Do you have examples that are both not full of sugar and available to the general public at a reasonable cost?
http://www.procapslabs.com/Products/Details/268447427/Secure...
Both have 5g net carbs per serving, but are intended more as a single meal replacement than something a person could solely subsist on.
Depends on what you consider a serving. The second link only has 67 calories per "serving", so really 30 scoops in a day. Using the 2000 calorie baseline, that would be about 150g of sugar, twice as much as Soylent. Also 200g protein vs 100g.
The first link would still take 20 scoops in a day. There's no sugar in it, which is good (personally I hate things like Stevia, but others may not mind), but it's still clearly a protein drink with 372g of protein in one days worth of calories.
Somehow the marketing folks for Soylent have been able to convince a lot of people that they ACTUALLY NEED a fully balanced meal replacement consisting of synthetic food upon which someone may subsist indefinitely. That's a feat of marketing, but apparently little else.
I tip my hat to their marketing skills, however. I never would have thought they could get anywhere selling a bland sludge to affluent consumers as a replacement for food... who would've thought that could work? They did it and did it well for a while at least.
Soylent doesn't fill a separate need from normal food, it fills the desire for a more efficient vehicle of nutrition than normal food. For example, I use Soylent not as an "I'm too lazy too make food" but rather as an easily replicatable nutritional base that is easier to customize to my nutritional needs and preferences than any other option out there that I'm aware of (there may very well be something better out here).
Their success is the result of "magical marketing", but of filling a niche desire of the market. In fact, Soylent didn't even do marketing for the first year or two of its existence. Rinehart just started experimenting, realized it hit a nerve with the hacker community, and created a product that appealed to the demographic that responded to his experiment.