2016: The year we drink our meals

Several analysts see 2016 as the year people drink “supershakes” as meals.
“Move over, diet shakes – Silicon Valley has created a new wave of supershakes for superhumans, stripping away the bother of cooking and giving consumers 100% optimal nutrition in a glass, all the better to fuel 24-hour coding binges or study sessions,” research firm J. Walter Thompson Intelligence said in a report.
Los Angeles-based Soylent is a leader in the emerging field, offering a food product that provides maximum nutrition per serving with minimal effort.
Soylent sells its product in ready-to-drink bottles and also as a powder. The drink contains soy protein, algal oil, isomaltulose (from beets), vitamins and minerals. The powdered version contains brown rice protein, oat flour, sunflower oil, vitamins and minerals.
Other companies in the drinkable meal game include Ambronite, Huel and KetoSoy.
“Some call it a lazy approach to nutrition; others see it as a consequence of our increasing obsession with productivity and efficiency, spurred by technology. For lack of an official name, I call it ‘food hacking’ and I predict in 2016 it will reach mainstream mouths,” Josh McNorton, project manager for FutureFest at Nesta, said in an article.
“Specific products like Soylent may be a fad, like so many dietary and technological ones before it, but the concepts of hacking and open source intelligence applied to food are incredibly significant,” McNorton said. “The internet is rife with food hacking websites, food hackathons are occurring all over the world, private companies and investors are funding its development, and the media is catching on. Throw a couple of celebrity endorsements into the mix in 2016 and we could see a full scale dietary revolution by the end of the year.”

Photo: Ready-to-drink Soylent.