Still not sure how this varies from a basic bulk vitamin and mineral powder (besides the übernerd ego "this one weird nutritional trick" loyalty marketing): http://www.gnc.com/graphics/product_images/pGNC1-9331188_gnc...
"According to Arthur Whitmore, a press officer with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Soylent would fall into the category of what the FDA considers food. Unlike a medication, Soylent will not require FDA approval, unless it contains some new type of food additive, which Rhinehart would need to disclose.
It’s important to Rhinehart that Soylent be considered a food, as opposed to a medicine or supplement, so that food-stamp recipients can buy it using EBT cards."
http://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-is-powdered-soyle... http://discourse.soylent.me/t/fda-press-officer-comment/3783
Within the Soylent community, there are two acknowledged classes of soylent. The two are distinguished by using "Soylent" when referring to the "official" recipe, and "soylent" when referring to DIY versions.
Rob has stated several times that he isn't going to patent the Soylent recipe. The reason is because the only product on the market that comes even close to Soylent for complete nutrition (without lots of harmful other components) is Plumpy'nut [1]. Plumpy'nut's recipe is patented, so even if someone could produce it cheaper, they can't legally produce it.
Rob is keeping the Soylent formula open in large part so that other people can produce exact and comparable versions. In addition, Rob has not only allowed others to develop comparable version, but outright encouraged it. So much so that when NickP developed a tool to develop recipes based on a list of ingredients and individual goals, Rob promoted the tool and gave it a home on the official soylent.me domain - http://diy.soylent.me/
In otherwords, people are being actively encouraged by the founder of Soylent to develop versions of soylent that meet needs that are not met by Soylent. And people are rising to the challenge - http://diy.soylent.me/recipes?sort=dailyCost&pctComplete=0.9 There's even a 100% complete recipe that can be made for $2.45 per day; this works out to about $74.73 a month - http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/low-entry-barrier-soylent
tl;dr - Your concern has been already been acknowledged by the community; there are alternative recipes, including one that works out to $74.73 a month, which is well under the $225 SNAP allowance.
Soylent is alleged to provide an appropriate amount of kcal, carbs, fat, protein and micronutrients/vitamins in a normal number of servings per day (e.g. 3). It's currently much less expensive than the GNC product at roughly ~$0.0038/kcal (assuming $255/mo, 84 meals/mo, 800 kcal/meal for men's formula).
The Soylent post reads like someone re-inventing a programming language and writing a paragraph each about "Now, we are including a 'for loop' because people want to iterate over variables while increasing their values. This can be used for activities like..." — it's all just very elementary school boot report feeling.
We're not talking about eating 20 scoops of vitamin powder a day to live off of. That would hurt pretty bad.
Unless you really meant the product as a whole in comparison to the vitamin and mineral powder, in which my reply was an overcomplicated way of saying "it's not a basic bulk vitamin and mineral powder."