When I last looked at them in depth, they wanted to create meal replacement shakes so busy professionals didn't have to waste mental output thinking about food. Did they pivot?

Edit: I can't reply for some reason, but I applaud them if solving world hunger is their goal. I think they should have changed their marketing, though. Their original marketing seemed very niche.

I sympathize with the position you're taking, their marketing is certainly pursuing the busy-body yuppie audience. I think if you spend some time reading comments and posts from users of Soylent online you'll see a lot of people are buying it because it is inexpensive and nutritious, while still requiring very little time to prepare. I acknowledge that, as an example, a healthy and cheap meal can be made from beans, rice, and frozen vegetables, but it takes non-trivial energy to make that every day, which is hard to find on a consistent basis after working or studying all day.

I certainly see Soylent as a means to improve public health and the state of mass food production. I think if you take an honest look at Rhinehart's blog posts about Soylent and his other (somewhat radical) personal experiments you'll find that his pursuits are similarly aligned.

Why can't those be the same thing? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to use the capital generated by the prices you can charge for a luxury good to fund the R&D necessary to bring the costs of their method low enough that it could be a significant and affordable improvement to low-income families' nutrition.

It sounds like the Tesla model: first create a luxury car that you can sell to the very wealthy, and use those funds to increase production & lower costs through increased volume to produce a family car... then use the increased demand for batteries to make building a Gigafactory cost effective, so you can start producing Powerwall house batteries, so you can start taking more houses off the electricity grid & become 100% solar.