Ask HN: What Happened to the Soylent Buzz?

A few years ago, Soylent, and related local copies, were given a lot of press and were lauded as the future of eating.

Techies loved them, there were articles about Soylent all over HN. Soylent itself got backing by Alphabet and Anderseen Horowitz.

I haven't heard about Soylent that much lately, however, and the buzz (or hype?) seemed like it died off.

Reading an article on Yahoo! about them, it seems like they pivoted recently, with CEO from Kraft. Which made the company profitable for the first time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/soylent-once-beverage-tech-bros-143516284.html

4 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] thread

edent 4y ago ↗

It was only ever a marketing scheme designed to get men onto the same diet bandwagon as women. Meal replacement shakes have been around for decades but were mostly targeted at women and, occasionally, men who wanted to lose weight.

It turns out, like most products, there is a limited market. Solyent / Huel were only able to convince a few people to develop an eating disorder and that's probably a good thing.

shp0ngle 4y ago ↗

It seems after almost bankrupting, they did some changes - they cut a lot of costs and focused more on retail and end-costumers, and that got them back up.

https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2021/07/28/Soylent...

Note though, all I get here is from their own PR machine.

tamaharbor 4y ago ↗

People actually tasted it.

brudgers 4y ago ↗

Soylent is mainstream enough that my kid -- who was in middle school when it was the buzz -- knows about it as a young adult.

It's ordinary knowledge in their social circle.

Objectively, it's just another food product and the likely exit has always been acquisition by a food conglomerate.