7 ms·

Soylent’s product itself has zero novelty in it. Meal Replacement Powders (MRPs) have been around for decades and are popular among the bodybuilding crowd. The

by rl12345 10y ago

Soylent’s product itself has zero novelty in it. Meal Replacement Powders (MRPs) have been around for decades and are popular among the bodybuilding crowd. The only “innovation” Soylent has brought to the table was being the first company to market MRPs to geeks and hipsters -- and that's it. Personally, I've never tried their product because the ingredients they use seemed average/fudged at best (and I tend to avoid brands that pop out of nowhere with a lot of hype). Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself.

anExcitedBeast 10y ago
> Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself. That defeats my primary use case for MRP: not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life.
- rl12345 10y ago
  It requires you a little more upfront work indeed but once you have your stack mixed and stored it gets as practical as with any other MRP.
  - ewzimm 10y ago
    I think it goes against a lot of people's idea of efficieny. Why should each person need to research, source, and mix their own MRP if we have similar needs?
    - fnord123 10y ago
      Because you might not don't trust a company to do a good job at the price point in question.
      - rl12345 10y ago
        True. Also many times they don't tell the real story of what's really inside their packages.
    - 6stringmerc 10y ago
      In the past when I was using legal prohormones and needed to feed in a lot of protein and nutrients, a 1 gallon milk jug filled with mix and stored in the fridge was ridiculously efficient. There's no way it was more unpleasant than Soylent; I distinctly remember kind of enjoying the chocolate flavor. The deal is that people have to know what their body needs first and foremost. Gain? Lose? Maintain? All are different goals and methods. Solyent advertising as an off-the-shelf works-for-all-people might be fundamentally true, but I don't think it can be argued that it's the ideal for each and every person.
    - rl12345 10y ago
      That's why I started the sentence with "if you care about maximizing the quality of your product" -- it's a trade off. If you are ok with getting the average stuff, it's absolutely not necessary to customize your own MRP. The problem is, in the supplement industry, "average" often times means bad, so at least do a little research on any off-the-shelf supplement you're about to buy.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  but cooking good meals is so damn easy, there are even companies which will deliver the ingredients to very nice meals if you want to cook them. anecdotal at best, but a friend years ago was diagnosed with adult diabetes and told he had to change his diet. this guy never cooked. part of his transition was cooking classes provided as part of his diabetes counseling. he discovered a world of quick and easy meals, many in a single pan and all were healthy.
  - the_duke 10y ago
    Cooking still takes time. For anything decent, you need AT LEAST 30 minutes, usually more like 60+. And then comes the cleaning of pots, pans, filling the dishwasher. That's a WHOLE HOUR I could be wasting my time on HN instead!
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      Listen to a podcast or audiobook etc. while you cook.
      - dasboth 10y ago
        This is underrated advice that applies to any household chore. I like cooking for the sake of cooking but the time spent on it feels wasteful. If I put on an educational podcast I suddenly don't mind the time I spend cooking/washing dishes/whatever.
    - digler999 10y ago
      man, I'm glad I'm not the only one. One compromise I found that works is go to the deli at your grocery store. Get a half pound of some salad (doesnt have to be greens, they have potato salad, noodle salad, etc ), then get either "tuna salad" or "chicken salad", and buy a loaf of bread or crackers. Then just scoop the meat-salad onto your crackers/bread slice right before you eat it. It's like JIT cooking. Cleanup consists of throwing away the salad containers.
    - kaitai 10y ago
