Soylent Closes $1.5M In Seed Funding From Lerer, Andreessen Horowitz
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
(Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn't worry so much about middlebrow dismissals floating to the top of HN threads. They probably do have some predictive value.)
Frankly, if they were doing something other than food, it probably wouldn't be an issue either. They are playing with people's health and wellbeing.
The reason I hate Soylent is, as several other people mention in this thread, the over-blown claims made in their crowd-funding drive.
Before any work with nutritionists or dietitians the Soylent team were claiming:
> "You can finally join the easy, healthy, and affordable future of nutrition."
> "What if you never had to worry about food again?"
> "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you."
> "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health,"
> "By taking years to spoil"
> "there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet."
Some of these are just enthusiastic US marketing. I'm in the UK where we have stricter rules for advertising, so there's some cultural clash there.
But some of them are sleazy and not truthy.
That bad-feeling is retained by many people, even though the Soylent team are now working with real food scientists and being more careful with the claims.
As the word is used on The Colbert Report, "truthy" is somewhat sleazy. It means something that sounds like it's true, but which isn't necessarily based on facts.
>Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.
Not just easy and healthy. No. Perfectly optimized... Automatically puts you at an optimal weight They've toned down the language since saying this, but I think anyone has good reason to be upset over such claims.
Tim Ferriss gave a platform to Soylent on his blog recently, which is one of the best things you can have happen for your product: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2012/01/11/the-t... Rhinehart wasn't very grateful, simply because Ferriss showed some healthy skepticism. Here's the whole event:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2013/08/20/soylent/
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=874
http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/9684046788/
One of the last things Ferriss says? I don't want you to fail and explicitly stated otherwise in my piece... That mimics the same attitude a lot of us here have.
Being skeptical of bogus claims isn't the same thing as dismissing something. Or calling it a toy. That accusation is a dismissal of reasonable skepticism.
I'm neither For/Against Soylent, but after reading that I have a fairly negative view on Rhinehart.
As an extra: His response to 1-size-fits-all is laughable, is he forgetting about the 1000s of eating issues people have (gluten, lactose, allergies, diabetes)... Sorry ranting now.
Nope, all fair points.
The worry with soylent or other food replacement is that it could outright harm you. Pfizer was developing Torcetrapib as a successor to multi-billion dollar Lipitor and it was on in Phase III that it was found to have adverse effect. It took 16 years of development, and close to $1B expense before the side-effects were discovered.
The soylent effort is great but if there are any health issues, they may come to the surface much later.
I'm fine with the idea of meal replacements, but:
1) I think they already exist. They just aren't marketed to trendy 20-somethings. (This is what Soylent does well and why, I assume, they're getting investment. The actual product can be completely reformulated until it comes reasonably close to being a good meal replacement: It's the brand that's become valuable.)
2) The Soylent team sounded like such snake-oil salesmen out of the gate that they simply don't have much credibility, as far as I'm concerned. With all of the made-up benefits they touted at the start, now they have to dig themselves out a deep pit of bullshit to actually demonstrate the value of their product.
It's important that we don't treat this kind of food product like a toy. Which is why it's important to be critical of unsupported claims. (And critical of supported claims, as well.) Especially those made by young people with no particular background in the field they're purporting to be experts in. Food is not a toy. It's not Tumblr. It's not Zynga. It's something we require to survive.
Remember supersize me, that guy started having liver problems from eating McDonalds... Yet nothing changes and McDonalds keeps selling crap.
Food is a toy, and Soylent are very far down the scale of "bad food products I can buy"
On the other hand... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Head
So does it concern you that in McDonalds ads there are always attractive slim people, when in fact at most stores you see average looking obese people?
Are we arguing truth in advertising? Or Danger in food products?
Where 'the hype' includes claims of total meal replacement over long periods of time.. yes.
I don't think many, if any, people are concerned that this stuff is literally toxic. The concern is what will happen if you use it as advertised: constantly, exclusively, for extended periods of time.
People eating McDonalds for every meal every day of the week is troubling, I don't think anybody actually suggests you do that. McDonalds certainly doesn't suggest that you do that, though I sometimes feel that many people wish they did suggest you do that so that McDonalds would be easier to flay alive. Being appalled by McDonalds is an international sport after all...
There really isn't that much of a problem with eating a greasy deep-fried cheeseburger once in a while, and there isn't a problem with skipping a meal or two and having a shake instead. That isn't what concerns me, that isn't what seems to concern DanBC ("I think that's the worrying thing about Soylent. I really wish they'd kept it experimental, or pushed it as suitable for daily use but not all meals, or some such."), and that isn't what I see concerning other people in this thread. The literal product, the substance Solyent, is almost certainly perfectly fine to consume. So are cheeseburgers.
