[alainmeier]

Here's a very thoughtful response from Rob, the creator of Soylent answering your very question:

http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-...

tldr; There's room in the market for more than one non-solid dietary product, the goal of Soylent is to be a complete alternative that supports an active life rather than something that just lets you survive, ensure is expensive and low calorie.

[jgrahamc]

Yes, I've read that in the past and without being rude I do not consider that to be 'thoughtful'. It's a repetition of what he's said a number of times about his goals for Soylent, but it does not answer my question.

He mentions Ensure as follows: "I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal." That does not tell me anything about Soylent.

Sure, he wants to make it cheaper. Can he? About a month ago I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5875246 The pricing is very close between Soylent and Ensure Complete. Abbott claims you can live long term on it etc.

My suspicion is that he's comparing Soylent with the common consumer "Ensure" product which is relatively low-calorie etc.

[schiffern]

4 bottles of Ensure Complete would only be 1400 Calories/day, vs. 2200 Calories for Soylent. You'd have to drink 6/day, making it $66.43/wk for Ensure Complete (cheapest Amazon price) vs. $52.88/wk for Soylent.

Of course, you said that you considered $73.48/wk to be "very close to Soylent pricing". Sure it's in the same order of magnitude, but a 40% increase is nothing to sneeze at.

[DanBC]

Ensure Plus is higher calorie.

You don't want the high calorie versions because people are going to be chugging this stuff to avoid feeling hungry.

[schiffern]

Ensure Plus contains 350 Calories, exactly the same as Ensure Complete.

[anonymoushn]

The response is definitely worthwhile, and a bit of it seems to be that the use case is different. It would be a bit expensive to replace a majority of one's diet with Ensure Complete. A 16-pack of 8oz Ensure Complete is 5600 Calories for $42, so eating for a day costs $15. The preorder price of 1 week of soylent is $9.29/day, but worryingly we don't know how many Calories that is...

A quote from Vice on the crowdfunding page indicates that it should be about 700 Calories/day[1] (making it several times as expensive as Ensure), while Rob Rhinehart's blog indicated that he was consuming a reasonable number of calories earlier this year (2629 C/day)[2].

[1] https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

[2] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=474

[JoshTriplett]

"More expensive per Calorie" is not necessarily "more expensive" for the target audience. The classic "2000 Calories per day" assumes some level of physical activity. If you don't have any physical activity, you're better off consuming fewer Calories per day, as long as you get all the other nutrients you need.

[anonymoushn]

This is an important consideration. The target audience of Soylent likely has some wild variation in desired caloric intake, perhaps 4-6x between people who want to drop some pounds and people who lift as a hobby.

[JoshTriplett]

Yeah. The creator of Soylent makes a point of saying that it should be tuned for the person using it. Hopefully in the long-term they'll offer versions with varying calorie content. Alternatively, they could offer a two-component system with nutrients and minimal calories in one and pure calories in the other, to make it easy to tune that one variable for your target calorie consumption.