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Please see this discussion, in particular the response from "rob": http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-nutritional-products/431 http://d

• 2muchcoffeeman 13y ago
  zzbxdo comment, fourth from the bottom is also interesting. People point out existing commercially available meal replacements, but I've been wondering about what hospitals use. There are already people that have to live for extended periods by being fed through a tube. So has anyone done a comparison of soylent vs meal replacements vs medical products?
• mdisraeli 13y ago
  From the link: "I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal" I have family ties into this industry, and quite frankly this comment is rather ignorant. Ensure is a brand range, with a lot of variation, some of which are, for example, extremely high in calories. It is also worth noting that one of the uses of products like Ensure is to actually mix in with regular cooking, increasing the calorific and nutritional value of normal food. Comparing existing products in the market with "Altavista", and Soylent with "Google" is also very disingenuous, as it serves to discredit all the work put into existing products, and ignores their business model. Funnily enough, Ensure isn't marketed as hipster-food, and everything about it is tailored for their target market of the medical industry. As hackers, surely we should be supporting good business, rather than blindly going with the latest fad?
  • sneak 13y ago
    Why doesn't Ensure have a good webpage showing us these options and educating us on how to choose? There's more to "product" than what's in the bag.
    • mdisraeli 13y ago
      Because pharmaceutical/clinical nutritional sales have very little at all to do with websites! In our tech focused, Business to consumer / mass business market, it is easy to forget about hands-on sales. These products, remember, have lots of legislation around them, very strict instructions on when they are appropriate to be used, training is required in order to really use many of them properly, and so on. That tends to be the first indicator of the need for sales reps. Equally, and perhaps more importantly, remember that direct to consumers is a market for these products only because of clinical teams recommending them. Their typical sales targets are huge, and are acquired in big bulk contracts with entire hospitals, if not healthcare regional bodies. Contracts on that scale are, again, typically done via sales teams who work closely with a client, build a relationship, and help the client get the most out of their sales. This model also exists in the tech industry, and indeed is how most Big Enterprise IT works. I'm sure they could get more direct to consumer sales if they improved their website, yes. But even ignoring any legislative issues with directly aiding that market, why focus on growing the 5% of your market (being generous!), when that 95% of hands-on sales is really what you should be investing in?
      • sneak 13y ago
        Because a million bucks in nerdy preorders without any marketing to speak of suggests that there's a large underserved market.
• kamaal 13y ago
  >>Given the ingredients of Ensure, I wouldn't want to try to live on it for 30 days. Ensure itself doesn't want you to. Because its a food supplement, not 'food'. The right analogy is to compare {Soylent, Ensure} with {Cereal, Fresh Fruits, Vegetables, Meat, Milk, Eggs and other natural food}