Soylent Closes In On Finalizing Its Formula, Reaches $1M In Pre-Orders Soylent, the seemingly wacky personal experiment of 24-year-old engineer Rob Rhinehart, is maturing into a full-fledged business. Rhinehart and his team, who were running a Y Combinator-backed startup called Level RF last year, did what Paul Graham has called the “pivot of the century.” Fascinated by inefficiencies in the industrial food system, Rhinehart designed and then started living off a meal replacement he cheekily named Soylent — after the dystopian movie Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers that society has been living off rations made of humans. This Soylent, thankfully, is not made of humans. It contains an assortment of carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins and dozens of other vitamins that are deemed medically necessary to for a person to live by the Institute of Medicine, plus other modifications Rhinehart made through the testing process. “I’d like this to be something that is like coffee — a commodity something that’s available everywhere. Maybe a utility like water and power. Something that is ubiquitous and easy to consume,” he said. “I’d like to see it in grocery and convenience stores soon.” Now Rhinehart says the company will be closing in on a finalized formula by the end of next month — a version 1.0, if you will. They’ll have a party in late August where they’ll invite press and members of the public. Then the company will gear up to do 140,000 shipments in September with $1 million in pre-orders. It costs roughly $65 a week, including shipping. Most of the customers are young men, but there have also been a few Doomsday predictors and people preparing for a societal apocalypse that have tried to order lifetime supplies of Soylent, Rhinehart said. The company has been posting updates of modifications to the Soylent formula, including changing the protein source to a vegan one derived from a rice or pea protein isolate. “In terms of a new food product, this is much, much larger initial manufacturing run than has happened in the past,” Rhinehart said. A chance introduction got him in touch with the makers of MuscleMilk, Cytosport, who helped him find an factory in Modesto certified by the National Sanitation Foundation. He also started working directly with suppliers; in early versions of Soylent, he would buy components off Amazon or Alibaba. The taste is pretty bland, kind of malty even. “Soylent is not supposed to be this luxurious thing,” Rhinehart explained. To bit.ly/13Evs5m tcrn.ch/16bsdW9 Source: TechCrunch
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 19:18:40 +0000