I thought part of the problem was that McDonalds /did/ suggest you /could/ do that, without any ill-effects - that their meals were healthy and you could eat breakfast, lunch and dinner there without a problem.
On the other hand, soylent is making the claim that it's healthy to use soylent as a complete replacement for food. Thus, the standards are much higher in terms of truth in marketing.
http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food/food_quality/nutrition_c...
There's no mention of food from other places, and the final paragraph ("Variety keeps things interesting") certainly implies you could eat there daily without problem, to the exclusion of other food sources.
No, because I've already dismissed McDonald's menu as not having any relevance to anything I care about.
EDIT: OTOH, were people promoting McDonald's new menu items as the solution to real problems (both personal and global), I'd react with the same kind of skepticism as I do to Soylent's claims.
Mcdonalds on the other hand never market their food as a complete meal replacement solution. In fact, here in the uk, they're very careful to point out you still need a healthy balanced diet (admittedly due to regulations, but still... They do it, Soylent don't)
If this new menu item is intended to be eaten full-time to the exclusion of everything else: yes.
If Soylent's angle was "running late? don't have time? give Soylent a go!" I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. The claim that bothers people is that it obviates the need for any other food.
Not all food is super-healthy, and that's fine. I like tasty food that's not particularly good for me sometimes.
This is not what Soylent claims to be. It claims to be something you can replace almost all of your food intake with and remain healthy.
And prolonged exposure to anything. I mean anything will cause harm to your body. Its not just McDonalds.
Soylent is a bit like a drug company releasing a new drug.
Do you think it's possible people are taking food too seriously?
Empirically, Soylent has been on the market without causing any problems for a few months. What if it doesn't cause problems for a few years?
I'm interested to understand why people choose food to get so passionate about. When a new source control system comes out, people don't get so heated. Why for a food company?
- Food is a major component of identity. It conveys things about your values and belief systems. Thus, like other identity factors (race, religion, political position, sexual orientation, socio-economic class), when this is challenged, some people are particularly sensitive and respond very defensively.
- As food choices are widely accepted to be a major factor in overall health (and thus, susceptibility to serious illness, life-expectancy, etc), it's natural for there to be a significant amount of fear behind people's positions in the discussion. I.e., when someone says "this diet will give you a greater chance of positive health outcomes than the one you currently follow", that can be frightening to people who harbour fears - conscious or subconscious - about their health and their expected lifespan.
The science will come around in time. But the idea that this could eventually make nutrition available to people who wouldn't otherwise eat is amazing.
The idea is sound, even though it's nothing new, and I make use of something similar (Ensure) daily. The critics of Soylent mainly criticize the outrageous claims made based on an inconclusive experiment of N=1, which is an amateur way of proposing solutions to health related issues to being with.
Considering how they raised their money now, I won't touch it even if they get an FDA seal of approval.
Now, the FDA process may be inefficient or unnecessarily expensive, but long term clinical trials are not something that we should be eager to dispose of.
I love the idea of Soylent and meal replacements in general. The critique I had for it was that everywhere I looked for the recipe, I saw references to maltodextrin. I don't want to fill my diet with maltodextrin instead of whole weat bread/oats. I hope in the future there are varieties where I can have more control over the carb source I consume a lot of in my daily meals.
One of the problems of Soylent is the need for water. About one billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. Problems with water cause very many infant deaths.
It's exciting seeing this get some awareness in tech culture. Maybe people can design and develop easier cheaper better methods of water purification or desalination; or cooking; or whatever.
You can imagine that the cost of the product from this huge NGO is going to have been driven down as far as possible.
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition
http://www.irinnews.org/report/83124/malawi-cheaper-recipe-f...
https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...
Here's the WFP in a Syrian camp for refuges http://youtu.be/Ej0vAUsn_o8
About 1 in 8 people are chronically hungry https://www.wfp.org/news/news-release/world-food-day-wfp-say...
Here's some nice feel good photos of children getting school meals. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2013/j...
Why does Soylent need water? Could the same ingredients be prepared as a Soylent power bar?
That is a crowded product market, but Soylent might have an interesting pitch. A cashier at Trader Joe's told me that power bars were the store's best selling items.
