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Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

blog.soylent.com

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Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#331

Post by Animats »

johnfn wrote: post #5

Soylent gets a lot of hate (I'm looking forward to skipping out on this thread before the inevitable negative comments from people who assume that Soylent consumers will eat nothing but Soylent for the rest of their lives), but to me, it's solved a large problem in my life: what to eat when I'm hungry but I don't have enough time to prepare a full meal. It can happen every now and then when I'm rushing around, and so…

There's Calorie Mate Balanced Food Block from Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company in Tokyo.[1] It's like Soylent, but in solid form, without the pretension. Popular with Japanese salarymen who eat lunch at their desks. It's such a cliche in Japan that it appears in Metal Gear Solid. Nijiya Markets, the California chain, stocks it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Calorie-Mate-Balanced-Chocolate-Ounce...

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#332

Post by tommynicholas »

akcreek wrote: post #9
tommynicholas wrote: post #2

The new cacao Soylent is so much tastier than I expected it would be. Despite all the mocking Soylent gets, the product is excellent. Maybe it's groundbreaking and maybe it's not, but it's definitely helpful to my life.

The cacao is pretty good, but the other new flavor, nectar, is terrible IMO. Tastes like liquid pez. I still prefer the original flavor for meals. Cacao tastes more like a treat than a meal.

Got a case of Nectar - I sort of expected it to be bad but we'll see. May go to 50/50 regular and cacao.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#333

Post by deeth_starr_v »

chaostheory wrote: post #318
deeth_starr_v wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, while the intentions of Soylent are probably sincere, when I first heard about it my response was "nope nope nope". My parents were hippies and we grew/raised most of our food when I was a kid. But my grandparents had embraced the new space-age diet: margarine in place of butter, tang instead of orange juice, kraft instead of cheese, etc. I thought it tasted awful compared to real food. As we have found out,…

I agree with you. For everyone else, I just want to add that there is a place for things like Soylent, beyond the marketing. We're most likely not going to be able to continue our current method producing food cheaply. I could be wrong but things like Soylent will probably be the future that mitigates this issue for a lot of people.

Yeah, meat/food substitutes are likely central to our population growth rate, but let's be intellectually honest. I'm not sure it'll work. I'm really hopeful the meat substitutes will pan out. We haven't figured out cancer yet. You're betting on us figuring out food?

Edit: because cancer is complex, the same a food and nutrition

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#334

Post by mighty_atomic_c »

rockostrich wrote: post #174
wil421 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What meals are you cooking for $3-4 on the Joule? Looking at getting a Joule soon.

Any meal you can cook without the Joule using other cooking methods. 8 oz of chicken breast (~$1.50), 6 oz of brussel sprouts (~$0.75), 8 oz of potatoes (~$0.25). That's a $2.50 meal. Add half an onion, some bell pepper, some spices, and oil for cooking and it probably comes out to less than $3. Of course, those are average food prices in the US so YMMV. If you're in NYC or LA/SF, it's going to cost more than that no…

Sous vide burssels sprouts?

I mean, sous vide is amazing, but have you ever had your sprouts crispy? I used to be pretty indifferent to them until my fiancee cooked them up crispy.

Hmm... Now I'm thinking about food, oh look, its lunchtime.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#335

Post by nazgulnarsil »

rubatuga wrote: post #155

Although I was initially brought onto the hype train by great marketing and the promises of health and complete nutrition, I realize that my initial reliance on Soylent was actually part of a deeper problem, brought on by problems such as depression and inappropriate time management. When in reality I should have had enough time to eat out or possibly even cook a meal, I found myself relying on Soylent. I didn't leav…

Soylent has refused to make basic changes to improve their nutritional profile based on widely known and accepted research. Lots of their micronutrients look optimized for cost and not for human health. E.g. Soylent uses D2, when even 30 seconds of googling should have turned up evidence such as: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/4/694.full

"ergocalciferol should not be regarded as a nutrient suitable for supplementation or fortification."

D2 and D3 are metabolized so differently that they result in the "production of unique biologically active metabolites."

Ergocalciferol is the version used in the Soylent powder, while the bottled version doesn't even deign to inform the consumer what they are getting (it just says Vitamin D)

The fact that this problem exists and has existed for years with many of their ingredients indicates that they aren't even doing shallow research into nutrition.

(https://www.MealSquares.com try to provide multiple sources of all micronutrients from different food groups)

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#336

Post by Animats »

Does this mean they're going to make their own product? Currently, Soylent, the company, is just a marketing operation. Everything else is outsourced.

That's not an unusual strategy for hype-based products. Skyy Vodka and WD-40 were completely outsourced. Skyy Vodka was originally made by Frank-Lin Distillers Products in San Jose, the company that makes most of the low-end booze on the West Coast. Frank-Lin buys bulk ethanol by the tank car load (they have their own railroad sidings), does a little post-processing on the ethanol, takes in tap water and runs it through a deionzing plant, mixes them, adds flavoring, and bottles. They have a really fancy automated bottling line which can handle about a thousand different bottles and can change bottle types automatically. This is called product differentiation.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#337

Post by rhblake »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #314
rhblake wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RDA for protein is 0.8g/kg (~0.36/pound), so about 65g in your case if you're sedentary. 1g/pound is an old bodybuilder myth according to this article [0] which goes through various studies: "many review papers have concluded 0.82g/lb is the upper limit at which protein intake benefits body composition". This is for strength athletes and bodybuilders, mind you: most people (even many athletes) need far, far less. [0]…

> 1g/pound is an old bodybuilder myth according to this article Except that every time I've ever seen/heard it from bodybuilders it has always been 1g per lean pound which fits pretty well with your 0.82 figure accounting for typical bodyfat percentages. So your article is arguing a strawman and they've been right all along.

You're right, I forgot about that. My main point was that parent is probably overdoing it (even if he/she were a bodybuilder), and this seems to be quite common.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#338

Post by akgerber »

deeth_starr_v wrote: post #256
giaour wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founder of Soylent has repeatedly pushed his product as a solution for world hunger, unhealthy diets in the first world, and poor time management. I think critiquing the product on those terms is fair.

Agreed, while the intentions of Soylent are probably sincere, when I first heard about it my response was "nope nope nope". My parents were hippies and we grew/raised most of our food when I was a kid. But my grandparents had embraced the new space-age diet: margarine in place of butter, tang instead of orange juice, kraft instead of cheese, etc. I thought it tasted awful compared to real food. As we have found out,…

Meat is chemicals too. Just more complex ones, usually.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#339

Post by tommynicholas »

mks40 wrote: post #32

A question to Soylent customers: Do you use it as the occasional convenient meal replacement or how far do you go into replacing all real food? I suspect there is both, but what I am getting at is how much Soylent's long-term success depends on people seeing eating as a nuisance that should be optimized away versus something that should be savoured and enjoyed. To me this is in the context of the larger question of p…

Most breakfasts (I was eating Oatmeal before so very similar) and the VERY occasional lunch/dinner.

Re: Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV

#340

Post by elvinyung »

tonydiv wrote: post #49

It amazes me that VCs find this type of business interesting because it's not defensible in many of the ways a software company is. I am also not sure why the company wants to raise this much money -- they need to continue growing like crazy (outside of tech regions where engineers who are unwilling to cook live) or go bust. Nonetheless, the drink is ok. I tried it for a few months. Instead of avoiding cooking, I hav…

I've owned an Anova for a bit more than a year. Amortized over all the meals I've cooked, mostly super cheap cuts of meat that have been cooked over 24-72 hours to incredible quality, I would say that it is probably the essential tool in my kitchen.
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