There's clearly some market for this. The food giants haven't yet entered because it's risky, and the supply chains for the ingredients still being developed. As soon as Soylent is successfully shipping safe product, however, the big companies will jump in and crush Soylent Corp with their lower pricing and higher profit margins due to their scale of production.
This is what I don't understand about Soylent: assuming that these are similar products and offer similar nutritional profiles, no one would reccomend that you base 90% of your diet on ensure. It sounds crazy. Is this mostly about rebranding/recontextualizing a similar product for another audience? Otherwise I don't see why it's innovative.
Abbott and Nestle and other companies only offer replacements meant for 90%+ diet use for people under medical supervision. I don't think we totally know how to create a reliable replacement without missing something - and everyone's needs are different - so until someone figures out how to solve that problem it's not going to exist in a form you can buy off supermarket shelves.
The idea of drinking Ensure for 90% of my meals scares me for the same reason Soylent does. The unknowns are too much - small startup or major pharmaceutical company alike.
Add Sustagen to that list, who make meal replacement shakes, including a medically certified "hospital formula" used by hospitals and health services as a full time long term meal replacement. Very popular here in Australia and available in all supermarkets.
Branding. Though I'd be a little surprised if they don't ultimately get sued over the Soylent name. They'd be smarter to change it now before they have mass recognition and it gets a lot costlier to do so.
They can compete too on "nutrition". Talk about how the big corps cut corners (which they will) and how that reduces the utility of their finely tuned formula.
Doesn't have to make sense, just has to sound plausible.
I'd be worried about that too. First-mover has some advantages, but look at what has happened with Greek yogurt. I'm sure the Chobani people are doing well, but they weren't exclusive for long. Even worse outcome is Powerbar - their name is essentially genericized, but they got beat by everybody and their brother.
There's clearly some market for this. The food giants haven't yet entered because it's risky, and the supply chains for the ingredients still being developed. As soon as Soylent is successfully shipping safe product, however, the big companies will jump in and crush Soylent Corp with their lower pricing and higher profit margins due to their scale of production.