Mr. Rhinehart first pitched Soylent to the world with a post titled “How I Stopped Eating Food.” Now his successor Mr. Crowley says that Soylent’s customers — and everyone else — should definitely keep eating food.

Asked if new customers should consider living solely off Soylent, Mr. Crowley said, “We don’t recommend it, no. Absolutely. 100 percent. We don’t recommend, not because we don’t think it’s healthy or we don’t think it’s there. It’s a very difficult thing to do and our research tells us that it happens for a very limited amount of time.” (Mr. Rhinehart himself moved the company toward gentler “meal replacement” messaging before stepping down in December 2017, when he announced Mr. Crowley as his own replacement.)

Now Soylent has edged closer to something its customers might recognize as food.

There are other reasons to tell a less provocative story. In 2017, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency informed Soylent that its product didn’t meet agency requirements for “meal replacement,” which halted the company’s expansion in that country. In 2016, the first attempt at solid Soylent — the Food Bar — was quickly pulled from circulation after customers reported vomiting and diarrhea.

The company is working hard to ensure its products are not merely safe to eat, but also tasty and enjoyable. “That’s the big word that we talked a lot about,” Mr. Crowley said. “Before it was all about function. Original Soylent was function, function, function. Now you hear words like enjoyment in our mission.”

Innovation, Enjoyment, Expansion

Mr. Crowley has made innovation a top priority and this year Soylent will introduce several new products. Squared comes second — after Bridge, a carton of low-calorie, protein-rich Soylent, also in beverage form — that the chief executive said is “helping us bring more females into the fold and still all plant-based, all based on the same platform, 36 essential nutrients.”