Soylent

by Rosa Labs, LLC

Review: Soylent Adds New Flavors and Updates the Packaging

Posted: Jul 05, 2017 at 11:13 AM (Last Updated: Jul 05, 2017 at 1:43 PM)

Covers Products: Cafe Chai, Cafe Vanilla

Soylent is continuing its evolution from being a bag of largely tasteless powder into a full-fledged beverage brand. Their latest offerings, Cafe Vanilla and Cafe Chai, are their best-tasting and best-looking products to date and prove to be a really great showcase for what Soylent can do.

These products, which seem to be built as breakfast meal replacements, are loaded with nutrients. This includes 20 percent of the daily recommended daily allowance for all essential vitamins and nutrients, a macronutrient profile of 47 percent of calories from lipids, 400 calories, 20g of protein, caffeine (150mg for Cafe Vanilla and 30mg for Cafe Chai), and L-theanine. And both products provide more than enough sustenance to be a credible meal replacement.

But for us, we’re really most impressed by the flavor that they’ve created -- especially considering all of the ingredients that are used in Soylent. Both of these flavors build upon the flavor of Coffiest, which we were big fans of when it launched in 2016. The Cafe Vanilla is basically a vanilla flavored coffee drink, which, unlike other vanilla flavored coffee drinks, has a really nice balance between the coffee and the vanilla flavors as well as the other ingredients in the drink. The Cafe Chai, which doesn’t use coffee as an ingredient, has a pleasant chai spice that’s mild and easy on the palate. In both cases, they’ve done a nice job of keeping the aftertaste (from the sucralose, etc.) to a minimum, which is perhaps the biggest achievement of their more recent flavor introductions.

What’s also interesting about this product is that it’s somewhat against the grain of what you see in other beverages. The product uses artificial flavors and sweeteners and has a callout for “produced with genetic engineering.” While there are plenty of other food and beverage products out there that use this type of formulation, Soylent is quite transparent about this and certainly doesn’t shy away from their efforts to use science to craft their product.

Beyond that, the packaging, which is now a 14 oz. square bottle, continues to get better looking with each new product that Soylent launches. The square bottle feels nice in the hand, while the two tone label (white on the bottom and an accent color for the flavor name on the top) and minimalist layout give the product a modern and almost high-tech look. It feels like the right approach for what they are selling and the execution is excellent.

Overall, we’re big fans of the latest from Soylent.


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