> Not sure what your purpose is in rallying against this, anyway
Just one question - why would tech people be best placed to do this, not you know, nutritionists who have successfully, established products in an adjacent niche?
I wonder if Soylent would have been even more successful if instead of trying to "develop" a food from scratch with software engineer skills, they had instead simply rebadged or varied an existing NutriSlim-type product.
In Soylent's specific case it looks like they saw an unaddressed opportunity in the tech environment around them, then expanded from there. They took a marketing approach (it's about "science and efficiency") which that crowd responds to. Nutrition and food marketers weren't a part of that world and likely didn't have the chance to see the opportunity.