From ArsTechnica:
We've been pretty vocal about the long-awaited release of Soylent, the engineered food supplement/substitute. However, every post about Soylent (be it at Ars or anywhere else) draws a not-insignificant number of comments from people who are nervous about its perceived artificiality. A common criticism is that modern food science doesn't yet have a complete picture of exactly how and why nutrition works. Perhaps throwing a bunch of micro- and macronutrients into a bag can't totally emulate the complex interaction of different natural ingredients in normally consumed food.
Whether or not that's actually true isn't certain, but Simo Suoheimo is betting that he and the rest of the people at Ambronite can deliver the same fast nutrition as Soylent while using whole foods instead of powders and pills. "We have the world's first drinkable meal that fulfills daily nutrition recommendations from organic, natural ingredients," Suoheimo explained to Ars in an interview.
Related Stories
Here's Soylent's New Product. It's Food.
Mr. [Rob] Rhinehart first pitched Soylent to the world with a post titled "How I Stopped Eating Food." Now his successor Mr. [Bryan] Crowley says that Soylent's customers — and everyone else — should definitely keep eating food.
Asked if new customers should consider living solely off Soylent, Mr. Crowley said, "We don't recommend it, no. Absolutely. 100 percent. We don't recommend, not because we don't think it's healthy or we don't think it's there. It's a very difficult thing to do and our research tells us that it happens for a very limited amount of time." (Mr. Rhinehart himself moved the company toward gentler "meal replacement" messaging before stepping down in December 2017, when he announced Mr. Crowley as his own replacement.)
Now Soylent has edged closer to something its customers might recognize as food.
There are other reasons to tell a less provocative story. In 2017, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency informed Soylent that its product didn't meet agency requirements for "meal replacement," which halted the company's expansion in that country. In 2016, the first attempt at solid Soylent — the Food Bar — was quickly pulled from circulation after customers reported vomiting and diarrhea.
The company is working hard to ensure its products are not merely safe to eat, but also tasty and enjoyable. "That's the big word that we talked a lot about," Mr. Crowley said. "Before it was all about function. Original Soylent was function, function, function. Now you hear words like enjoyment in our mission."
Stargate SG-1 s04e01.
Previously: Soylent Halts Sale of Bars; Investigation into Illnesses Continues
Soylent Meal Replacement Sales Blocked in Canada
Related: The Other Soylent Finally Ships
Ambronite: Organic Soylent Alternative
In Busy Silicon Valley, Protein Powder Is in Demand
Soylent 2.0 is Coming: Food Replacement Premixed in Bottles
Spore Scare Stops Shipments of Soylent Superfood
Soylent Stops Selling Powder While it Investigates Customer Sickness Complaints
Soylent Has Arrived At Walmart
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:29AM
Organic components? You mean like ... people? ;-)
(Score: 1) by hoochiecoochieman on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:39AM
The more important: Is it tastier than pork chop?
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Wednesday May 07 2014, @02:30AM
And what about the most important ingredient to soylent, long pork?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:47AM
So when the dreaded Soylent Beta occurs, some damn fool will start an Ambronite News next?
(Score: 1) by Wodan on Tuesday May 06 2014, @09:55AM
sounds like a plan! at least we won't have to have a vote on the name then.
(Score: 2, Funny) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:07AM
How about "Ambronite - News for treehuggers"? ;-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Funny) by elf on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:03AM
http://www.ambronitenews.org/ [ambronitenews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:12AM
You didn't buy the domain yet, lazy bastard.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by takyon on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:33AM
I don't eat foods without "bro" in the name, so I can't ingest Soylent.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:39AM
I will gladly pay you Thursday for a hambroger today.
(Score: 2, Funny) by oodaloop on Tuesday May 06 2014, @10:54AM
It should have plenty of brotein in it. If you're not sure, just ask your brofessor.
Many Bothans died to bring you this comment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:16AM
Before beginning a diet, consult your broctor.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday May 06 2014, @01:41PM
Bromine is tasty.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday May 09 2014, @08:19AM
mmm Broccoli
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:13AM
Why not just skip the digest part?