Given that the cheapest DIY soylent appear to be primarily based traditional staples like rice, oats, peas, soy, and flax seeds, it doesn't seem very likely to be cheaper. The initial price for the official one is $9/day, while the cost of the cheapest DIY based on traditional foods is $2/day.
Who are these destitute people in such a hurry? WTF
It's practical to do certain stuff with Soylent that's a little more difficult with traditional food. With the appropriate containers, I can, for example, very easily "package" a week's worth of breakfast and lunch. The only operation involved is measuring dry powders and cleanup is very minimal in comparison to traditional cooking. I can do the same thing with ordinary cooked meals, containers, and a freezer, but that's quite a bit more involved.
Are HN users going to get a "brow height" indicator sometime?
I guess... that's not really all that much of an objection, from a business perspective. With all this hype, I'd say it has a reasonable chance of making money. It does seem to be marketed well, and it's timed right
But, I think most of the 'middlebrow dismissals' are more a response to the hype. I mean, meal-replacement shakes are an old product; certainly at first glance, if you dismiss the fantastic claims about soylent, like the idea that you can eat it and nothing else, it looks a lot like any other meal-replacement shake packaged for a particular market. The problem is that the group they are targeting, generally speaking, identifies as more skeptical than most, and they are using the traditional snake-oil style pitch that you normally use to get a product off the ground. On an emotional level, I (and I think many in their target demographic) find that pretty offensive[1]. I think that negative emotional response to obvious hype is the core of the resistance you see here.
[1]or rather, responding positively to something sold using overly-enthusiastic sales techniques would... conflict with my self-image.
*i'm not sure what you mean by support, but I'll take it as 'pay attention' or 'not dismiss.'
However, in this case we're "playing" with human health, and the good/bad effects of Soylent can take years to be clear.
I have the feeling that Soylent, or this particular area of business, is going to be huge in the coming years. Not surprisingly, A16Z has invested in it :)
I only eat because I'm hungry; the taste, as long as it's bearable, is always an afterthought. I find grocery shopping, cooking and especially doing the dishes to be insanely inconvenient in my daily life, and eating out is far too expensive. My wife asked me the other day, "It's not that you expect me to make dinner for you, it's just that if I didn't, you'd likely eat either a frozen pizza or boil some pasta every night, right?"
I would absolutely love for this Soylent project to become a reality. The convenience of getting a well balanced diet served in one small dose is something I only dreamed of coming true; fingers crossed they can pull it off.
Once the internet buzz started swimming around their milkshake idea, it felt like the developers saw green and threw their standards out the window. Their Kick Starter page read like something out of the Patent Medicine era of the early 1900's. "Do feel tired, groggy, or have ailment X?" Soylent with cure it!
Obviously, I'm a cranky minority, but the absolute lack of intellectual honesty and rigor presented in the claims on their Kick Starter put a sour taste in my mouth over the whole thing.
Soylent as a simple meal replacement makes quite a bit of sense. It's the same as Weight Watcher shakes and the like-something you can eat to replace a meal once a day at most. That product can get away with not being perfectly nutritionally balanced because it's not meant to be eaten every meal. You can use the other meals to fill the nutritional holes left by it, even if you're using it to replace one meal a day.
Soylent as a total food replacement brings a LOT more scrutiny. It means that they have to prove that it IS perfectly nutritionally balanced, and that there aren't any adverse side effects for long-term consumption. That's where the snake oil responses come in, because the burden of proof is so much higher.
sigh I can only conclude that you read the first sentence of my comment, and fired off a response before bothering to read the rest.
It's fine if you want to argue against one of my opinions, but at least make it about an opinion that I actually hold! ;)
For clarification, the problem is not that it's now being marketed, it's that it is marketed along with unverified medical claims.
Is it just the marketing buzz that Soylent created?
I'm pretty sure this was exactly my point. Soylent's original angle was as a total replacement and they've already started moving the goalposts to 14. 14 meals a week is the same thing that Slim Fast has pitched since the late 70's and no this wasn't just for occasional meals or 2-3 days at a time, customers were encouraged to follow Slim Fast's 2 shakes a day as a long term solution.
Slim Fast, of course, is strictly marketed for weight loss. Soylent, not really at all.
As someone with serious medical issues who depends on meal replacements regularly, and through that experience has learned how important the right mixes are, I wouldn't touch Soylent with a ten foot pole. I'm really really worried (and convinced) people are going to end up with pretty serious health issues from Soylent but the fanboyistic reception it gets saps my energy to bother arguing with people about it.
