Less sweet.

I was on a liquid diet for a while for medical reasons. Ensure (and other drinks in that space) are horrifyingly sugary, and even their "diabetic" formula is disgustingly sweet and high in simple processed carbs that are a half step up from sucrose. They're also extremely low in fiber.

Additionally, though the vitamins and minerals are balanced for consuming four per day, you'd have to drink 8-10 of them daily to fill the caloric needs of a healthy and not particularly active adult. Sugar is a surprisingly inefficient source of calories on the scale of an adult's daily metabolic needs.

Soylent has a very neutral flavor that can be seasoned for a sweet or savory effect, and a bottle has roughly the right amount of calories for a meal for an adult. If you're moderately active and eating nothing else, around 5 per day will suffice.

Even on a liquid diet, I ate other things besides soylent, and I struggled to consume enough calories to meet my basal metabolic rate - below which your body will start consuming itself for energy. (Forget maintaining your original weight on a liquid diet at all.) Whole milk, you say? I was forbidden to consume significant amounts of lactose.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of options were either extremely sweet or would fill your stomach without providing meaningful nutrition (a cup of chicken broth has 10 calories!) Despite usually being a chocolate hound, after two weeks of that I would gag at the thought of a m&m. Soylent at least was neutral and would keep me feeling full for a little while.

It seems like the answer to this and similar questions on here, which is Soylent's true "innovation" in my estimation, is that Soylent is the first meal replacement with young men as a target market. Meal replacements are pretty convenient, but if you're an 18-25 y.o. man I have a feeling there's a nonzero level of stigma (real or just feared) associated with drinking SlimFast ("women's drink") or Ensure ("old people drink") all the time. Before now all there was for young people were protein shakes + multivitamin, which is also possibly too associated with bodybuilding/gym rats for comfort for some people.

But if you're a young man drinking Soylent, this hip new VC-backed tech fuel drink, it occupies a similar mental association space to Red Bull. I can't help just seeing it as a marketing thing.

I used to drink a couple of Ensure every day. Soylent has more calories, protein and nutrients per serving while basically being the same price.