We’ve been pretty vocal about the long-awaited release of Soylent, the engineered food supplement/substitute. However, every post about Soylent (be it at Ars or anywhere else) draws a not-insignificant number of comments from people who are nervous about its perceived artificiality. A common criticism is that modern food science doesn’t yet have a complete picture of exactly how and why nutrition works. Perhaps throwing a bunch of micro- and macronutrients into a bag can’t totally emulate the complex interaction of different natural ingredients in normally consumed food.

Whether or not that’s actually true isn’t certain, but Simo Suoheimo is betting that he and the rest of the people at Ambronite can deliver the same fast nutrition as Soylent while using whole foods instead of powders and pills. "We have the world’s first drinkable meal that fulfills daily nutrition recommendations from organic, natural ingredients," Suoheimo explained to Ars in an interview.

"Soylent has taken, for example, the vitamins and minerals from a vitamin pill and the protein from concentrates," continued Suoheimo. On the other hand, his company’s product, called "Ambronite," is a blend of 24 easily identifiable, non-factory-derived ingredients "such as herbs, arctic berries like bilberry and sea-buckthorn from northern Finland, and four organic nuts," he said.

The exact ingredient mix in Ambronite is still somewhat in flux, and Ambronite co-founder Suoheimo and his team have just started their own crowdfunding campaign to finalize the product in order to bring it fully to market. The product currently has a carb/fat/protein percentage ratio of 40/36/24 in contrast this to Soylent’s 50/30/20 ratio. It’s packaged in 500 kcal bags, and one bag can substitute for a meal. To hit the standard nutrition target of 2,000 kcals per day, a person would need to consume four Ambronite packages. According to Ambronite’s crowdfunding site, eating this much Ambronite would put you at or above 100 percent of the recommended daily allowance for all of the standard micronutrients, with the exception of sodium. In fact, eating four Ambronite packages would get you far over the recommended daily allowance for several nutrients, including iron (at 615 percent), Manganese (at 560 percent), thiamine B1 (at 410 percent), and a few others.

Putting more crazy stuff in my body

The company sent Ars three meal packets of Ambronite to try out. I had two of them over the weekend and saved the final one for today so I could take some additional photographs of the process. Unlike Soylent’s beta formula, the Ambronite powder comes pre-homogenized and doesn’t have to be mixed (though Soylent’s Rob Rhinehart assures us that Soylent’s shipping mixture will also be homogenized). Also unlike Soylent, it is actually green.

Each 500 kcal package gets mixed with two cups (about 473 ml) of water. I used a whisk and a mixing bowl rather than a blender, and one package yielded a pretty hefty meal-sized portion of green nutritive slurry. The meal’s texture was a little thicker than I remember Soylent being, and while the powder appeared to be very fine before mixing, the finished drink turned up the occasional chunk of not-entirely-chopped nut. Also, if anything, it got even greener after I mixed it up.

While Soylent tastes like a vaguely sweet yeasty bread-drink, Ambronite tastes like raw, unsalted almonds. It’s definitely a less neutral taste than Soylent; it’s much more like totally unsweetened almond milk, though the nut-taste is less pronounced than almond milk. The note included with the mixture said that other Ambronite testers have enjoyed blending the mix together with things like apple juice and avocado. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to give that a shot, though, as the taste—at least to my palate—doesn’t seem like it’s something that would readily blend into other tastes.

An entire package provided a whole hell of a lot of satiety. After a standard breakfast of oat bran (this is pretty much what you have for breakfast starting in your late 30s), I drank an Ambronite packet for lunch and didn’t find myself feeling any hunger at all until dinnertime approached. If I were going to eat Ambronite all day, it seems like the best strategy would be similar to the strategy I settled on with Soylent: frequent small glasses throughout the day.

And, no, the limited amount of Ambronite I consumed didn’t appear to have any effect one way or another on my bowels.

Cost and shelf life

Ambronite’s all-natural ingredient mix definitely comes with some strings attached. For one, the packets contain no preservatives and thus must be consumed relatively quickly. The packages sent to me arrived on May 2, and on their label they had a "best before" date of June 30. The packages were likely mixed and shipped on April 30, so based on that, Ambronite appears to have a viable shelf life of about two months.

Cost is also a drawback. Rob Rhinehart of Soylent has repeatedly noted that one of his primary goals is to "commoditize" nutrition—he wants Soylent to ultimately cost about $5 per day, or about $1.67 per meal. Ambronite, on the other hand, is unapologetic about its costs being higher. "We’re definitely on the premium side of the segment," said Suoheimo. "We work with some of the most precious, rare ingredients in the world—like wild berries that are hand-picked. We strive to give people the best possible ingredients on the planet in two minutes, in a meal that fills nutrition recommendations, and so we’re not going with cheapest raw materials." Suoheimo went on to tell Ars that Ambronite carefully considers ingredient freshness when sourcing its components, as things like the age and freshness of the nuts can affect the final product’s fatty acid profile.

"When it comes to price per meal, we’re talking about the $7-8 range," Suoheimo said. At four meals per day for 2,000 kcals, that comes out to $32 per day on the high end. That number applies specifically to the crowdfunding stage; Suoheimo told Ars that once the product enters mass production, the company will be looking for ways to drive that cost lower. But he had no estimates yet as to what the cost would eventually be after crowdfunding.

In spite of the scarcity of some of Ambronite’s hand-harvested ingredients, Suoheimo is optimistic that scaling Ambronite up to mass production won’t force the company to compromise on the ingredient list. "I’m happy to tell you that we’ve cracked the code on that and found the best array of raw materials that we can scale with. It won’t be an issue," he assured us.

Carving out a segment?

Suoheimo made it clear to us that the price is derived from what seems to be an uncompromising determination to use high-quality ingredients. But the desire to stick to organic components isn’t an end in and of itself; Suoheimo also noted that nutrition isn’t a complete science. "That’s why most of our ingredients have been used in human consumption for thousands of years," he explained. "We’ve known for eons that eating berries and fruit is good for our health, but only in the last decades have we uncovered scientific knowledge of why those phytonutrients and antioxidants are important."

Soylent’s runaway crowdfunding success (and its large DIY community) has made it clear that there’s a geek market for easy-to-prepare nutrition, but inherent mistrust of "lab food" is still a huge roadblock to widespread adoption. Ambronite handily leaps that barrier, offering what it categorizes as comparable nutrition benefits. However, as with foods of all types, Ambronite’s organic components come at a huge premium over Soylent’s processed ingredients.

Suoheimo believes that people will pay for Ambronite, though. "I really think that there’s a lot of power to be harnessed in many premium natural ingredients, and that’s exactly what we’re going for. Rather than to claim that we’ve solved human nutrition completely, which we obviously haven’t."

Ambronite’s Indiegogo campaign launched this morning, and it will run for the next 60 days.