Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent

The Comeback Nobody Predicted

Soylent was supposed to be the future of food — and then it became a joke. The bland nutrient slurry, backed by $170 million in venture capital and beloved by a specific archetype of Silicon Valley techie, collapsed into irrelevance by 2023, selling for a fraction of its peak valuation. Co-founder John Coogan, now a tech-business podcast host, admits the company was "always trying to be a little bit too clever" and acknowledges they were simply too early. Yet the core idea behind Soylent — that eating could be reduced to efficient nutritional delivery — has not only survived but quietly taken over the mainstream beverage aisle.

Fairlife protein shakes, Huel, Orgain, Koia, Rebbl: the shelves are now packed with products that do almost exactly what Soylent promised but without the dystopian branding. Fairlife has become Coca-Cola's fastest-growing U.S. brand. Huel recently sold to Danone for **$1 billion**. These products market themselves with language like "a satisfying way to get the nutrition you're looking for" — careful, aspirational phrasing that avoids the techno-utopian provocation of Soylent's original pitch. The post-food future arrived; it just had better packaging and a savvier read of the room.

What Changed — And What Didn't

The ingredients haven't changed dramatically. Soylent blended oat flour, maltodextrin, brown-rice protein, canola oil, fish oil, and sucralose into something that tasted like obligation. Today's protein shakes often feature similar macronutrient profiles and processed-ingredient lists. What shifted was the cultural framing. Soylent wore its contempt for the rituals of eating openly — it was engineered by and for people who found cooking an inefficiency to be optimized away. That attitude, combined with the particular social profile of its early adopters (hoodie-wearing, apartment-unfurnishing tech workers with six-figure salaries and philosophical indifference to pleasure), made it easy to mock.

Soylent's greatest fumble was not the formula — it was that it came too soon.

Today's meal-replacement and protein-shake brands have learned to sell convenience without selling coldness. They invoke wellness, fitness goals, and "nutrition," not the elimination of the human experience of food. The customer is no longer positioned as a man who has transcended the need for dinner; she is someone with a busy life who deserves to feel good. The product is nearly identical. The ideology is repackaged.

The Protein Obsession as Cultural Backdrop

The success of this new generation of food-replacement drinks also rides on a broader cultural fixation with protein that would have seemed extreme even a decade ago. Protein has become the macronutrient of the moment — a near-universal shorthand for health, muscle, virtue, and discipline. This created fertile ground for products that might otherwise seem joyless. A shake isn't a sad meal anymore; it's a protein delivery vehicle, and protein is desirable enough to make the transaction feel positive rather than reductive.

The growth of Fairlife in particular illustrates how completely the market has normalized what Soylent once represented. Coca-Cola — a company whose flagship product is unambiguously about pleasure, taste, and the opposite of nutritional optimization — now derives some of its fastest domestic growth from a product that is basically functional fuel. That a century-old beverage giant is pivoting toward liquid meal optimization to find its growth edge suggests the trend has moved well beyond a tech-industry subculture.

What if you stripped life of all joy and bottled the result? The answer, it turns out, is a billion-dollar market.

Soylent's Legacy and the Irony of Timing

There is something genuinely strange about Soylent's trajectory. The company spent years being ridiculed for representing a bleak, pleasure-free vision of human nourishment, then collapsed — just as the market it had tried to create exploded around it. The brands now cashing in on the protein-shake boom don't invoke Soylent, and they work hard to differentiate themselves aesthetically and rhetorically. But the underlying premise — that meal-like nutrition can and should be consumed in drinkable, shelf-stable, macronutrient-optimized form — has been thoroughly validated.

Coogan, watching the industry he helped pioneer from the sidelines, has the particular bitter-sweet position of the founder who was right about the destination but wrong about the timing. His company's demise was not a refutation of the idea but a casualty of arriving before the culture caught up. The lesson isn't that functional meal replacement was a bad idea. It's that the same idea, stripped of its provocative branding and Silicon Valley messianism, is now completely ordinary — sold next to orange juice, backed by Coca-Cola and Danone, consumed by people who have no idea what Soylent was and would not have wanted to.