      I'm sitting here eating my scrambled-eggs breakfast taco. Fry eggs, fry taco (for decadence), add veggie condiments that are already prepared, eat. I even use a cast-iron skillet so I don't have to wash it, just rinse & leave on the burner a minute. 10 min. Cookbook author Melissa Joulwan has an algorithmic approach to weekly meal prep that results in delicious and easy weekday meals, if you're willing to make the "cook 2 hrs on weekend + cook no more during the week" trade-off. It's not the mere minutes that Soylent promises, but for some folks reading this it might be useful. It's paleo so easy to adapt to high protein/low carb/high veggie/whatever floats your boat here.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  > not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life. As I've come around to thinking of the human body as more of a system than a binary switch (sick/not sick), I've come to appreciate that natural food sources have a lot of nutrients in them that are hard to get with manufactured foods. There's a lot of debate about studies proving this one way or another, but for me looking at it intuitively from a co-evolution standpoint (foods we eat evolved in conjunction with humans) is proof enough to pay attention to the quality of my food. The intuition is basically: food we've been cultivating and bringing around with us for millions of years is going to be more beneficial to our internal chemistry than a substitute we recently made up to save money on production costs. I also view eating as a chore (except when it's not), so I often end up eating this: black beans, chicken, guac, milk PS: for the "naturalistic fallacy" group, how do you account for the role of evolution as an optimizer for health vs evolution as optimizer for 20th century economic cost? Optimization targets make a difference.
  - SippinLean 10y ago
    naturalistic fallacy
    - gwbas1c 10y ago
      Not really. We still really don't know as much about nutrition than we think we do. That is why eating a varied diet is promoted; because we just don't understand what we need as well as we think we do.
    - orasis 10y ago
      and the macro-nutrient focused approach of the last decades is scientistic fallacy. Mindfully listening to the body will lead to better adaptation than formulaic consumption.
    - soundwave106 10y ago
      In my opinion, no. We can't even completely understand all of the chemical reactions (the Maillard reaction) involved in making toast at this point. Sure, we do have a fair bit of nutrition knowledge right now, of course, and not everything natural is good for you, of course. However, current popular "natural food" at this point has been vetted through centuries of sampling and cross breeding. At this point I would consider it "more reliable" than processed MRPs (soylent powder is made of natural ingredients too but has been very heavily processed to get where it is) for that reason alone. MRPs are okay every now and then, sure. Personally I would bet against using them all the time. Even in the bodybuilding community where whey protein supplements are popular, the consensus seems to be its much better to get your protein from a chicken breast if possible.
- alexmorenodev 10y ago
  2 years of gym and I never needed these powders to fill up my macros. >sunday >market, buy groceries, pasta and meat for whole week >cook everything at once >put everything on freezer >clean up everything only once Of course, I need to wash my dishes during week, but it takes literally 1 minute and half. And you can argue that there are powder to purposes other than macros, and I agree with you that you must take it if you think you need to. I, personally, don't.
mpg33 10y ago
I'm not even a "foodie" person and the idea of just eating these meal replacements all the time seems like being in "food prison."
- rl12345 10y ago
  Agreed. Personally, I take supplements as a way to complement my normal diet -- not to substitute it. Once in a while, when it's not possible to have a real food meal, those MRPs can be also very handy.
  - mpg33 10y ago
    Although I'd imagine a liquid diet where you are mainly only consuming smoothie type beverages has to be less hard on your digestive system just because of the simply fact it requires less effort to break down?
    - ploomans 10y ago
