Soylent, the slushy slightly sweet meal supplement/replacement from California engineer Rob Rhinehart and his company Rosa Labs, has by most accounts been a smashing success story. We tried it and liked it a year ago. While we wrote more about why folks might (or might not) want to drink it once it hit its official release, the Rosa Labs development team has continued work even as shipments of the powder leave the factory by the truckload. In an update e-mail yesterday morning, Rosa Labs announced two major milestones: first, that shipments have (finally) been completed to everyone who backed the Soylent crowdfunding project prior to its closure, and secondly, that Soylent is getting its first major update to version 1.1.

It seems a little weird that food (or "food") has a version number, but Rhinehart always intended Soylent to be a product that changed over time based on feedback and market forces. In a quick post on the official Soylent blog, Rhinehart explains that the bump to 1.1 brings with it a decrease in the product’s sucralose level, dialing down the release version’s vague sweetness to a more truly neutral taste. The logic here, explains the post, is that it’s easier to add sweetness than to take it away, and many Soylent 1.0 users have expressed a desire to flavor the product with add-ons (peanut butter is a popular one, as is blended fruit).

The second change deals with my biggest issue with Soylent—what can be politely termed as "a bit of gas." Regular Soylent use eliminates the gas, but using Soylent as an occasional substitute for a missed meal—which is my preferred usage of the stuff—can introduce some thunderous gut activity (which I referred to in my original Soylent review as "horse-killing farts").

This reaction wasn’t uncommon in many users of Soylent 1.0 (the official forum features many threads talking about gas), and so 1.1 introduces new digestive enzymes to help attack the product’s proteins and carbohydrates, hopefully leading to fewer instances of in-home crop dusting. As with most things about Soylent’s ingredient mix, the enzyme profile will likely change with time.

Ars caught up with Soylent founder Rhinehart with a few questions about the release of 1.1. Chiefly, we wanted to know if the bit about all backers having had their orders shipped meant everyone who preordered Soylent, or just people who had put their money down during the initial crowdfunding phase. Rhinehart cleared this up by saying it was the latter: "All orders placed during the Tilt campaign have now shipped. What we are now working on are all the orders placed on our new website since May when we first started shipping. So, we have shipped all of our 'preorders,' but we are still a bit supply constrained for new orders."

One of the reasons why it’s been taking so long to get to new orders, he explained, is that re-orders have been given priority over new customers, so that current customers can keep their Soylent coffers filled. "Anyone who has received their Soylent has been onboarded to receive priority shipping. In fact, this is the primary reason it has taken so long to get to our new orders: reorders have been very strong and at times we have had trouble keeping up with just those." He also explained that there is no 1.0 inventory to burn through—as of right now, all fulfillment is being done with the 1.1 formula.

Finally, we asked about health data. With the product having been released many months ago and being rapidly adopted by a willing audience, Rosa Labs had intended to begin larger-scale studies on how Soylent affects people. Here, Rhinehart had more to say:

I look forward to being able to share some more quantified data here. We are setting up processes for gathering and sharing health data as it relates to Soylent consumption. However, for the time being we have had to focus on product development and distribution and have not yet had the resources to run the studies we have planned. However, many of our backers are savvy quantified self enthusiasts and health hackers. If you look around the Web, and especially discourse.soylent.me, you will see loads of health data and experience reports. I will let the users speak for themselves until we have more controlled data to report. Personally, I still use it multiple times a day and feel great.

I’m still working my way through my initial supply of Soylent 1.0, primarily when I write through lunch and don’t have anything handy. It makes a particularly apt liveblogging fuel—if there’s an Apple or Microsoft or Samsung liveblog going on at Ars, it’s a pretty good bet I’m drinking Soylent while it’s happening. However, once I re-order and get some of the 1.1 formula in hand, I’ll make sure to share my thoughts.