Tech

Soylent 1.0 arrives at Ars: We mix it up and slurp it down

After a day on the final formula, we talk taste, texture, gas, and the future of food.

Lee Hutchinson – May 18, 2014 1:00 pm | 219

Last August, I spent five days eating nothing but Soylent, the provocatively named liquid food product created by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Rob Rhinehart. Five days wasn’t anywhere near enough to gain more than the briefest glimpses into how the stuff might affect my body—I wound up losing a couple of statistically insignificant pounds, and once I’d moderated my intake some and wasn’t over-stuffing myself, I felt fine. The biggest side effect from eating Soylent for five days was a truly epic amount of gas for a couple of days; my wife is a saintly creature who assures me she didn’t notice, but I recall crop-dusting from room to room, praying that the foul vapors I was venting didn’t kill our houseplants or set our curtains on fire.

The gas calmed down after a couple of days, though, and the experiment was a success. I didn’t die, and farts aside, I felt pretty good. In the months since then, Rhinehart and his coworkers at Rosa Labs have tweaked the Soylent ingredient mix, fine-tuning the substance and figuring out their supply chain in order to meet the truly massive demand generated by the product’s crowdfunding campaign. After months and months of delays, much of which is directly attributable to the rice protein supplier chosen to deliver the tiniest-possible particulate size, Soylent began shipping on April 25.

Our order arrived yesterday afternoon, when USPS dropped off a 40lb. box (about 18kg) on my doorstep. In it were 28 bags of Soylent and 28 individual oil capsules. And we dove right in.

No soy, no people

“Soylent” as a product name raises a lot of eyebrows. People tend to respond to the name either by immediately exclaiming “It must be made of people!” or by saying “I heard that soy is terrible for you so if you drink this stuff you’ll probably die.” Good news for both responses: unlike its colorful namesake in the Harry Harrison novel or the Charlton Heston movie, Soylent contains no people; additionally, it isn’t made out of soy.

The final product has a 50/30/20 ratio of carbohydrates and fats and protein, respectively. The nutrition label we saw back at the end of January is almost identical to the shipping version (the only difference is that the shipped formula has 9g of dietary fiber instead of 8g, moving its RDA percentage from 32 percent to 36 percent). Each bag contains three servings for three full meals, and so with that bag’s oil bottle mixed in, a full bag of Soylent delivers 2,010 kcal and at or a bit over 100 percent of the recommended daily allowances for just about everything.

When we talked to Soylent inventor Rob Rhinehart last year, we made it a point to ask him about the reasoning behind choosing such a polarizing name. “For food, a lot of people tend to react quickly and not give it a lot of analysis. Piquing curiosity is very important here, and giving the product some kind of flashy marketing name would kind of—people would miss it quickly,” he explained. “But the name ‘Soylent’ is really good for encouraging further discussion and thought. Clearly, I’m wanting someone to investigate it a little deeper if I’m calling it ‘Soylent.’ It doesn’t seem very marketable!”

That oddness, along with Rhinehart’s bold claims about Soylent’s nutritional completeness and efficacy, drove a multimillion-dollar crowdfunding campaign that resulted in tens of thousands of orders. Much like other ridiculously successful crowdfunding campaigns, Rhinehart and his small team found themselves staring down a tremendous pile of orders to fill—and the potential to be crushed under the weight of so much success was definitely there. Transitioning Soylent from a small operation sending hand-mixed pouches to a few hundred beta testers into a full-scale manufacturing operation shifting literal tons of product has been a difficult slog, but now that product is shipping in quantity to customers, the sustaining effort should be a lot easier than the run up to the start has been.

Putting it into our mouths and seeing what it does

I mixed up a batch of Soylent immediately after photographing it, and the taste and texture was almost identical to the 0.8 beta formula I ate last year. Bread-y and vaguely sweet, with an almost-but-not-quite aspartame tang to the sweetness. Other sites have described Soylent as “like drinking cake batter,” and that’s not a bad description—it’s not as thick, of course, but it does have a spoon-coating consistency somewhere north of whole milk but south of buttermilk.

The chalkiness I’d so disliked during the beta was still there, in spite of the much finer-grained rice protein used in Soylent 1.0, though numerous other places suggested that letting the mixture sit overnight in the fridge would help the protein blend better. I did so, and this morning found the chalkiness to be drastically reduced. Properly-soaked Soylent has a very smooth, almost creamy mouthfeel. However, the silty particulate-type feeling is still there after swallowing—after drinking Soylent, I still feel like I need a small glass of water to get what feels like riverbed mud out of the back of my throat.

The part where we talk about farts

Yes, okay, this is the part of the review that I know at least half of you have scrolled to without bothering to read the rest. The good news—good for me and my wife, anyway—is that after having consumed a half-pitcher of Soylent over the last 20 hours, my gut is in fact not producing World War I trench warfare mustard gas.

That’s not to say everything is completely copacetic below the belt, though. I would say that while Soylent 1.0 hasn’t made me essentially house-bound like the 0.8 Beta version did, it is disrupting my normally clock-like regularity. My gut has produced its share of ominous rumbles, and my usual morning reading time has been augmented with two much faster, much smaller trips to the library that rated probably a 5 or 6 on the Bristol scale. Also, by “library” I mean “toilet.”