      I don't think "less hard on your digestive system" is an advantage but rather a disadvantage. Just like "less hard on you bones" is not really an advantage for astronauts that spend a couple of weeks/months in space. If you want to have a healthy body you have to put it under a stress level for which it was designed by evolution. I.e. exercise once in a while and don't just sit in front of your computer, eat enough fibres and harder to digest food, etc
    - rl12345 10y ago
      Our bodies having to break down food is not necessarily bad. For example, it allows you to receive a steady stream of nutrients throughout the day, instead of getting it all at once and being deprived later on.
    - kaitai 10y ago
      A lot of our digestive flora actually uses "non-digestible" components for sustenance, we're finding. There can be surprising and unexpected side effects to eliminating food components we thought we just excreted. Fiber, for instance, is technically not all digested -- much just passes through -- but it's really important! Other types of fiber are fermented in the gut depending on what bacteria you've got.
ghaff 10y ago
If someone marketed this type of product as a reasonably nutritious meal on the go as an alternative to grabbing a Big Mac or a soggy slice of pizza, it would be utterly unobjectionable--and no one would pay it the slightest mind. So instead we get this narrative around meal replacement for Silicon Valley types who are too busy advancing Western civilization with a Facebook for Farmers to have time to eat.
- minikites 10y ago
  In the USA, we love to aspire to be other, "better" people. It's why some poor people vote against their own interests to cut taxes on the rich (thinking that one day they'll be wealthy enough to benefit from it), it's why Uber is a "revolutionary" and not a regulation-dodging jitney cab service, it's definitely what's powering much of tech bubble at this point, and Soylent is but another example of all this in action.
  - sornaensis 10y ago
    I know this comment got downvotes for being kind of snarky/evoking political debate, but I just thought I'd throw my support out for the main sentiment. It seems like a lot of startups are more marketing rather than technological successes. And I'm not sure I really like that.
- harveywi 10y ago
  What's wrong with skipping a meal? (While we're on the subject, what's right about it?) Folks have been sold a solution to a problem that does not exist. Marketing and its various permutations wins again. The use case of this aptly-named "Soylent" product is a load of hooey. When the military starts using meal replacement powders instead of MREs, then I will reconsider my position on this issue.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    >What's wrong with skipping a meal? Absolutely nothing. But it's not uncommon, if you skip a meal, to feel a bit low energy and/or to snack instead. When I'm out doing things, I'll often skip lunch but I may have a granola bar, fruit, some nuts, or something along those lines.
Chathamization 10y ago
> The only “innovation” Soylent has brought to the table was being the first company to market MRPs to geeks and hipsters -- and that's it. That's not true though. Look at the nutritional information for MRPs compared to soylent. 3 meals on an MRP will give you 21% of your daily value of potassium; Soylent will give you 100%. 3 meals will give you 12% of your dietary fiber from MRPs, 96% from MRPs. The goal of Soylent is to provide you with all the nutrients you need if you eat it 3 times a day. You can argue whether or not it achieves this goal, but it's not even the aim of the MRPs. You can find some examples of people who tried an MRP only diet online; they're pretty good examples of why MRPs are not the same as Soylent at all.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- werdna123 10y ago
  Exactly. Soylent is the first meal replacement to specifically aim for balanced nutrition. It's like OP hasn't even researched this stuff
zebraflask 10y ago
It might just be an irrational perception, but when this first came out and got some media attention, I thought it was a great example of the attitude that some engineers/developers have: "too good to do something normal like eat a sandwich, the only thing that matters is more coding." It struck me as a fundamentally antisocial product developed by someone who might have some kind of an eating disorder. But, like I said, that might only be a perception.
- werdna123 10y ago
