Soylent hits its 1.0 formula, nears release

It's Soylent, and thanks to some food coloring, it's green!

Lee Hutchinson

Soylent, the food replacement from former engineer Rob Rhinehart, has hit one of its final milestones before release: the formula has been finalized and frozen, and large-scale manufacturing and packing is underway. Just after Thanksgiving, Rhinehart posted a blog entry discussing the changes in "Soylent 1.0" versus the beta 0.89 version we consumed for a week back at the end of summer.

At the time, the Soylent folks estimated that backers of the company's wildly successful crowdfunding effort would be receiving their initial shipments of Soylent in December; this estimate has now been revised to January. The main reason for the delay has been due to the small Soylent team having to find ways to cope with the realities of mass-producing their product. The beta packages of Soylent sent out to the small list of testers were all hand-stuffed, whereas the actual production version is being mixed and packaged on an industrial scale by a specialist company called a "co-packer."

Macro mix

Going by the blog post, there are a number of substantial changes to the Soylent formula from the beta we slurped down. One is that the carbohydrate mixture has been nailed: one 500g bag of Soylent will contain 210g of oat flour and 132g of maltodextrin. The protein mix has also shifted—our beta Soylent contained a mix of rice and pea protein, but production Soylent will contain 210g of brown rice protein isolate.