If you know how, it's surprising how deliciously and nutritiously you can eat for ~$10/day, which is what Soylent currently costs. Doing so does require cooking and a bit of planning. Obviously, filet mignon is off the menu, but you'd be surprised what still is. Also, (properly chosen) real food is proven while Soylent is not.
So, what is the niche for Soylent?
People who know about nutrition know that you probably shouldn't trust the claims Soylent makes until it's been on the market for a while. People who know how and are willing to cook economically probably don't want to risk their health on an unproven product that won't save them money (currently). People who are largely ignorant of nutrition and eat ramen and Kraft Dinner daily probably won't want to give up the taste they'd be missing out on, nor pay extra for it.
There are a few crazy people who will adopt Soylent as their primary staple, but the majority of business will likely be from people looking for novelty or an occasional time-saving meal replacement. Basically the meal-shake crowd. What's the best way to appeal to this segment? Claim that your product can be eaten daily without causing health-problems, just as Soylent is currently doing. Future variants might include calorically reduced versions for the diet crowd or a protein-boosted version for the (wannabe)body-builder crowd. There's plenty of commercial opportunity here.
Will Soylent actually change the world for the poor though? If they can bring the price down Soylent might make a difference with the educated poor, but that's a very small segment of the population. The uneducated poor will gravitate towards food that tastes better.
I find the "soylent is cheap and $10 a day" message very weird too.
$10 per person per day (in multi-month bulk, it $12.15 per day for a weekly supply) is on the expensive side for grocery shopping. If your goal is nutritious thriftiness, $2-5 per day is a very achievable goal. If you want cheap on a global "nutrition-crisis" level, $0.30-$2 is the goal. I've hear soylent mentioned in that context too.
It's only "cheap" when compared to eating out which seems like a very disingenuous comparison.
I'm not dismissing soylent. I'd be interested in trying it. But, calling it cheap is crazy.
I feel that Soylent making claims about World Hunger is just another claim they pulled from the air, with very little knowledge of the work needed, but which sounds good to supporters.
I spend more than $10/day on lunch alone. Without eating out.
"Cheap" varies greatly by location, and expectation, and how much time you're willing to put into cutting cost. And if you're considering Soylent, presumably spending lots of time planning out your meal is probably not high on your list of desirable activities (I could probably easily cut my lunch cost, but I value the time it'd take at more than my potential savings)..
$100 is a lot less than some other people spend on lunch. Bench pressing 100kg is easy for some people. I wouldn't call it light. When you say something is "cheap" it's always relative.
But, there is within the bounds of regular conversation there are some assumptions you make about things. If you say this jar of powdered chocolate beverage is cheap, I will assume you mean relative to coffee, tea or something else I'm likely to make at home and not relative to a barrister coffee or a martini in bar.
Here I think the logical comparison is other powdered foods (slim fast, protein shakes, weight gainers, etc) or grocery shopping.
> Here I think the logical comparison is other powdered foods (slim fast, protein shakes, weight gainers, etc) or grocery shopping.
Then, let me repeat myself: I spend $10/day on lunch based on grocery shopping. Easily.
There are certainly many parts of the world where $10/day for Soylent would not be competitive at all. And it certainly would be less competitive for people who value their time low enough to spend time keeping the cost down (I could probably cut 1/3 of my lunch bill by going to the cheaper grocery store 5-10 minutes away rather than the one downstairs from the office; and I could cut quite a bit off the bill by spending time finding the cheapest lunch meat, and the cheapest bread etc., but I won't).
But the point remains, that while $10/day may sound expensive, in many locations it is not, and even less so when comparing with "shopping as quickly as possible" vs. bargain hunting.
I live in Ireland. Food is expensive here relative to most benchmarks.
At my local (small & expensive) €10 will get you a kg of potatoes (€1), A head of broccoli (€2), a kg of carrots (€1) and a delicious whole cooked chicken (€6) - that's euros, but it will feed 4. Cook you own chicken or drive to a proper supermarket and you can make it dollars or get some chocolate. Spaghetti with meatballs would feed the family for half that.