  Can you keep a sandwich in your backpack for weeks and it won't go bad? Can you eat a sandwich without any crumbs? Can you eat a sandwich in meeting rooms with "Drinks allowed but no food allowed?" There are many more use cases than you have thought of
oldmanjay 10y ago
Your dismissal is 100% emotional. Do you have any reasons that I should find it compelling or are you relying entirely on emotional resonance to make your anti-soylent case?
- bbctol 10y ago
  What? The dismissal was that the product previously existed. What's emotional about that?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    What's not emotional about requiring products you have no hand in to meet your standards of innovation?
    - bbctol 10y ago
      What... what is emotional about that? Saying a product is trying to fill a need which has already been filled is the least emotional reason I can think of to not purchase something.
      - oldmanjay 10y ago
        Fair enough
- rl12345 10y ago
  How about the company itself taking their product out of the market because it's making people sick?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    That wasn't the reason given for the dismissal. I'm not arguing anything in particular about soylent, and in fact I don't care about it at all. I'm just pointing out that personal standards are a boring emotional basis for deciding what is innovative.
squeaky-clean 10y ago
Find me a MRP that has: A balanced amount of nutrients, and not just 600% protein and 10% of everything else. Isn't loaded with sugar so it tastes like a dessert. Isn't filled with artificial sweeteners so it tastes like a fake dessert. And isn't nutritionally designed for body-builders / children / elderly. I wouldn't mind switching away from Soylent. With articles like this, and their spammy marketing for their new products (no, I don't want a coffee flavored drink, no I don't want a candy bar). But I don't know any other products like it aside from the Soylent clones.
- Musonius 10y ago
  Huel
  - squeaky-clean 10y ago
    The only person to respond with a real answer! Thank you! An actual product with an unflavored version that's low in sugar. Sadly I see no option to have it shipped to the US on their website.
- another_account 10y ago
  Slimfast and Complan off the top of my head. And those two have been around for decades. MyProtein sell simular stuff that is more balanced than whey protein + whole milk for a meal replacement. Also, whey + whole milk + instant oats lets you control the macros fairly well, assuming your getting all your micro-nutrients from real food elsewhere. And this is without looking on google. Id bet there are many many more. All the own-brand versions of slimfast for example.
  - squeaky-clean 10y ago
    I know those, and they don't match any of my criteria. Slimfast has no flavors that aren't dessert drinks. For a 400 calorie serving of Slimfast original, it's over 36g sugars (vs 9g Soylent). Slimfast Advanced has almost no sugar, but is "sweetened with non-nutritive sweetener" (from their website). I can't find which actual sweetener it is, but most artificial sweeteners upset my stomach and taste more terrible than sweet. Complan is also loaded with carbs, (33g sugar + 30g else) and has no fiber. They're marketed as meal replacements, but I don't see how they're anything but vitamin enriched milk shakes.
md2be 10y ago
You are spot on. Almost 30 years ago the tiger bar meal replacement bar was introduced and 1000s have followed. I'm trying to understand how the tech community doesn't get this? The big natural foods trade show happens a few times a year. It is referred to as NatutalExpo East / West. I've been attending (as a food scientist and entrepreneur) for more than a decade. Food bars are perhaps have the lowest barrier to entry. If you have the 10K, I can find you a a dozen copackers who will produce 3-5 thousand bars for you.
- pinot 10y ago
  As another FS person, I was looking around for bay-area jobs and saw an ad for Soylent. This was probably in 2013. They were looking for someone w/ a FS background to bag product and other general work like this and I was shocked that they weren't using a co-packer.
- manglav 10y ago
  Do you have any contact information? I'd be interested in producing a different food bar for a specific market.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by rl12345 10y ago

