Canada is about to get a taste of Soylent, the powdered meal-in-a-packet that wants to do for food what Amazon did for department stores, Uber did for taxis and Netflix did for cable — displace it.

Soylent, which advertises itself as nutritionally complete, affordable and convenient, has amassed a loyal following in the U.S., along with some vocal critics.

On Monday, Soylent will start shipping to Canada, the company’s first international expansion since its launch in 2013 with $4.5 million (U.S.) in crowdfunding and venture capital. It recently raised another $20 million.

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Despite what the name might suggest to Charlton Heston fans, Soylent is not made of people. In Soylent 1.5, the latest iteration of the product, the carbohydrates, protein, fats and vitamins come from a blend of three dozen ingredients, including rice protein, oat flour and powdered vegetable oils.

If renaming updates in decimal points makes Soylent sound more like software, that’s the point. Soylent considers itself a tech company trying to “disrupt” a broken system: the delivery of essential nutrients to the human body, also known as eating food.

Rob Rhinehart, Soylent’s 26-year-old founder, developed the product when he became frustrated with the stress, complexity, cost and repetition of daily meals while he was busy with another startup.

“It really didn’t seem efficient, especially today, considering the progress of many of our other devices and technologies. Why are we still stuck with these relatively ancient whole foodstuffs?”

David Jenkins, Canada Research Chair in the department of medicine and nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto and St. Michael’s Hospital, reacted to Soylent’s nutritional profile and business model with wary approval.

“(It) may not be the worst thing on earth for you,” Jenkins said, noting the balance of macronutrients was reasonable but the fibre content was a little low.

But he said Soylent’s healthfulness depends on what we’re comparing it to.

“The food supply we’ve got at the present is guided by the colour and the flavour, not the nutrient content. So we can’t say we’ve done a very good job just with ordinary food — well, not so ordinary food.”

No peer-reviewed studies have been published that compare Soylent either to a diet of traditional whole foods or to the typical chronic disease-promoting Western diet, high in fat and sugar. The company says it is has several of its own studies underway.

Soylent says most customers consume its product at least once a day. Surveys indicate only a small number of customers, fewer than 5 per cent, subsist on Soylent exclusively.

Soylent may tick most of the necessary boxes for nutrition based on our current understanding of the human diet, but of course that knowledge is limited. Our understanding of the role of fats, for example, has shifted significantly in the past decade. Recent research into the microbiome suggests the importance of fibre has been underestimated.

Rhinehart acknowledges we will never know everything about the human diet. But he counters that the bulk of the company’s investment is poured into optimizing Soylent’s nutritional profile based on established knowledge and current research; most other modern food companies spend their money on marketing. He rejects the idea that another system is already optimized for human nutrition: natural food.

“Plants didn’t evolve to sustain humans, they evolved to sustain themselves. It’s really somewhat of a workaround that we’ve put so much work into agriculture and selective breeding,” he says. “What if we just looked at the specifics of what we need nutritionally and tried to get those directly? I find that a much more efficient process.”

Rhinehart also believes that food-processing technology, when harnessed for consumer good rather than corporate profit, is far more efficient than relying on many smaller laboratories filled with variable equipment, a.k.a the home kitchen. He noted the massive scale of food waste, for one. But Soylent’s plan isn’t to replace cooking entirely.

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“Cooking should be more of a hobby. Eating should be more of a social activity rather than a manufacturing bottleneck, where you have to produce these calories for your body every single day. Doing so with manual labour seems a little arcane.”

Jenkins has a different perspective.

“If it’s something people want, and if they don’t gain weight on it, and if they can use it as part of their healthy package for living, it’s a sad comment on where we’ve got to with food,” he said. “But maybe that’s what the future looks like.”