Seriously though I'm surprised at this thread. Most of the world eats for under $1 per day. I assume that the median family of 4 in the US isn't spending much more than $5 per homecooked meal (X 3 X 4 X 7 = $420 per week) because they don't have the income for it.
In order to have nutritious very cheap food the "make it yourself from cooked ingredients" way, you need:
- Large amounts of skill in planning, choosing, preparing, and cooking ingredients. The fact that you absorbed those household skills by watching your mom doesn't make them trivial. Many people have no such skill.
- Free time to do the work of sourcing, preparation, cooking and cleaning. (Not always available to people who work as many jobs as they can or have kids.)
- Predictability of demand and usable time (often not available to "casual" workers).
- Good project-management skills, to bring ingredients together in usable form at the right time.
- A location that conveniently offers the ingredients you need (rather than a food desert), at their optimal prices (rather than marked up).
- Enough knowledge of basic nutrition to balance the meals you make over the long term.
- Enough knowledge of food risks to not poison yourself (easily done with raw meat, undercooked beans, etc).
- As a nice-to-have, enough actual skill cooking to make it taste good.
But anybody (and I really mean anybody except for people that can not take care of themselves at all) can learn how to cook a quick and healthy meal. The amount of skill required for healthy eating is almost nil, we're not talking 5 course meals here.
Worst case bail-out (still a lot more tasty than sludge, and a lot cheaper too) is that old bachelors stand-by, the omelet. Slightly more advanced, pastas and salads. You'll be doing fine like that if you combine that with fresh fruit, maybe some nuts, milk/yoghurt and the occasional piece of meat/chicken/fish (well done, if you're panicky about the risks involved in preparing those).
Ok, true, you probably need a fridge if you want to economize on the cost part and if you live in a place with lots of others there might be trouble from that angle. (student dormitories for instance, assuming they allow cooking).
Well, perhaps if the sort of folks who yap about privilege hadn't spent the last four decades doing their damnedest to destroy the system in which, yes, the vast majority of households had at least one member (but probably several) who had the appropriate skills, then we wouldn't have this kind of mess.
I would dearly love to be able to get the sort of job where I create problems, then make money by talking about them.
From the discussion I've seen here Soylent seems to have hit on a market for 'efficiency of prep and consumption'. I've seen a lot of people comment to the effect they don't want to think about food, they don't care to enjoy what they eat, they just want it to be a solved problem requiring no thought. Beside the health impact of single-source nutrition or the possible savings I would actually like to see if this feeling has any measurable truth to it. It 'feels' like I maybe spend time on food I could be spending on other things, but is this an opportunity to reclaim valuable time or would I just use the extra time to browse HN or some other browsing?
Does it necessarily have to be an all-or-nothing approach? I have time to cook and eat whole food on weekends. 5 days of the week I'd just like to slurp and go.
I definitely think the workweek rush propagates the idea of 'I wish I could get my food-related time back', so I imagine it could see a lot of success as a work-lunch/home-from-work dinner type product alright.
Not requiring cooking or planning. According to the article, the aim is also to lower the product's price to ~1/6 of the current:
> 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).
I'm traveling via motorcycle this summer across the US and plan to eat Soylent for around 70% of my meals. I don't trust myself to plan, carry, take time to prepare and cook well balanced meals for ~60 days of traveling. Even freeze dried meals seem likely less balanced than this, and still take up more time/space.
I doubt I'm the target market, but it seems a perfect target for those traveling.
I have no idea. I'd probably pick Ensure as well, I think it's cheaper per can and less hassle.
Actually, I have lived off of Ensure before. When I had my wisdom teeth yanked, they had to break my lower jaw to get them out (it was a big deal with a specialist and general anesthesia and everything). I could open my jaw for about 3 months and lived off of a diet of only Ensure for the entire time. I actually put on a few pounds believe it or not during this time.