anExcitedBeast 10y ago

> Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself. That defeats my primary use case for MRP: not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life.

rl12345 10y ago
It requires you a little more upfront work indeed but once you have your stack mixed and stored it gets as practical as with any other MRP.
- ewzimm 10y ago
  I think it goes against a lot of people's idea of efficieny. Why should each person need to research, source, and mix their own MRP if we have similar needs?
  - fnord123 10y ago
    Because you might not don't trust a company to do a good job at the price point in question.
    - rl12345 10y ago
      True. Also many times they don't tell the real story of what's really inside their packages.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    In the past when I was using legal prohormones and needed to feed in a lot of protein and nutrients, a 1 gallon milk jug filled with mix and stored in the fridge was ridiculously efficient. There's no way it was more unpleasant than Soylent; I distinctly remember kind of enjoying the chocolate flavor. The deal is that people have to know what their body needs first and foremost. Gain? Lose? Maintain? All are different goals and methods. Solyent advertising as an off-the-shelf works-for-all-people might be fundamentally true, but I don't think it can be argued that it's the ideal for each and every person.
  - rl12345 10y ago
    That's why I started the sentence with "if you care about maximizing the quality of your product" -- it's a trade off. If you are ok with getting the average stuff, it's absolutely not necessary to customize your own MRP. The problem is, in the supplement industry, "average" often times means bad, so at least do a little research on any off-the-shelf supplement you're about to buy.
Shivetya 10y ago
but cooking good meals is so damn easy, there are even companies which will deliver the ingredients to very nice meals if you want to cook them. anecdotal at best, but a friend years ago was diagnosed with adult diabetes and told he had to change his diet. this guy never cooked. part of his transition was cooking classes provided as part of his diabetes counseling. he discovered a world of quick and easy meals, many in a single pan and all were healthy.
- the_duke 10y ago
  Cooking still takes time. For anything decent, you need AT LEAST 30 minutes, usually more like 60+. And then comes the cleaning of pots, pans, filling the dishwasher. That's a WHOLE HOUR I could be wasting my time on HN instead!
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    Listen to a podcast or audiobook etc. while you cook.
    - dasboth 10y ago
      This is underrated advice that applies to any household chore. I like cooking for the sake of cooking but the time spent on it feels wasteful. If I put on an educational podcast I suddenly don't mind the time I spend cooking/washing dishes/whatever.
  - digler999 10y ago
    man, I'm glad I'm not the only one. One compromise I found that works is go to the deli at your grocery store. Get a half pound of some salad (doesnt have to be greens, they have potato salad, noodle salad, etc ), then get either "tuna salad" or "chicken salad", and buy a loaf of bread or crackers. Then just scoop the meat-salad onto your crackers/bread slice right before you eat it. It's like JIT cooking. Cleanup consists of throwing away the salad containers.
  - kaitai 10y ago
    I'm sitting here eating my scrambled-eggs breakfast taco. Fry eggs, fry taco (for decadence), add veggie condiments that are already prepared, eat. I even use a cast-iron skillet so I don't have to wash it, just rinse & leave on the burner a minute. 10 min. Cookbook author Melissa Joulwan has an algorithmic approach to weekly meal prep that results in delicious and easy weekday meals, if you're willing to make the "cook 2 hrs on weekend + cook no more during the week" trade-off. It's not the mere minutes that Soylent promises, but for some folks reading this it might be useful. It's paleo so easy to adapt to high protein/low carb/high veggie/whatever floats your boat here.
dave_sullivan 10y ago
> not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life. As I've come around to thinking of the human body as more of a system than a binary switch (sick/not sick), I've come to appreciate that natural food sources have a lot of nutrients in them that are hard to get with manufactured foods. There's a lot of debate about studies proving this one way or another, but for me looking at it intuitively from a co-evolution standpoint (foods we eat evolved in conjunction with humans) is proof enough to pay attention to the quality of my food. The intuition is basically: food we've been cultivating and bringing around with us for millions of years is going to be more beneficial to our internal chemistry than a substitute we recently made up to save money on production costs. I also view eating as a chore (except when it's not), so I often end up eating this: black beans, chicken, guac, milk PS: for the "naturalistic fallacy" group, how do you account for the role of evolution as an optimizer for health vs evolution as optimizer for 20th century economic cost? Optimization targets make a difference.
- SippinLean 10y ago
  naturalistic fallacy
  - gwbas1c 10y ago
    Not really. We still really don't know as much about nutrition than we think we do. That is why eating a varied diet is promoted; because we just don't understand what we need as well as we think we do.
  - orasis 10y ago
    and the macro-nutrient focused approach of the last decades is scientistic fallacy. Mindfully listening to the body will lead to better adaptation than formulaic consumption.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    In my opinion, no. We can't even completely understand all of the chemical reactions (the Maillard reaction) involved in making toast at this point. Sure, we do have a fair bit of nutrition knowledge right now, of course, and not everything natural is good for you, of course. However, current popular "natural food" at this point has been vetted through centuries of sampling and cross breeding. At this point I would consider it "more reliable" than processed MRPs (soylent powder is made of natural ingredients too but has been very heavily processed to get where it is) for that reason alone. MRPs are okay every now and then, sure. Personally I would bet against using them all the time. Even in the bodybuilding community where whey protein supplements are popular, the consensus seems to be its much better to get your protein from a chicken breast if possible.
alexmorenodev 10y ago
2 years of gym and I never needed these powders to fill up my macros. >sunday >market, buy groceries, pasta and meat for whole week >cook everything at once >put everything on freezer >clean up everything only once Of course, I need to wash my dishes during week, but it takes literally 1 minute and half. And you can argue that there are powder to purposes other than macros, and I agree with you that you must take it if you think you need to. I, personally, don't.