It isn't, and it looks there was even an American company which tried to sell something similar (total meal replacement) in the past and failed. Maybe someone HNer will remember the name, as it was commented on a previous Soylent article.
> ... and still isn't marketed in quite the same way.
It isn't marketed in quite the same way because Abbott (the manufacturer) is a responsible company and is well aware a fully enteral diet has drawbacks.
It doesn't hurt that Soylent has a distinct "anti-authoritarian" vibe going on with it, that tickles the "techies can solve any problem, everyone else isn't as clever as we are"-bone.
There are actually lots of meal replacement powdered shakes that are marketed to young, active, middle-to-upper-class people.
The last time I discussed Soylent on this site, I compared the marketing phenomenon around it to the "School Teacher discovers [whatever], Doctors hate her!" ads. I think everyone is fawning over soylent because they are techies, Rhinehart is a techie, and a techie somehow 'disrupting' a non-tech field fits their mental image of superiority. If Rhinehart were a nutritionist and if he were marketing this to, say, people into cardio, then this product wouldn't be notable.
(Note that this isn't me saying the product will sell poorly. It is just my reason for not, say, thinking that this is going to "Change Everything"(tm))
I could actually see Soylent as the hardcore foodie's dream come true: Never eat a boring meal again, because you don't have to eat until your next feast.
Obviously it wouldn't work for my case because there's no way I'd feed this stuff to my kids, but I can't really blame folks - even food-lovers - for wanting to just skip the effort with a big chunk of their meals.
I can crack a few eggs in the morning, toss in some veggies and have a hot, delicious breakfast to enjoy with plenty of protein and it all cooks in just a few minutes.
For the most part with "weekday cooking", the most time consuming part is the prep work and that stuff can be easily batched as long as you plan ahead.
I just don't see how anyone who would consider themselves as foodies could be happy drinking this stuff for the majority of their meals.
I love to cook, and am good at it. But I run out of food all the time, or have weird random stuff lying around that doesn't fit easily into a quick recipe. I wish I had your skills/organization.
However I find the current Soylent version a little disgusting, not very convenient, and quite expensive.
If/when they have a dry pill that costs $2 per day I'll be completely sold (hope a pill is possible? maybe not?)
All frozen pizzas are not created equal. Shop around and try different brands and styles. Do not microwave them.
Pasta should be an exciting meal every time. You are probably using a low quality sauce, or overcooking it, or rinsing it after draining it (never do this). Use enough salt.
You can also doctor things up. A cheap box of macaroni and cheese is transformed by crumbling a couple slices of high quality bacon onto it.
You can dress up a frozen pizza with some extra toppings. Even canned black olives make a difference.
Drinking a whole 2 liter pitcher of soylent is not easy. Really, go read the day by day reviews from Ars.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/ars-does-soylent-day-...
I'm not sure I'd use the word convenient either. Your protypical cheap bachelor microwave meal of pizza, burritos or pot pies beats soylent on both prep and cleanup. It also tastes better and is cheaper. A bowl of cereal or oatmeal ties on cleanup and price but wins on prep and taste. Energy bars for a lunch snack win on all counts.
But, guess what... it isn't cheap because they've actually researched this stuff and got it past FDA.
That's really stretching what pivoting is, no?
Random snippet, but glad to hear this. It's exciting to watch to LA startup scene grow and thrive.
[1]
http://fast-5.org/content/summary
Apparently real american cowboys do just this. During the busy season, some ranch-hands end up eating just one huge meal a day.
I can't go more than 90 minutes between small snacks without suffering shakes, and I'm not diabetic. Even a small orange or pear will bide me over.
I know some airlines that ban flightcrew from intermittent fasting when on flying-days for that reason.
I would imagine long term damage would come from the mere fact that you're eating the same combination of foods/powders day in and day out. I'm pretty sure there are periods throughout history of people eating only one food and surviving (ie Irish in 1800s with potatoes, 3rd world countries with rice/beans) but it's not ideal or good long term.
The problem comes if you try to tell me that surviving on only potatoes is a good idea. For that claim, I am going to demand some serious legwork. The potato salesman and a few potato enthusiasts claiming that he does it and feels fine isn't going to cut it.
Try it.Trust me, you will remain a life long foodie.
I wish he had chosen another name, not because I dislike the name Soylent but because people will always make this association with the movie. Any time I tell people about this project I get 'hur hur is it made of people?'
Regarding the quote, the name is not self-deprecating (at least by my understanding it is not intended to be), and Rob's influence is the book, not the movie.
