Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Soylent Rolls Out Green Mint Chocolate, Embraces Dystopian Name Origin

Los Angeles-based Soylent, the startup which offers up drinks and other meal replacement items which pack in essential nutrients and protein so users can (almost) skip normal meals, has rolled out a new product--and finally embraced the odd use of a name best known for its dystopian, science-fiction origins. According to Soylent, it has rolled out "Soylent Green Mint Chocolate", a new creamy, milk chocolate with a minty taste. Soylent said it will also be launching a marketing campaign which "finally answers one of the Internet’s most burning questions -- what is the secret of Soylent? It's plants, not people." The campaign finally owns up to the company's odd naming after Soylent, the sci-fi food featured in the dystopian Charlton Heston film, "Soylent Green", where Heston's character discovers--to his horror--that the food replacements being offered to a population of a badly overpopulated, resource depleted earth are actually made out of people. That move was based on a book by Harry Harrison, called "Make Room! Make Room!". In a brilliant move, Soylent released a GIF animation which replays the famous last scene of the Soylent Green movie--but with one of its bottles as the main character. Soylent VP of Marketing Andrew Thomas--who appears to be the one behind the switch in tactics--said that until now, the company has refused to respond to Internet trolls who apparently have been peppering the company's every move on the Internet with Charlton Heston's signature "Soylent Green is made out of people!" line. Soylent pointed out a new Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of its products, saying that compared with a fast food cheeseburger, the cheeseburger causes five times the CO2 emissions vs. a Soylent Drink.