mpg33 10y ago

I'm not even a "foodie" person and the idea of just eating these meal replacements all the time seems like being in "food prison."

rl12345 10y ago
Agreed. Personally, I take supplements as a way to complement my normal diet -- not to substitute it. Once in a while, when it's not possible to have a real food meal, those MRPs can be also very handy.
- mpg33 10y ago
  Although I'd imagine a liquid diet where you are mainly only consuming smoothie type beverages has to be less hard on your digestive system just because of the simply fact it requires less effort to break down?
  - ploomans 10y ago
    I don't think "less hard on your digestive system" is an advantage but rather a disadvantage. Just like "less hard on you bones" is not really an advantage for astronauts that spend a couple of weeks/months in space. If you want to have a healthy body you have to put it under a stress level for which it was designed by evolution. I.e. exercise once in a while and don't just sit in front of your computer, eat enough fibres and harder to digest food, etc
  - rl12345 10y ago
    Our bodies having to break down food is not necessarily bad. For example, it allows you to receive a steady stream of nutrients throughout the day, instead of getting it all at once and being deprived later on.
  - kaitai 10y ago
    A lot of our digestive flora actually uses "non-digestible" components for sustenance, we're finding. There can be surprising and unexpected side effects to eliminating food components we thought we just excreted. Fiber, for instance, is technically not all digested -- much just passes through -- but it's really important! Other types of fiber are fermented in the gut depending on what bacteria you've got.

ghaff 10y ago

If someone marketed this type of product as a reasonably nutritious meal on the go as an alternative to grabbing a Big Mac or a soggy slice of pizza, it would be utterly unobjectionable--and no one would pay it the slightest mind. So instead we get this narrative around meal replacement for Silicon Valley types who are too busy advancing Western civilization with a Facebook for Farmers to have time to eat.

minikites 10y ago
In the USA, we love to aspire to be other, "better" people. It's why some poor people vote against their own interests to cut taxes on the rich (thinking that one day they'll be wealthy enough to benefit from it), it's why Uber is a "revolutionary" and not a regulation-dodging jitney cab service, it's definitely what's powering much of tech bubble at this point, and Soylent is but another example of all this in action.
- sornaensis 10y ago
  I know this comment got downvotes for being kind of snarky/evoking political debate, but I just thought I'd throw my support out for the main sentiment. It seems like a lot of startups are more marketing rather than technological successes. And I'm not sure I really like that.
harveywi 10y ago
What's wrong with skipping a meal? (While we're on the subject, what's right about it?) Folks have been sold a solution to a problem that does not exist. Marketing and its various permutations wins again. The use case of this aptly-named "Soylent" product is a load of hooey. When the military starts using meal replacement powders instead of MREs, then I will reconsider my position on this issue.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >What's wrong with skipping a meal? Absolutely nothing. But it's not uncommon, if you skip a meal, to feel a bit low energy and/or to snack instead. When I'm out doing things, I'll often skip lunch but I may have a granola bar, fruit, some nuts, or something along those lines.

Chathamization 10y ago

> The only “innovation” Soylent has brought to the table was being the first company to market MRPs to geeks and hipsters -- and that's it. That's not true though. Look at the nutritional information for MRPs compared to soylent. 3 meals on an MRP will give you 21% of your daily value of potassium; Soylent will give you 100%. 3 meals will give you 12% of your dietary fiber from MRPs, 96% from MRPs. The goal of Soylent is to provide you with all the nutrients you need if you eat it 3 times a day. You can argue whether or not it achieves this goal, but it's not even the aim of the MRPs. You can find some examples of people who tried an MRP only diet online; they're pretty good examples of why MRPs are not the same as Soylent at all.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
werdna123 10y ago
Exactly. Soylent is the first meal replacement to specifically aim for balanced nutrition. It's like OP hasn't even researched this stuff

zebraflask 10y ago

It might just be an irrational perception, but when this first came out and got some media attention, I thought it was a great example of the attitude that some engineers/developers have: "too good to do something normal like eat a sandwich, the only thing that matters is more coding." It struck me as a fundamentally antisocial product developed by someone who might have some kind of an eating disorder. But, like I said, that might only be a perception.

