Soylent: An Offbeat Food Idea Investors Are Taking Seriously
npr.org
npr.org
The product itself fits (in my mind) in the nutritional supplements / meal replacements category and wouldn't have ordinarily gotten the attention of HN and startup investors.*
I wonder if this is an anomaly or first blood. Maybe startup culture is spreading to other areas. Startups haven't themselves been necessarily creators of technology (tricky to define). Many are just something that is enabled by mass adoption of some new technology or the cultural shifts that came with it (eg cloud based enterprise software). The whole world seems to be changing fairly rapidly now. That means there might be room for startup-culture to infiltrate even more areas. Tech savy, risk tolerant, big vision, funded, etc.
*I've got nothing to say about the product itself really. I like eating, personally.
Imagine if naval explorers of yore had Soylent instead of cured/canned meats.
Canadian military field ration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Meal_Pack
American military field ration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal,_Ready-to-Eat
I think of YC alumns like FlightCar who, while sure there's a technology element in how they organize (but what company doesn't have this), are certainly not a "tech" startup -- they're just a good idea.
ZeroCater doesn't cater individual meals to individuals with the goal of improving meals of convenience, which we have a habit of relying on processed and fast foods for.
It's a tool for businesses to cater popular food to their employees.
This isn't inspired by tech startups, it is a tech startup. It bothers me how people equate technology with the web. I guess the Saturn V was a useless piece of crap because it didn't use the latest web stack.
Technology is a tricky word (is twitter a new technology?) to define clearly, even for a limited context. We got used to lumping together companies creating technologies with those building on big new technologies like the internet. So, an online store could still be called a tech startup (or dotcom or web startup)
But, imagine this exact same product coming from a company similar to one of the existing nutritional supplement companies. Would you call it a tech startup?
We're dealing with subjective definitions obviously, but I think this is substantially different. One thing that stands out is that there is no good answer to the question "why now?"
Calcium.
Studies have shown it blocks the absorption of Iron and Zinc. At least one even indicates that the combination of all three taken together can be quite detrimental[1]
I'm not a nutritionist, and I'm not even arguing against the possibility that a Soylent diet may be much healthier than the average American diet. I don't have a wealth of other examples where nutrients being taken together at the same time could be less than ideal.
But I do believe that these are questions that the people involved in Soylent should have concerned themselves with before even entertaining the idea of an all-purpose one-size-fits-all meal replacement. I haven't seen this addressed, and it boggles my mind that so many seemingly intelligent people are eager to pay for the opportunity to be guinea pigs of a meal replacement powder that could very well be harmful in the long run.
[1] (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20486142?uid=3739960&u...)
[1] http://discourse.soylent.me/t/interaction-of-for-instance-ir...
[2] http://discourse.soylent.me/t/micronutrients-blocking-each-o...
And yes, I realize there are people getting blood tests. The human body can be surprisingly resilient, and whether or not the deficiency is in iron or something else, it may take a long time to present. My main objection is to them marketing this essentially as a beta release of an end-user product already.
If the purpose behind all the testing were to explore whether a meal replacement like Soylent might be a viable method of maintaining peak human nutrition, with years of planned research before jumping to conclusions, I would be all for it. But it seems as if they've already presumed that an all-in-one formula CAN be engineered to provide for a healthy diet, and are focusing exclusively on arriving at the optimal balance of nutrients to deliver.
If the company would put forth an application for biometrics/ some sort of personalized formula calculation, I would feel better about this.
People have different biochemistry, allergies, metabolisms, and nutrient deficiencies. Hell, even different climates and geography cause changes in the way the human body works. It just seems like a huge issue was overlooked in not taking into consideration these variables.
I have a friend whose SO and himself are working on a similar project, however she is a nutritionist and knows the pitfalls. They are trying to take into account the person to person variability and make personalized formulas based on individual needs. I would be much happier with this approach.
What a cool experiment though...
Food spoilage can be an issue too. I can't imagine how how much food has been thrown into the garbage because it looked untasty.
-shrug- Assuming the brown powder thing works out, why would I want to? It's not like I've ever got much pleasure from eating.
I've been to restaurants that are supposedly decent, and I don't think there's anything off about my cooking - others seem to find it palatable enough, (though whether they'd tell me or not if they didn't is questionable.) I've tried cooking with expensive ingredients and cheap ingredients - and there's a difference in texture but not really much in the taste.