Mix it with some young blood from Nigerian children and have it injected directly into the body.
Problems solved.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:18PM
And Aging reversed... http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/05/136 243 [soylentnews.org]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07 2014, @03:10AM
And given the study we saw the other day with younger blood rejuvenating older mice, assuming that the same holds true for people, not only will the injected Nigerian children's blood infused with Ambronite be nutritious, it'll also make you younger!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:42AM
"engineered food supplement/substitute"
This describes pretty much everything for sale at McDonalds or the freezer aisle at the supermarket. The marketing theme for Soylent is it proposes to be a "complete" supplement/substitute.
The meta story about soylent is this kind of product had been available for decades, heavily marketed to dieters and doctors. My grandfather drank that kind of stuff for a very short period of time after surgery (you'd have to ask a surgeon why, something about his gallbladder and they had minor problems and wanted liquid only for a couple days in case they had to go back in, which they didn't, but they wanted to be ready if they did). The only thing special about Soylent is the advertising campaign aimed at theoretically healthy people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @01:12PM
There's one other special thing about it, or at least that they market as being special: The price.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @02:36PM
Ambronite's cost per meal is about 4 times higher than soylent's, and at 7-8$ for the crowdfunder's who invested in this stuff the cost seems pretty steep, though they "expect it to go down". Since they used wild picked arctic berries from Finland and the packets only have a shelf life of 2 months, I doubt either the prices will remain stable for long without changing the recipie.
(Score: 1) by Oligonicella on Tuesday May 06 2014, @03:17PM
Your first sentence is naught but hyperbole. I just bought groceries two days ago. Almost nothing there was "enginerred" other than being precooked. Much of is was simply frozen.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 06 2014, @04:34PM
That must be a highly unusual supermarket, perhaps a healthfood store or extremely careful selection of a very small subset products. Locally all I can think of in the freezer aisle that isn't somewhat mysterious is frozen veg and frozen fruit, both of which I buy a lot of. But I'm under no illusion that they have literally about 3 times the shelf space for pizza rolls and hot pockets as they do for veg and fruit, and those are only 2 of the highly processed foods they sell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06 2014, @04:38PM
Honestly, it's got the name going for it. That's about it. Liquid nutrition is already readily available at your local grocery store. They make it for old people.
But Ensure doesn't let you scream, "IT'S PEOPLE!" before you drink dinner.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday May 06 2014, @11:47PM
Ensure is a supplement. At 250 calories/meal it will not support an active person.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Tuesday May 06 2014, @03:08PM
(Score: 1) by lajos on Tuesday May 06 2014, @06:02PM
Hope they didn't use the "nutrition recommendations" from the morons that came up with the idea of the food pyramid (as in eating more carbs than anything else). Oh wait, they were not morons, just a bunch of corrupt politicians.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday May 07 2014, @03:39AM
I'm looking at Ambrionite's nutrient chart, and wondering if that's sufficient to produce iron toxicity.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by darkfeline on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:02PM
It's probably not a fair assessment, but Ambronite looks like any other prettily marketed useless or wishful-thinking startup, with a dash of organic fantasy added in. Natural != good. Good == good.
What Soylent has over Ambronite:
* FDA approval and official nutrient facts
* A number of people who have tested the product over the short and medium term.
* Open source recipe (you can source the components yourself and modify it if you want)
* Sustainable? Soylent aimed to help solve/alleviate world hunger. Organic farming is not sustainable/efficient enough at current population levels. No problem of half the world starved to death though.
What Ambronite has over Soylent:
* All Natural!
* Organic!
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by Groonch on Tuesday May 06 2014, @07:20PM
"Organic farming is not sustainable/efficient enough at current population levels."
Not efficient enough, probably. That is, if we don't change any of our other habits, like eating meat. But the level of demand has nothing to do with whether organic farming is sustainable. In fact, sustainability is one advantage that organic farming has over non-organic farming. It doesn't require lots of artificial fertilizers made of finite, depletable resources. If done right, it conserves soil better than modern methods, and it doesn't turn the land into a toxic waste dump.