It's been more than a year since Rob Rhinehart's "How I stopped eating food" blog post; in that time, the entrepreneur started a company, hacked his body, engineered and iterated on a food substitute formula, built a distribution infrastructure, and collected millions of dollars. It's all been leading up to today, the day his company's product ships to customers. Soylent has been loosed upon the world.

Regular Ars readers are at this point almost certainly familiar with the oddly named food supplement (though it might also be considered a food substitute). Rhinehart's goal with Soylent was to subvert the very idea of nutrition by adding some fungibility to food. Rhinehart envisions an endpoint where nutrition is available as a utility, like water or electricity—and he wants Soylent to be that nutrition.

The first orders of Soylent actually left the factory yesterday afternoon, according to an e-mail exchange between Ars and Julio Miles, Soylent's VP of communications. First out the door are shipments of the vegan version of the product, which lacks the canola and fish oil mixture (and also isn't wholly nutritionally complete, since the oils contain all the various fats that the dry powder mixture lacks); after that, standard shipments will ramp up.

Rhinehart has maintained that he didn't want to start shipping Soylent until the company was able to provide a steady supply—it would be less than ideal if some customers received shipments and ate all their Soylent but were unable to reorder. This desire to get things just right has led to months of delays with suppliers, including most notably the brown rice protein supplier. The company chosen to supply the fine-grained protein had to deliver the largest order in its history to Soylent and was unable to make its deadline; as a stopgap, the company ended up air-freighting a 28-ton contingency shipment to Soylent's copacking facility to get production started while the rest of the rice protein was manufactured.

But the delays appear to be over, and after slipping by more than six months, Soylent should be appearing in customers' mailboxes next week. We've got our own one-month supply ordered, and we'll be doing a taste test and comparison as soon as it arrives.