide.html</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting</a>
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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?'<p>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.<p>From <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requires-food" rel="nofollow">http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requi...</a>:<p>> 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?<p>Are they going to use some of the money to hire people who know about nutrition?<p>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).
$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?)
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.<p>I guess you could mix it with 1/3 of normal food, but still two out of three meals are the same always.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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).
How will they compete with a large food company?<p>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.
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?