werdna123 10y ago
Can you keep a sandwich in your backpack for weeks and it won't go bad? Can you eat a sandwich without any crumbs? Can you eat a sandwich in meeting rooms with "Drinks allowed but no food allowed?" There are many more use cases than you have thought of

oldmanjay 10y ago

Your dismissal is 100% emotional. Do you have any reasons that I should find it compelling or are you relying entirely on emotional resonance to make your anti-soylent case?

bbctol 10y ago
What? The dismissal was that the product previously existed. What's emotional about that?
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  What's not emotional about requiring products you have no hand in to meet your standards of innovation?
  - bbctol 10y ago
    What... what is emotional about that? Saying a product is trying to fill a need which has already been filled is the least emotional reason I can think of to not purchase something.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      Fair enough
rl12345 10y ago
How about the company itself taking their product out of the market because it's making people sick?
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  That wasn't the reason given for the dismissal. I'm not arguing anything in particular about soylent, and in fact I don't care about it at all. I'm just pointing out that personal standards are a boring emotional basis for deciding what is innovative.

squeaky-clean 10y ago

Find me a MRP that has: A balanced amount of nutrients, and not just 600% protein and 10% of everything else. Isn't loaded with sugar so it tastes like a dessert. Isn't filled with artificial sweeteners so it tastes like a fake dessert. And isn't nutritionally designed for body-builders / children / elderly. I wouldn't mind switching away from Soylent. With articles like this, and their spammy marketing for their new products (no, I don't want a coffee flavored drink, no I don't want a candy bar). But I don't know any other products like it aside from the Soylent clones.

Musonius 10y ago
Huel
- squeaky-clean 10y ago
  The only person to respond with a real answer! Thank you! An actual product with an unflavored version that's low in sugar. Sadly I see no option to have it shipped to the US on their website.
another_account 10y ago
Slimfast and Complan off the top of my head. And those two have been around for decades. MyProtein sell simular stuff that is more balanced than whey protein + whole milk for a meal replacement. Also, whey + whole milk + instant oats lets you control the macros fairly well, assuming your getting all your micro-nutrients from real food elsewhere. And this is without looking on google. Id bet there are many many more. All the own-brand versions of slimfast for example.
- squeaky-clean 10y ago
  I know those, and they don't match any of my criteria. Slimfast has no flavors that aren't dessert drinks. For a 400 calorie serving of Slimfast original, it's over 36g sugars (vs 9g Soylent). Slimfast Advanced has almost no sugar, but is "sweetened with non-nutritive sweetener" (from their website). I can't find which actual sweetener it is, but most artificial sweeteners upset my stomach and taste more terrible than sweet. Complan is also loaded with carbs, (33g sugar + 30g else) and has no fiber. They're marketed as meal replacements, but I don't see how they're anything but vitamin enriched milk shakes.

md2be 10y ago

You are spot on. Almost 30 years ago the tiger bar meal replacement bar was introduced and 1000s have followed. I'm trying to understand how the tech community doesn't get this? The big natural foods trade show happens a few times a year. It is referred to as NatutalExpo East / West. I've been attending (as a food scientist and entrepreneur) for more than a decade. Food bars are perhaps have the lowest barrier to entry. If you have the 10K, I can find you a a dozen copackers who will produce 3-5 thousand bars for you.

pinot 10y ago
As another FS person, I was looking around for bay-area jobs and saw an ad for Soylent. This was probably in 2013. They were looking for someone w/ a FS background to bag product and other general work like this and I was shocked that they weren't using a co-packer.
manglav 10y ago
Do you have any contact information? I'd be interested in producing a different food bar for a specific market.

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