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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

Any snack that satisfies appetite and doesn't make you sick or fat too quickly would suffice. A bag of nuts, a power bar, fruit, vegetables, canned fish/meat, etc. One can always balance out nutritional intake on subsequent "real" meals.

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.

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All those examples you've mentioned fill a very different niche than what Soylent is filling. Most people on Soylent aren't looking for something to keep them from getting hungry until they get a more balanced meal. They're looking for a quick, healthy, balanced meal. Soylent fills that desire, your examples do not.

They actually DON'T NEED Soylent, that's simply the magic of marketing.

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.

They also "DON'T NEED" any of the snacks you presented as alternatives. But regardless, I never claimed anyone needed it. There are few things in life that are truly "needed", but there are many that are wanted and/or provide a significant improvement in life quality.

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.

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