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Comment by quaunaut | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious about this, because frankly I just do not care about food.

It costs a lot of money to buy. It costs a lot of time to prepare, unless you pay someone else even more money to do it for you. It takes up a ton of space, and even requires you to have a bunch of appliances just for its existence.

All so you can what- get a taste in your mouth and not die? I know that's a gross oversimplification(forgive me for it if you will), but it's always been a hassle I just really don't enjoy dealing with as often as I have to. I want to enjoy food, not be forced into it.

If this is actually healthy- and I want something more than a few people living off of it for a couple weeks- I'd love it. I wouldn't give up food entirely of course, but I'd save it for when I actually want a specific taste, or to go to a specific experience with friends and family.

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I'm with you there. I've been eating chicken breasts, lean pork, tilapia/salmon, broccoli, yams and nuts for the past several years and I would love to save time on making that crap once or twice a week. Too bad I also don't trust anything out of a box, since I don't believe we know yet what's good or bad for us.

I'm curious--have you tried replacing some of your meals with Ensure?

Edit: I'm not suggesting that Ensure and soylent are identical, but there is a lot of overlap, and in this case it appears to satisfy a lot of the requirements in the parent comment.

This.

It's interesting to me when something like this comes along and people herald it as something completely ground breaking when there's already a myriad of products do this and probably taste infinitely better.

Not saying its a bad idea, but this space is already incredibly crowded. what's the selling point that Soylent has over its competitors?

The company is taking essentially an open-source approach, and is deliberately fostering an active DIY community. Ensure and other products don't operate that way, as far as I know. That's pretty compelling to a lot of people.

Plus getting distribution will be cutthroat savagery. Direct-to-consumer is a huge amount of work and limits growth. Costco, Whole Foods, Trader Joes and Amazon should be hit up at the same time.

I would not call the space incredibly crowded. In fact, I'm not aware of anyone else promoting at the consumer level a 14-21/week meal replacement product.

Because that approach is fantastically irresponsible and existing companies don't want the legal hassle.

I don't know that it's irresponsible, much less fantastically so. The legal angle is a good one and why upstarts can continue to outwit the incumbents (discount them at your peril).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7557043

I don't think they actually are that similar.

Ensure doesn't even get you close to the recommended amount of macronutrients, unless you're trying to lose weight. Ensure has 210-350 calories [0], yet high levels of micronutrients which means if you drink too many of them you risk taking in way too much of some vitamins and minerals.

Soylent is meant for healthy people who want to consume a normal amount of macro and micro nutrients each day.

[0] http://ensure.com/nutrition-faq

In many parts of Asia its economical to eat out for every meal, not just for the rich. In Vietnam for example many street food vendors have a minimal markup on the cost of the raw ingredients, something like +20%. Same for a lot of cities in China as well I believe.

Is the food actually healthy though? I've heard bad things about the street food there [1], but I've never been.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil

I've eated cheaply in southern Vietnam - things like pho (noodle soup) and rice paper rolls which aren't fried. People there are pretty knowledgeable about the freshness of food - if a stall serves up crap, they go out of business pretty quickly.

Just out of curiosity, do you currently consume instant/cup ramen?

I haven't recently, but in the past I've consumed enough for half a lifetime.

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