[rblatz]

Or you could just buy Ensure, which has no trouble shipping and is available at nearly every grocery store and pharmacy.

I don't get Soylent's appeal, and I don't understand what unmet needs in the market it is meeting. My best guess, people that want to feel like they are "hacking" eating. Which is really just different marketing for a meal replacement shake.

[aianus]

Ensure is not the same thing as Soylent.

1. It is way more expensive than Soylent powder.

2. It has too much sugar and too little of everything else. If you scale the calories to 2000 you'll have 400% of your daily recommended value of some nutrients and 50% of others.

3. It comes in annoying sizes (one bottle is only 240 calories, wtf?).

[nilkn]

In addition to what others have said, the transparency of Rosa Labs (the makers of Soylent) is a big deal. Now that they have a manufacturing plant and so on, maybe things will change for the worse in the future, but up to this point they've been very open about their goal to produce a cheap, liquid, easy meal replacement, and they've openly supported the DIY community as well. They've also been adamant from the beginning that it's a process of continual improvement, and that's why Soylent is versioned, almost as if it were open source software.

You could file this all under marketing and not be technically wrong, but it makes a real difference in the experience as a consumer.

[tunesmith]

Soylent is not the same as Ensure - if you google soylent vs ensure, you'll see a lot of differences.

[Skunkleton]

Maybe look into it more? Ensure and Soylent are very different products, even if they state similar purposes.

[nosuchthing]

It's certainly marketed to the startup crowd as the startup work fast break things beverage.

If you go into a health food store like whole foods, there's a dozen or so other meal replacement options very similar to Soylent. Some soy free, some with exotic herbs and algae, some high protein, and all within the same price range.

[zacwest]

So your argument against it is, "somebody else already made something similar so why bother"?

[rblatz]

No, my argument is I don't understand all the excitement here at HN for Soylent. It doesn't seem novel or exciting, but a lot of people act like its the best thing ever invented. I then attempted to guess at the reason, which is that it's marketed towards techies and hackers in the startup scene, which ensure isn't.

Other replies have given me additional information which I'm going to go over. Your's was setting up a straw man argument.

[iopq]

It has better balance of nutrients. Anyone can throw in some cheap vitamins and call it a day, but having enough potassium (which Americans under-consume compared to sodium), magnesium, protein, is rare. Soylent has 20% of RDA of EVERYTHING. Just check here:

files.soylent.com/pdf/soylent-nutrition-facts-2-0-en.pdf

Soylent is still low on protein for my tastes because I lift weights and I'm shooting for at least 150g a day.

[Tiquor]

They really are different products. Is skeptical fit a while, but after dinner research I found that they really are not comparable.