They might have had controls, for all we know. The team shared many but not all details of the process, as is their prerogative.

Rhinehart is an engineer by background, and his blog posts ( http://www.robrhinehart.com ) evince a serious respect for the scientific method. Now that version 1.0 has been finalized and is shipping, I think we will definitely see a lot more testing of Soylent from both inside and outside the organization.