I think that the only reason that anyone's interested in Soylent is the current startup/crowdfunding bubble hype, not because it's actually anything particularly new. Soylent is to Ensure as Groupon is to coupons. Before the hype, on select groups (people who were too sick to eat, middle-aged housewives) would be into each of them, but once you add the startup/crowdfunding/Internet angle, all of a sudden a bunch of 20 somethings take a fascination in something that they otherwise would have sneered at.
> Water, Sugar, Corn Syrup Solids, Modified Milk Ingredients, Cocoa, High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Corn Oil, Salt, Artificial Flavour, Soy Oil
Just because something is "well known" doesn't make it better. Nestle is not a company with an outstanding global reputation and if given the choice between trusting them or a company like Soylent, I'm going to choose Soylent.
Like others here, I view Soylent as an interesting experiment. I enjoy a nice meal as much as the next person but I also appreciate the value of something fast, simple and nutritionally complete that can be used from time to time as supplementation when you don't feel the need to sit down for an actual meal.
My point is that there already are a lot of products out there that are "fast, simple, and nutritionally complete that can be used from time to time as supplementation when you don't feel the need to sit down for an actual meal," but I don't see everyone who's so excited about Soylent already using them on a regular basis. OK, perhaps you would prefer to have something without sugar in it (I'm not sure why you would object to the other ingredients, fats and salts are essential parts of your diet), but I would think that if Soylent were going to be as popular as people make it out to be, there would already be lots of people replacing meals with existing meal replacements. All Soylent offers over the others is that it's bland, as far as I can tell.
I'm not saying the existing, well known ones are better. Just that they haven't revolutionized food or replaced traditional meals on a large scale or anything.
There are plenty of people who do already replace occasional meals with these existing meal replacers, along with energy bars and the like. So, Soylent will be one more out of a large number of choices in this field, produced by people with no particular food industry experience, and more bland than the rest. Is that supposed to get me excited about "the future of food"?
I can imagine people who already do use existing meal replacers, but having some particular problem with them that Soylent solves, might go for this. And then there's the Silicon Valley hype bubble, where a bunch of people will buy it and drink it for lunch for a month or two before getting bored and excited by the next big new thing (Twitter to your shoes! Personal Instagram quadcopter follow bot! Distributed decentralized FarmVille/GTA hybrid!)
The reason I'm so baffled by this is that it's hard to imagine why so many people would get excited about yet another product in an already crowded marketplace that's fairly niche (well, fairly niche for people who use them as their primary nutrition; relatively large for people who use it to replace an occasional meal). I don't see anything revolutionary about Soylent; it's yet another meal replacer.
As far as the taste, it's too soon to tell. Indications are that it's pretty flavorless http://gawker.com/we-drank-soylent-the-weird-food-of-the-fut... (outside of joking reactions like "It was great and I love it. I don't want to eat anymore.") Given that they aren't particularly focusing on trying to make it taste good ("I'm not trying to make something delicious; there are already a lot of delicious things. It's all about efficiency, it's about cost and convenience."), I doubt it will wind up tasting much better than Ensure.
I just don't get all of the excitement over Soylent. It seems like a solution in search of a problem. It's pretty damn easy to get a healthy diet for cheap and extremely low effort, as long as you don't care about flavor and variety. Rice, beans, and grated cheese covers pretty much all of your nutritional needs (maybe toss in a multivitamin per day to be on the safe side), takes about 5 minutes of work and 15 minutes of waiting for it to simmer, you can prepare a week's worth in advance and reheat it over the course of the week, and it will cost you less than $5 per day in the US. How is Soylent supposed to be so much better than that that it will "disrupt the world food system"?
Given how bad the hype has become (Soylent appears to me to be about as useful and likely to be successful as Pets.com), I think it's time to start shoring a bunch of Silicon Valley stock; we appear to have hit the next bubble. The problem is that outside of Twitter and Facebook, no one has really gone public recently, so it's a lot harder to actually short these silly companies.
I've tried supplements and eating very dense foods (lots of grease and carbs) with lukewarm results but if Soylent works as promised, it'll basically change my life.
That said, my comment was meant to be humourous and I totally understand how people who don't have problems with normal food might view Soylent. It's the ultimate first-world problem.
I know of Ensure Plus because I know lots of people with anorexia, and it's used during refeeding programs. (Sometimes as a drink, and sometimes through an NG tube).
Sure, there may be some people in specialized circumstances that have problems with normal food, though there are a lot of options already (smoothies, existing meal replacements like Ensure, possibly even bodybuilding focused meal replacements as they tend to focus on being high-calorie, soups, etc). And yeah, Soylent does seem like the ultimate first-world-problem food.
Anyhow, good luck with trying to get more calories in your diet, and if Soylent helps you with that, all the better!
What, all different flavours of Ensure? All different styles of Ensure?
> supplements like Ensure,
Ensure is a sole source of nutrition. Your ignorance about the product speaks volumes.
(@rosalabs is the company behind Soylent.)