Yes, I think it might be cheaper for the 'poor' to buy the ingredients separately themselves and prepare the drink (or cook the food) themselves. Since Soylent must cost as much as it's raw materials plus preparation and transportation costs.
To be economical for the 'poor', not only must the Soylent company must be able to acquire the ingredients at a cheaper price than the 'poor' can, the difference must also be greater than the cost of Soylent's preparation and extra leg transportation between where the ingredients are bought and where Soylent is prepared.
Until Soylent can be prepared from raw industrial chemicals, of course!
The other problem that doesn't tend to get addressed in this sort of discussion of nutritional-supplements-for-the-poor-masses is that you still need to mix it with water. The poorest places have a lot of problems getting water that's safely drinkable and cases of supplement don't really help them (see also the issue of baby formula in the developing world).
Honestly, this idea that soylent is a solution to famine strikes me as a bit absurd.
Besides that, food and the process of eating is not just physical and chemical, it is also psychological and social. Could you meet the bare-bones nutritional requirements of the homeless by replacing soup kitchens with soylent kitchens? Probably. And I'm sure you could even serve them with hot bowls of soylent. But handing someone an actual meal, with food prepared by someone who wants to help them, will, without a doubt, provide much more emotional and and therapeutic benefit than will handing them a pouch of powder and a spoon. The whole concept of soylent smells like a halfassed answer to a barely understood problem from a cut-rate engineer.
Soylent should be able to get industrial quantity discounts. a poor person is paying retail. And urban retail is no-where near wholesale (rent/overheads).
Soylent is economic in the sense mentioned in the article--low time spent shopping and no waste.
The scalability limitation on soy-lent is that most people will not be able to eat "something that tastes like cake batter" for 90 meals in a row (one month). There is plenty of evidence for this.
So, until they find a way to deal with "palatability" (its more than just variety), the ultimate upside potential will be limited.
But there are plenty of people making money off off of niche and novelty consumption specialty retail.
The niche is for hipster-nerds who want to have something "cool" that defines their personality. It's kind of like kids who work so hard to look like they haven't brushed their hair: "I just don't care what society thinks about me." It's no different than "I just don' care what food tastes like. whips carefully combed bangs out of face Pshah, I just totally don't have time to make food, you know? Like, I'm totally building this rad web app, you know, for the modern generation. You just don't get it, man, food is like, totally mainstream."
> Doing so does require cooking and a bit of planning. ... So, what is the niche for Soylent?
Bam, there's the niche right there! At least for me, laziness is the reason. I want to eat decently, but sometimes I don't want to stop working, I usually don't want to cook, and I don't always want to go out and grab fast food or have something delivered. So if I can mix a decent-tasting, filling shake quickly, that's a great thing. Bonus points since that shake will probably be better for me than some frozen dinner or fatty sandwich from a drive-thru.
The problem with this sort of dismissal of Soylent is that it has already sold several million dollars worth of product (while openly marketing itself as a meal replacement tool, and not an occasional meal-shake). So there's a flaw somewhere in your reasoning.
So, what is the niche for Soylent?
People who know about nutrition know that you probably shouldn't trust the claims Soylent makes until it's been on the market for a while. People who know how and are willing to cook economically probably don't want to risk their health on an unproven product that won't save them money (currently). People who are largely ignorant of nutrition and eat ramen and Kraft Dinner daily probably won't want to give up the taste they'd be missing out on, nor pay extra for it.
There are a few crazy people who will adopt Soylent as their primary staple, but the majority of business will likely be from people looking for novelty or an occasional time-saving meal replacement. Basically the meal-shake crowd. What's the best way to appeal to this segment? Claim that your product can be eaten daily without causing health-problems, just as Soylent is currently doing. Future variants might include calorically reduced versions for the diet crowd or a protein-boosted version for the (wannabe)body-builder crowd. There's plenty of commercial opportunity here.
Will Soylent actually change the world for the poor though? If they can bring the price down Soylent might make a difference with the educated poor, but that's a very small segment of the population. The uneducated poor will gravitate towards food that tastes better.