I haven’t been keeping up with the phenomenon known as ‘Soylent’, except when today I just read the news that they have been able to raise a $50M funding round for expansion into new markets as well as retail.
Why is this news?
Well, Soylent is something that is coveted as a food product by overworked millennials who seldom have time to cook for themselves. As such, it is very popular in the elite circles of Silicon Valley. Not surprising, then, that the investors in this food product are all people known in the Valley for making money off software. The company itself is the brainchild of a software engineer from that area. When someone in the family raises money, and that too, in the millions, it is sure to make some news.
I really like how they describe Soylent as ‘addressing one of the biggest issues we face today: access to complete, affordable nutrition’. How did we manage to come to a point in time where pre-packaged powdered nutrition is somehow more affordable than plants that grow in the dirt?
This reeks of hype through and through.
Soylent isn’t even the first meal-substitute – there are countless others. What it does have going for it, though, is that there is a face behind the product and the face isn’t that of a woman. Slimfast comes to mind. It is a meal substitute (although, you still have to include at least one regular meal in your diet), but it has become synonymous with female weight loss. At this point, if you tell someone that you’re on the ‘Slimfast diet’, they’d think you were a woman trying to lose weight, instead of assuming that you’re just time-starved and trying to access affordable nutrition (it is not affordable, though).
For investors, the popularity of the product means a shot at getting bought by a big name FMCG company. It is also a healthy segue from the technology landscape where almost everyone is building an AI or a VR app, not to mention the quantified shortage of skilled people not working for a major multinational company in the Valley.
Is it healthy?
Of course, not. Processed food never is. None of the investors themselves rely on Soylent for their sustenance. It is something that is ripe for the scalability problem that technology investors love to solve, though.
And, it has a brilliant name.