[princess3000]

You'd probably expect a car company with the motto "Engineering future cars" to have at least one mechanical engineer on their payroll. Expecting a company whose tagline is "Engineering future foods" to have at least one person with a background in nutrition isn't unreasonable.

Ship it and then iterate works when your product is software, not so much when it's marketed as the only food the human body needs to ingest for long periods of time. If node.js breaks then maybe some websites go down. If Soylent breaks then people could die (though hopefully they'd stop taking it before that point).

[KevinEldon]

I don't really care about who car companies employ; I do care about the performance of the car I buy. If the car is unproven I don't buy it. If the car is proven to be defective or unsafe I don't buy it.

Soylent is not a car. The first buy is bordering on an impulse buy. If it doesn't work for someone then they're likely to stop using it. If you're skeptical about it then don't buy it... wait for the reviews, wait for the early adopters to give some feedback.

Marketing is mostly bullshit... Soylent is mostly marketing right now. If the marketing bothers you then you're probably not an early adopter so just hang back and tell the early adopters how stupid they were in a year.

[quinnchr]

So you're saying it's the early adopters who hold the responsibility for ensuring the product is safe? They should possibly risk their lives so they can give reviews to future potential customers so that they can make an informed decision on the safety of the product?

Since Soylent falls under the food category we don't get the benefit of the FDA testing it's safety for us, unlike cars which have the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to set standards for safety testing. So really the only safety information you can glean is the track record/capabilities of those making Soylent, and without a nutritional scientist on board, that seems like a dubious idea.

[chadwickthebold]

Good point. We can argue all day about whether startups like Airbnb should be regulated, but it seems pretty clear to me that the government has a public health interest in regulating a pile of powder and its associated health claims.