It's not like I can't recognise tastes but the response is just, 'Meh. Oh, yeah it's food flavoured like [whatever]. That stuff you eat so you don't die.'
Take standard supermarket vegetables: nothing special there. Know someone who grows them themselves? Try them. Taste the difference? Suddenly vegetables are worth eating again.
Take a bad dessert: it's got all the right ingredients, but it tastes meh. You've just ingested half your daily calories eating meh. Now try a good dessert: omg how did they do this.
That's the difference.
A lot of them seem to be a few hundred k-calories a serving, and even if you had three a day that's still not going to push you up to anywhere near the 2000 or so you need. I'm not sure what the effects of taking multiples of your recommended vitamin intakes for them would be either, since a fair few of them claim to provide 100% of your RDA per serving.
Basically, I don't know enough yet. (Google is fairly unhelpful, throwing out shakes to lose weight rather than as realistic meal substitutes.) But it's an area I'm looking into.
These margins must be destroyed. Soylent, and its competitors, are out to destroy them.
Full meal replacements will only hit critical mass if they cost less than the $7 a day an average American already spends on normal food, and if they are easier to prepare, eat and store. They need to taste nicer too.
The first part is the hardest bit. $6 a day is the current mean cost of full meal replacement production in small batch sizes. Large batch sizes and huge volumes can probably half this cost through economies of scale. Once we have at volume, non-regulated full meal replacements that cost $3 a day, with say a 20-50% gross margin, I expect the entire market to explode.
First one to market wins.
Are those real margins, or are those the costs of sensible operation in a safety critical regulated marketplace?
> It is currently not economical for most people to adopt at the steep mark up of $14 a day that medical suppliers currently charge.
You Americans and your weird healthcare. Just checking - how do you work out that price of $14 per day? I don't doubt it, these things are expensive and something to make it cheaper is a good thing.
For late stage cancer patients it sure might be the case that the margins are deserved. But for healthy adults this might not be the case.
It really isn't that hard to measure basic powders and mix them together, nor is it that expensive to QA one's methods. Cost per day should approach cost of production per day in competitive commodity markets. The fact that this is not the case is due to some kind of market distortion, whether that is unserviced market need, human diet biases, oligopoly dynamics or regulatory barriers.
> how do you work out that price of $14 per day?
People need 2,000 kcal per day. Ensure nutritionally complete powder's serving size is 250 calories. Hence you need 8 servings per day to hit 2,000 kcal. A 7 serving can costs $13.71 on Amazon, which is $1.958 per serving, or $15.66 for a full day's needs. If you buy in bulk with a 6 can pack, cost per can is $10.83, giving $1.547 per serving, or $12.377 per day.
Sources:
1 can; http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-Flavor...
6 can pack: http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Complete-Balanced-Nutrition-Van...
You can't run on Ensure/Fortsip/Sustagen's only without having consequences.
Thrifty and low cost plan are not healthy meals whatsoever and it's highly optimized food consumption. Waste do exist. This report is disingenuous
Soylent is a meal of convenience, but it doesn't replace the meal of luxury...
I can't see myself or any of the people I know replacing food with a drink, but I definitely see room in the meal replacement market.
Best of luck to Soylent.
You specifically mention people with medical needs: What does Soylent do that isn't done by existing meal replacements? What extras does Soylent bring? Or is it just nice to see more products in that segment?
I guess with the investment Soylent could employ qualified dietitians or nutritionists to write information for medical professionals, and to answer questions from medical professionals.
It's nice to see more products in that segment for people in that state, so there's the possibility of more variety because I feel like people with medical needs have additional desires from their food/drink other than just being sustained.
So, uh, what does Soylet add? Just one more extra bit of variety?
I wouldn't call Soylent cheap, though - $65 a week for one person is quite a lot if you're on a tight budget, and it doesn't scale to family-size who can be cheaper off by buying and cooking food in bulk. Wouldn't feed my kids slop like this either tbh (and I'm pretty sure that they would rebel (if I had them and tried to feed them this for any duration of time)).
One person will pay almost $3400 per year for this. That to me is just insane, unless you really need this.
Edit - missed some parts of the article - seems it's more in the quick meal-replacement shake category, not to outright replace easting. Either way, I'll take real food.
There are some people very un-interested in cooking and would just like to not die. Soylent seems like a solution for those people. A former coworker of mine was ready to immediately throw down his credit card for something like Soylent. Before Soylent, he often lamented that the "Bachelor Chow" from Futurama wasn't real.