I don't understand why Soylent receives the press it does, meal-replacement shakes have been on the market for quite a long time. The entire phenomenon seems to just be a marketing gimmick around some misguided notion of it "replacing food".
People can argue the health implications all they want, but to argue that this isn't anything new.. well, maybe i'm missing something, but it's quite new to me.
Considering that i've been wanting this product for the last 15 years - I'd say at the very least the others (whatever they may be) were a marketing failure.
They usually ship with the liquid/water mixed in, and the cost/kcal is substantially higher, with the carbohydrate concentrations much, much higher.
Shipping with the liquid/water mixed can often be a convenience, and at least Ensure also offers it's product in a powdered form: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-powder
The 'buy online' link from the Ensure page you posted lists their powdered product at $65 per 6 pack of 14oz cans. The serving size is 57g, so there are about 7 servings per can; a serving costs about $1.55.
Each Ensure serving is 250 calories, with 9g protein, 9g fat, 34g carbs (13g sugar, 0g fiber) and between 10 and 60% of all the major vitamins and minerals (most seem to be 25%).
Each non-vegan Soylent serving is 670 calories, with 38g protein, 24g fat, 84g carbs (2g sugar, 9g fiber) and between 33 and 57% of all the major vitamins and minerals (most are 33%). The vegans do their own thing with an oil additive (Soylent ships a fish oil/canola blend) so the published nutritional information is not accurate for vegans.
So without actually doing all the arithmetic, I would say that I would probably need 2.5-ish Ensure servings for every 1 Soylent serving to equalize calories. I would be getting more vitamins out of Ensure, but also more sugar - most of the carbs - and no fiber at all. The price would be close but Ensure would be more expensive.
http://abbottstore.com/adult-nutrition/ensure-powder-vanilla...
http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0421/5993/t/4/assets/Comple...
Ensure Complete is more expensive than Soylent and, while much more complete than regular Ensure, is still arguably less complete than Soylent. I think the only things it has going for it are taste (presumably), availability and an established brand name.
http://abbottstore.com/adult-nutrition/ensure-complete-milk-...
Pre-existing competing products do not count because they're blatantly terrible.
Most meal replacement shakes I've seen (not including those used in the medical industry) aren't suitable to replace your entire diet with and are generally very expensive per meal because of this. Most also warn against using the product to replace every meal with.
I think it's very good to have a mainstream product like this that attempts to cover 100% of the suggested daily intake, simply to bring into debate what the daily intake should really consist of? And if we can achieve it in countries that are too far from supply of actual crops.
How will they make soylent? there are plenty of foods with 100kcal per/0z. that are shelf stable and natural (and healthy). Shipping in powder X vs other food Y is a false differentiation. Its neither more healthy nor, nor less bulky, nor cheaper to ship.
Lastly, you will need to ship in water which is 4-5x the weight of food per day.
We literally do not know that. Similarly, we cannot know that about soylent either. Because we simply do not know enough about human nutrition to be making these kinds of statements yet. The government's "Recommended Daily Intake" system is just a veneer over our relatively primitive understanding of nutrition to help give us some very basic possible guidelines (which are still quite susceptible to being wrong). The unfortunate part is that people take these 'recommendations' to mean that we virtually know all there is to know about nutrition when that is truly far from reality...
I'm confident that we'll get there eventually, but first the quality of nutritional research will have to improve significantly, and it'll be far more work than any one meal-replacement company can hope to realistically invest in. So as much as I am for soylent 'pushing the boundaries' in that area, it's gonna take a lot more than that to get us a full-diet-replacement figured out for sure.
There was a case a number of years ago where one of the formula makers didn't add enough chlorides, resulting in cases of chloride deficiency (previously unknown -- salt is everywhere in a normal diet, and is present in human milk).
So... while maybe we can't say that we have a maximally healthy artificial diet, we do have multiple instances of artificial diets that are good enough to survive on.
I've sat down and done the research and tried to find a single one that would actually say you could use it as a meal replacement, and there aren't any. The only thing really are ones that they keep coma patients alive with, which isn't exactly something a normal every day person could use and stay active. But they would advertise it, just a hint at it, then the fine print says otherwise.
[1] http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/people-chow-301-tortilla-perfe... [2] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570