[samstave]

False.

My mother just passed of cancer, she was on a feeding tube for 8 months consuming this Abott liquid food. It was shipped in cases just like anything else - cardboard boxes - and delivered via foil-boxes just like the portable milk that you see at any starbucks, though it required no refrigeration.

However, this substance was not made for taste buds and it smelled fairly bad.

They have different types depending on what caloric intake was prescribed by the doctor.

[sp332]

As stated in Steko's quote above, that costs ~4x as much as soylent. Note also that the numbers for soylent don't include packaging or shipping. If you made a commercial version with preservatives etc. the price might be comparable.

[samstave]

I am still skeptical of that stement: the medical cost of Abott's product is high. That does not mean the manufacturing cost is high. In fact, as I mentioned, I think the margins are what is extremely high.

The packaging of this is ubiquitous in many many other products (milk, juice, etc) and I am sure is a very very low cost factor.

[jtheory]

Yes, this -- manufacturing Soylent at scale (including a well-managed supply chain with much-lower-than-consumer pricing) would make it far cheaper than it is now to make.

Also consider that Soylent isn't primarily optimized for price, but for quality nutrition and taste.

ALSO consider that anything normally paid for by medical insurance has hugely inflated prices... Abott's probably costs a fraction of Soylent's cost to make. The rest is profit.

[schiffern]

>Note also that the numbers for soylent don't include packaging or shipping.

Sure they do. He says he's buying them in personal-size containers, and the price includes shipping. Someone is already buying the ingredients in bulk and reselling them in smaller containers, it's just not the soylent guy. Once he's buying in bulk I would expect costs to drop, even with the added expense of packaging and shipping.