Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent

From the beginning, Soylent was shorthand for a certain kind of guy. A guy who worked in tech and probably wore a hoodie. A guy who, despite his six-figure salary, lived in an unfurnished apartment. Soylent Guy, above all else, did not have time for quotidian tasks such as cooking and chewing. One way you knew this was that he slugged the nutrient-dense slurry known as Soylent.Remember Soylent? In the mid-2010s, Soylent promised to change the world by solving a timeless problem: Everybody has to eat. Instead of chopping vegetables or defrosting a meal, you could fertilize yourself, like a needy rhododendron, with a blend of oat flour, maltodextrin, brown-rice protein, canola oil, fish oil, and just enough sucralose to mask the flavor. For a brief moment, Soylent was beloved—at least in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists helped turn it into a $170 million brand. It was also a dystopian punch line: What if you stripped life of all joy and bottled the result? Ha! In 2023, Soylent was sold off for a fraction of its former valuation.John Coogan, who co-founded Soylent in his early 20s and now co-hosts the popular tech-business talk show TBPN, chalks up the company’s decline largely to inexperience. “We were always trying to be a little bit too clever,” he told me. But perhaps Soylent’s greatest fumble was that it came too soon.You can find Soylent-like drinks almost everywhere these days. Fairlife—a line of protein shakes that bills itself as “a satisfying way to get the nutrition you’re looking for”—is so popular that it has become Coca-Cola’s fastest-growing U.S. brand. One of its competitors, Huel, recently sold to Danone for $1 billion. You can buy nutrition drinks from Rebbl and Ogain and Koia and Oikos, along with many, many other companies whose names have the wrong number of vowels.If you are one of the many Americans who chugs these shakes on the regular, perhaps you might balk at the comparison to Soylent. (You don’t even wear a hoodie!) The point of non