Dive Brief:
- Food substitute Soylent has secured $1.5 million in funding, led by tech investors Alexis Ohanian co-founder of Reddit, and the venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures.
- Soylent, a drink made of rice protein, olive oil and packed with nutrients, had earlier picked up $1 million in backing from a crowd-funding campaign.
- Unlike meal replacements, Soylent is meant to be a replacement for all food. In other words, its purpose is to sustain life.
Dive Insight:
To understand the appeal of Soylent you probably have to be a bit of the stereotypical tech geek. The product was created by technologist Rob Rhinehart, who became fascinated with the "inefficiencies" of the food chain. Rhinehart now lives on 90 percent Soylent and 10 percent of what he calls "recreational eating." The whole thing feels like something dreamed up by someone who is a little cut off from food,people and life itself.
Perhaps Soylent will have some use as emergency food in famines, etc. But the idea that there are everyday Americans who should be replacing food with this stuff strikes us as absurd. Yes, it is perhaps true that there are far too many young people eating crap and staring at computer screens all day and night. Our guess is that many of Rhinehart's backers are exactly those sorts of troubled folks. But the answer for such people isn't to get more efficiency into their nutrition consumption, the answer is for them to shut off the computer, go to the store, interact with people and learn to cook.
Besides, part of the appeal of Soylent is that the company hopes to get the cost down to around $5 a day (it runs about $65 a week now.) But we already have a low-cost, nutrition-dense, easily transported product that does everything Soylent wants to do and does it cheaper. As anyone who has served in the military in the past few decades can tell you, an MRE isn't food, it's what you eat when you don't have food.