I would order Soylent right now if I could. So I'm pretty excited to find out about these. I had no idea they existed. FWIW, my diet now is like 95% red meat, with some cheese occasionally added in.
What are the downsides of these compared to Soylent? I mean, what's the motivation for Soylent if these already exist?
I guess the difference is that this guy is making the recipe available so you can tweak it to your requirements.
Ensure or other prepackaged products are a predefined set ratio, which may not be optimal for all consumers.
For example, highly active people will probably require a higher ratio of carbohydrates than less active people. Similarly, some people will be genetically predisposed to have higher/lower uptake of some nutrients/vitamins.
Ultimately, for any one person to succeed with a Soylent style approach, they will need to monitor their blood levels of a range of elements and compounds.
To my mind, developing a rapid, cheap, broad spectrum blood analysis to allow people to monitor their diet (soylent or not) is what should be focused on.
Looking at Ensure, it's $42.50 for 24 bottles with 350 calories each. At ~2000/calories per day (6 bottles), it looks to be something that would cost ~$320/month to replace most meals with.
I'd imagine that Soylent's sales success will lie with its price point reaching around ~120-150/month price point. Going much higher than that, and the financial incentive would be lost.
$42.50 for 24 is just sloppy shopping. I get about half of my intake from Ensure (and its competitors), not by choice but because of a medical condition that often precludes normal eating, and $28-32 ($7-8 for a six pack) is an easy target to maintain consistently. The cases of 24 are aimed at institutions, are priced accordingly, and never go on special.
Well known brands include Ensure and Fortisip.
(https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)
(http://ensure.com/)
These have the advantage of careful preparation and high standards of QA.