From http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requi...:
> Actually, in the original book Make Room! Make Room! Soylent is made of soya and lentil. The movie changed many aspects of the book, though it's still one of my favourite movies. My Soylent is human-free.
Just say, "only certain people," then start looking them up and down thoughtfully then hold and examine their wrist.
Are they going to use some of the money to hire people who know about nutrition?
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea and have lived off various meal replacement methods for short periods of time, but this still seems to me like 40% "custom meal replacement shake mix that I can order at TrueNutrition" and 60% marketing hype.
If you're a person who likes eating, this will be a horrible thing, but if you're a utilitarian it can be quite reasonable. Presuming it is successful there is also a huge opportunity in prisons. By eliminating food preparation and eating utensils you mitigate both costs and threats.
(http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...)
This suggests that shelf life is around 6 months to 24 months. Obviously this would be at suitable storage conditions - not too hot, etc. And I don't know what happens when the packet is opened. Some nutrients will degrade in contact with oxygen.
So if they get it worked out and good packets it could be long time.
You're down to $3 a meal. Unless you're eating fast food or nothing but pasta... good luck finding another way to get to $3/meal.
[edit- Important clarification: I'm talking about a nutritionally complete, paleo-ish diet of healthy foods (which is what this is targeting to replace).
Of course you can eat for less than $3/meal, but you start to include less healthy things like chips, breads, pastas, etc. This is not the meal Soylent is intended to replace.]
Everything under $2/meal.
Afternoon meal: sandwich, maybe bag of chips ($1.00-2.00 per person).
Evening meal: meat, vegetables, carb ($2.00-3.00 per person).
I guess if you compare it to eating out it's pretty cheap, but if you compare it to cooking (although there isn't much cooking in the mealplan above, really just dinner), it looks pretty pricey.
Browned the meat, put the rice in a skillet, cut up meat and put it on top, put potato slices on top of that, covered and baked for 45 minutes. Total prep time, 5 minutes, cost about 6 bucks. Feeds family of four, and had leftovers.
Some other recipes include things like a ham and noodles w/ cheese casserole (egg noodles, and a ham steak cut up on top), for around $6 to $7 or so; beef stew -- $4 to $6 for the stew meat, plus $1 - $2 for a bag of frozen mixed veggies and a couple potatoes; and variations on chicken fried rice, and even fajitas are all less than $10 a meal. Actually, the fajitas can go up to $15 if you get beef instead of chicken. And these all feed a family.
Do you pay for shipping for Soylent? Because that's already going to cost more than cooking multiple meals.
($65 per week is £40 per week. That's doable.)
I'd imagine it's similar to or cheaper than most people's food expenditures. If they actually can make it significantly cheaper, it could be a big deal.
I suppose sending it all to one place in big chunks makes it seem scarier, price-wise, which could be a problem for them. Food expenditures usually dribble out. They may want emulate that in their sales model, at least initially (weekly recurring transactions, or something.)
I guess you could mix it with 1/3 of normal food, but still two out of three meals are the same always.
And yes, they come in alternate flavours.
Many other people eat bread with assorted cold cuts daily for dinner throughout their life.
It would be awesome if they reach the scale where there are always a certain percentage of Soylent users that are a constantly measured population used to see how changes in the soylent formula affects overall health. This way they could provably show a formula improving every year instead of settling for a product that is "perfected" and then never really messed with once it achieves market success.
Our culture might even shift to a situation where we take supplements for our routine nutritional needs and enjoy traditional meals for special occasions, like when we have guests over.
There's clearly some market for this. The food giants haven't yet entered because it's risky, and the supply chains for the ingredients still being developed. As soon as Soylent is successfully shipping safe product, however, the big companies will jump in and crush Soylent Corp with their lower pricing and higher profit margins due to their scale of production.
Every single time Soylent is mentioned the other companies selling the same, or better, gloop are mentioned.
Here's Nutricia (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)
Here's Abbott Nutrition (http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands)
Here's the consumer site for Ensure (http://ensure.com/)
These are, despite what some people say, complete foods that can be used to replace all food you eat.
The idea of drinking Ensure for 90% of my meals scares me for the same reason Soylent does. The unknowns are too much - small startup or major pharmaceutical company alike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
I have no idea why this Soylent thing is considered new.
(https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products)
They can compete too on "nutrition". Talk about how the big corps cut corners (which they will) and how that reduces the utility of their finely tuned formula.
Doesn't have to make sense, just has to sound plausible.
Ha, good one!