If this isn't a respectability move after Soylent's recently quality struggles, I'll... drink a bunch of Soylent, I guess.
12-18 months ago they had multiple issues: sporadic mold under the caps, some people severely allergic to the algae-based ingredient they used, and occasional long shipping delays. But all of those issues have been ironed out while Rhinehart was still CEO.
I honestly think this situation is closer to young Larry Page stepping aside for 10 years while Eric Schmidt ran Google than it is to anything particularly bad that Rhinehart has done. By all measures I've seen, Rosa Labs is highly successful and growing fast.
The KetoChow guy gets around this by recommending to their Canadian customers, instead of mixing with cream, to mix KetoChow with maple syrup.
I kid not.
My thought was less that Soylent had a consumer confidence problem, and more that Rosa Labs may have a board confidence problem. Meaning the 12 month old issues still floating around, but also meaning that Rhinehart has magnets in his fingertips and is generally a "weird futuristic tech dude" stereotype. That was great for getting Soylent going, and I expect Rhinehart will keep coming up with fascinating new stuff. But if the board is looking for mainstream appeal and enormous returns, they'd do better with a "nutrition on the go" image than a "posthuman meal replacement" image. And part of that would be moving Rhinehart to product, where he'll shine regardless, and out of the spotlight, where he might be image-incompatible.
It's the same move as something like Good Day Chocolate; they're basically a bog-standard nootropics company, but they put the stuff in chocolate instead of pills and packaged it for the Whole Foods checkout line. I'm not sure that's the goal with Soylent, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was an attempt.
I was thinking foremost of the mold issues with liquid Soylent. That's fairly old (12+ months?) and seems to be solved, but it's a long-term reputation problem in the same sense as Chipotle. Less crucially, I'm also thinking about the digestive issues people have reported - that some people talk about nausea and terrible gas when consuming lots of Soylent.
Neither of those things seems to be a "our product is nonviable today" issue, but both have raised a specter among the people I talk to of "Soylent is weird and maybe not healthy". Swapping the CEO to someone more mainstream seems like one step towards fighting that perception.