A bit of heightened gut activity aside, things are proceeding much better than in the beta. I don’t feel as if my belly is hosting a Blue Man Group performance, and I have no doubt that after another day or two things will settle down back to normal. And, if they don’t, I’ll have another poop-related story to write on Monday! Everyone wins!

Success, backlash

But in spite of being an unquestionable success monetarily, Soylent still has a significant number of detractors in lots of different places. Commenters on past Ars pieces have repeatedly asked what meaningful differences exist between Soylent and other liquid nutrition products, both in the consumer space (something like Slim Fast or Ensure) and the medical space (with products like Jevity). The answers that Rhinehart has given to those specific questions (which you can read in our finale piece from last year) don’t often stick.

Lee Hutchinson introduces his buddy Matt to Soylent. Hilarity ensues.

Health professionals tend to be all over the map with their reactions, with some predicting doom and others praising the product. Rosa Labs has been more than willing to subject both Soylent and its employees’ Soylent-filled bodies to medical scrutiny during the product’s iterative development; the company has been working with Dr. F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons on how to keep the product, and its employees, healthy. There are no long-term (or really even short-term) studies on what Soylent does to a person. Rhinehart points out that all of the product’s ingredients are well-studied, but detractors counter by saying that the exact means by which the body transforms food into nutrients isn’t wholly understood, and that “eating” is a much more complex and holistic process than just filling up RDA percentages.

Health concerns aside, the idea of drinking a “nutrient slurry” for sustenance in general tends to evoke a strong sense of revulsion from no small number of people. The most extreme of these seem to express intense disgust and offense at the very idea of something like Soylent.

Rhinehart has stated many times, though, that one of his ultimate aims with Soylent is to democratize nutrition and transform it into a basic utility—something like running water or electricity. The cheapest way to get Soylent right now is by ordering a month’s supply on a recurring basis, which costs $255 and works out to about $3 per meal. Rhinehart wants to drive the cost down even further so that it can eventually compete with “rice and beans” (the price of which of course varies across the world, but a target of about $1.50 per day per person wouldn’t be out of line).

It’s a noble goal, but not everyone is wholly on board with it—some, like author Ruth Reichl, have gone so far as to say that Soylent could potentially undermine and erode the food traditions of developing cultures, displacing heritage recipes and methods of food preparation with convenience, and ultimately pushing the world in a direction where poorer peoples and countries subsist on Soylent while the developing world eats whatever they’d like.

That seems a little dystopian for my tastes, but my perspective is also a lot narrower—I paid out-of-pocket for the month’s worth of Soylent currently sitting in my kitchen because it appeared to offer a convenient and ostensibly healthy way to eat without having to go through the hassle of preparing lunch. “Hassle” is a relative term, of course, and when this line of thinking has come up in past articles, commenters are often quick to point out that making a sandwich takes all of 30 seconds, but that misses the larger point that a lot of folks—myself included—intensely dislike all the support activities necessary to make that 30-second sandwich possible. Grocery shopping for a constant stream of fresh ingredients and then attempting to eat them before they go bad is an exercise in repetitive futility for me—I’m the guy who winds up having to buy $50 of stuff to make lunch at home, and $49 of it goes bad before I use it more than once.

However—and it’s a big however—everyone’s schedule and likes and wants are different. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. And, because of Soylent, I have the option of glugging my way through a fast liquid lunch when I don’t feel like keeping the larder stocked—and can also enjoy cooking and eating a fabulous dinner with my wife when the mood strikes.

Soylent and everything after

One of the reasons Rhinehart waited so long to ship Soylent—supply chain issues notwithstanding—was to ensure that once the product did start shipping, customers could reorder Soylent when they ran out without having to wait. I asked Rhinehart if this was going to be the case—as I neared my month of Soylent, would I be able to get more without having to wait months?

“We are structuring shipments and inventory in a way that reorders will be serviced immediately,” confirmed Rhinehart. Between that and building up additional manufacturing lines, he is confident that people who want to have a continual supply of Soylent will be able to do so. “We’ve had our roadblocks but the product turned out quite good,” he added, “and I am glad we took the time to get it right, though ideally the process would have gone more smoothly, which it certainly will going forward.”

More than 30,000 individual bags of Soylent have been shipped from the Rosa Labs warehouses, and Rhinehart and the Soylent team are filling the remainder of the preorders as fast as they can. Further, the first string of re-orders appears to be also going out to folks, putting paid to Rhinehart’s intentions of keeping the supply flowing to repeat customers. The pricing of the product will likely fluctuate as the ingredient mix changes over time, and Rhinehart is already looking at ways to improve things—and perhaps even turn Soylent into something without any agricultural roots at all.

“We have a roadmap of changes and improvements I’d qualify as substantial enough to go through Soylent 1.3 at least,” Rhinehart commented yesterday in a discussion on the official Soylent forums. “I think Soylent produced entirely independent of agriculture would qualify as Soylent 2.0, and Food 3.0.”

In a world that’s still getting used to Soylent, we’re content to sit back, sip our liquid nutrition, and watch what Rhinehart and his team do next.

Lee Hutchinson Senior Technology Editor

Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.

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