Flavor Texture Satiety TOTAL 8 8.5 9.2 8.6
With its founding in 2013, Soylent blazed a trail in the protein drink and meal-replacement market by eschewing the target markets of gains-obsessed bros and geriatrics without teeth to focus on busy tech bros who were fed up with the cost and inconvenience associated with food you have to cook and chew. It was a brilliant pitch back then, and founder Rob Rhinehart’s predictions of a technocratic hellscape where worker drones grind too hard to be bothered with solid food for each meal have become all the more prescient in the decade since it hit the market.
The “original” recipe of Soylent is a bland, flavorless slime that appeals to no one except antisocial full-stack devs who only enjoyed eating paste as children. A plethora of flavors are now available, and it’s encouraging to report that the vanilla flavor is about as normal as it gets in terms of taste and texture. A rich, malty vanilla bean flavor gently blooms across the sip, and the viscous liquid goes down nice and smooth without even the subtlest hint of stevia, monk fruit, or other alternative sweeteners that are common in meal replacement drinks. If this liquid were any thicker it would be exhausting to consume, but Soylent really dialed this in over the decade-plus since it started as a nerdy science experiment with the explicit goal of eliminating the hassle of eating.
Soylent doesn’t contain the most protein, fat, or grams of fiber relative to other entrants, but it’s a well-rounded offering that gets the job done despite not putting up the highest stats. I thoroughly enjoyed sipping on this every morning, and the respectable fat and protein content did a fine job of keeping my hunger at bay until lunchtime. I ventured deep into the tank with some custom macros in Google Sheets one morning to see how far I could stretch myself with only Soylent in the tank, and I was able to keep grinding until 2:30 pm before my hand started wobbling. That’s about as close as I’ll ever get to going on a code bender, but it’s good to know Soylent is a quick and easy way to stay on my grind.