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Soylent Closes $1.5M In Seed Funding From Lerer, Andreessen Horowitz
- deletes 13y agoThe 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.
- Pxtl 13y agoSlim-fast and the like already get people doing that - Slimfast for breakfast and lunch, eat a regular dinner. And yes, they come in alternate flavours.
- aroch 13y agoAnd I doubt those people aren't weary of it...
- claudius 13y agoI’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.
- deletes 13y agoYes 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.
- nether 13y agoI 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.
- caublestone 13y agoI 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.
- Pxtl 13y agoBest of luck to him. I still wouldn't touch his ichor with a ten-foot pole.
- JonSkeptic 13y agoIf they need more money, they can try issuing it in different colors next i.e. Soylent: Blue, red, yellow, green.
- sharkweek 13y agoCall me an anti-foodie 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.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoIf they make Soylent In A Can, you can have my entire yearly grocery/restaurant budget.
- cylinder 13y agoThe 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.
- goostavos 13y agoWhen 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.
- caycep 13y agoWhat 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).
- ChuckMcM 13y agoRemarkably 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.
- not_that_noob 13y agoThough one would assume one would provoke a riot if Soylent was being served in preference to 'real' food.
- mikeash 13y agoThe basic concept is already used in prisons, although not in the general population: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf
- ChuckMcM 13y agoAwesome 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.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
- guynamedloren 13y ago> 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.
- tdees40 13y ago$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?)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zacharycohn 13y ago$65/week for 3 meals a day, 21 meals a week? 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.]
- toomuchtodo 13y agowww.budgetbytes.com Everything under $2/meal.
- beagle3 13y agoWhile 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.
- tdees40 13y agoMorning 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.
- shocks 13y agoAnyone in England know of a good place to source ingredients?
- pa5tabear 13y agoHow will they compete with a large food company? 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.
- DanBC 13y ago> The food giants haven't yet entered Every single time Soylent is mentioned the other companies selling the same, or better, gloop are mentioned. Here's Nutricia (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip// https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//) Here's Abbott Nutrition (http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands) Here's the consumer site for Ensure (http://ensure.com/ http://ensure.com/) These are, despite what some people say, complete foods that can be used to replace all food you eat.
- awongh 13y agoThis 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.
- silencio 13y agoAbbott 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.
- 13y ago
- zacharycohn 13y agoIf 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).
- robertfw 13y ago> 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. That's really stretching what pivoting is, no?
- Pxtl 13y agoYeah, 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.
- accountoftheday 13y ago"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"
- auctiontheory 13y agoMother of all Pivots. It's a MOOP!
- diziet 13y agoOne 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.
- staunch 13y agoPour it over some ice?
- stcredzero 13y agoThermos bottles and ice?
- pilgrim689 13y agoIf 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. [1] http://fast-5.org/content/summary http://fast-5.org/content/summary http://www.leangains.com/2010/04/leangains-guide.html http://www.leangains.com/2010/04/leangains-guide.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting
- stcredzero 13y ago> If you just want to save time but the Soylent thing creeps you out, try this: stop eating as often. Apparently real american cowboys do just this. During the busy season, some ranch-hands end up eating just one huge meal a day.
- dingaling 13y agoBe very careful with this approach, due to blood sugar levels. I can't go more than 90 minutes between small snacks without suffering shakes, and I'm not diabetic. Even a small orange or pear will bide me over. I know some airlines that ban flightcrew from intermittent fasting when on flying-days for that reason.
- pg 13y agoIncidentally, 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.)
- jonathanjaeger 13y agoI 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.
- stcredzero 13y agoYou 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.
- jonathanjaeger 13y agoWell 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.
- DanBC 13y agoThe 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. https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition http://www.irinnews.org/report/83124/malawi-cheaper-recipe-for-treating-hungry-children http://www.irinnews.org/report/83124/malawi-cheaper-recipe-f... https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/communications/wfp255508.pdf http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co... Here's the WFP in a Syrian camp for refuges http://youtu.be/Ej0vAUsn_o8 http://youtu.be/Ej0vAUsn_o8 About 1 in 8 people are chronically hungry https://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/world-food-day-wfp-says-investment-nutrition-key-unlocking-better-future-0 https://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/world-food-day-wfp-say... Here's some nice feel good photos of children getting school meals. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2013/jun/06/global-school-feeding-programmes-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2013/j...
- mrbill 13y agoHow 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.
- skeoh 13y ago> 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. From http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requires-food http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requi...: > 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.
- stcredzero 13y ago> Any time I tell people about this project I get 'hur hur is it made of people?' Just say, "only certain people," then start looking them up and down thoughtfully then hold and examine their wrist.
- Nickoladze 13y agoI think I read somewhere else that the names makes people think critically about it first. It stops them from diving in on a whim.
- ssharp 13y agoOnce 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.
- nwg 13y agoDoes 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?
- josephjrobison 13y agoWhat 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.
- jlgreco 13y agoExactly. 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.
- defen 13y agonb - the Irish "potato" diet also included copious amounts of butter and milk or cream. There's not enough fat in an all-potato diet.
- aasarava 13y agoWhy 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?
- caublestone 13y agoYes, Soylent has $1.5MM in funding from VC's and $1.5MM+ in pre-orders.
- pratik661 13y agoFood 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.
- codex 13y agoThank goodness for the youth. For, while nothing is new under the sun, they don't know that yet.
- KevinEldon 13y agoI 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.
- malandrew 13y agoI 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.