Soylent Review: Convenient Meal Replacements?

It isn’t always easy to find time to prepare meals for yourself and your loved ones, let alone put together something that’s genuinely healthy. This leads many families to rely on fast food to fill their bellies, which adds up quickly, contributing to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and more.1

Fortunately, there are several ways you can get a meal’s worth of calories and nutrients into your body when you’re significantly pressed for time. Soylent boasts a handful of these alternatives, with enough flavors to please most consumers.

But Soylent has multiple products designed as meal replacements, energy boosters, protein supplements, and snacks, so our testing team tried a little of everything and scrutinized the nutrition provided by each product to let you decide if they’re right for you.

Soylent’s catalog features pre-made drinks and mixable powders that can provide a meal’s worth of nutrition in a short amount of time. They’re ideal for those without a passionate relationship with food, especially busy professionals with little time to spare on a daily basis, but gourmets and nutrition buffs might find them lacking in several key areas.

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers make more informed decisions about staying healthy and living healthier lifestyles.

At Innerbody Research, we extensively test each health service or product we review, including Soylent. Our team sampled a majority of Soylent’s products, as well as various products from its competitors to provide you with in-depth analysis of taste, texture, convenience, and more. And we tempered our experiences with knowledge gained from reading more than 50 scientific papers dedicated to nutrition in general and meal replacements in particular.

Additionally, like all health-related content on this website, this review was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy. We’ll continue to monitor developments in the meal replacement space and in Soylent’s catalog to keep this review content up-to-date.

Evaluating Soylent was a straightforward process for our team, and we focused on four key criteria in rating the company’s offerings both on its own merits and in comparison with the competition. Taste and texture were more important to us than anything else, though nutritional value was close behind.

We also looked at cost, but the cost differences from one meal replacement company to the next weren’t astronomical, so they didn’t have as much influence over our final consideration. Finally, we considered the convenience Soylent offers its customers, both in terms of the products themselves and in the company’s interactions with customers.

Let’s dive a bit more deeply into each criterion to better understand our overall rating for Soylent.

Taste and texture

Meal replacement drinks can be bland, artificially sweet, and too thick to enjoy without feeling seasick. Of these three pitfalls, Soylent is only half-guilty of one, as some of its flavors are a little homogeneous in nature. The taste is still superior to many other options, and its best flavors far outshine those of its closest competitors. In particular, our testing team thought that Soylent’s strawberry flavor was among the best meal replacements we’d tasted to date.

Soylent’s texture is on par with or superior to its competitors, as well. Some may boast a slightly thinner, more “drinkable” consistency, but our testers never found Soylent to be too thick. If anything, it’s worth noting that the slightly thinner consistency from companies like Orgain, Boost, and OWYN comes from those products’ substandard calorie content.

Soylent’s powdered mixes result in drinks of about the same consistency, but you’ll probably need a blender to get the best results. Our team found that even the company’s shaker bottle left a little clumping after a vigorous shake.

Nutrition

The bar for judging a bottled meal replacement’s nutrition value isn’t as high as you might expect, but 400 calories of balanced macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals for under $5 is never going to be perfect.2 Compared to homemade vegetable juice, a wild salmon filet, and an organic quinoa salad, no ready-to-drink meal replacement can hold its own come lunchtime.

When we compare Soylent not to the heights of personal nutrition but to the nutrition profiles its competitors offer, we get a clearer picture of its potential. According to Albert Abayev, a registered dietician with Cedars-Sinai Hospital, a typical healthy meal should consist of 20-30% calories from fat, 40-50% from carbohydrates, and 30% from protein. Fats are more calorically dense than protein or carbs, so their influence on this ratio is nearly double the other components. For a 400-calorie meal, the ideal macronutrient balance would be:

• Fat: 13g
• Carbohydrates: 40g
• Protein: 30g

Here’s a look at the macronutrient balance in Soylent’s Creamy Chocolate drink:

• Fat: 24g
• Carbohydrates: 36g
• Protein: 20g

You can see that Soylent’s beverage has an overabundance of fat and is deficient in carbs and protein. This imbalance is not unusual among meal replacements. Huel has a similar nutrient profile, though it has a slight overabundance of carbs and a slightly lower amount of fats.

Cost

If we break down the costs of Soylent’s ready-to-drink shakes against similar products, it’s clear that Soylent is relatively well-priced, especially for the calories and nutrients it provides.

Here’s a look at how Soylent compares to its competitors in terms of cost and nutrient value:

Most of Soylent’s competitors don’t come close to providing the kind of calorie content you would need to replace a meal in its entirety. Huel is the next closest competitor in this regard, but its shakes are nearly $1 more each.

Convenience

There’s no denying that grabbing a bottle out of the fridge and drinking it on your drive to work is easier and less time-consuming than poaching an egg or slow-cooking some oatmeal. But in its class of products, we wanted to see how much more convenient Soylent was than its competitors. Our testing team experienced more than just the taste of these drinks. We went through the entire ordering process, communicated with customer service reps, awaited shipment, and, in the case of the powdered mixes, prepared some drinks for ourselves.

Generally speaking, the experience was mostly convenient. The site is easy to navigate, and customer service was helpful when we needed it. That service was not timely, however, as the site’s apparent live chat feature is a glorified FAQ index that turns into an email form when it can’t answer your questions. That email correspondence was helpful, but it took a lot longer than the direct chat support we received on Huel’s website.

Soylent is a nutrition and wellness company that offers meal replacements in pre-mixed drinks, mixable powders, and bars. The cornerstone of its recipes is soy protein isolate, which allows for a blend of vegan-friendly formulas high in protein.

The company’s name is a self-aware reference to a food product in the dystopian science fiction film Soylent Green. In that film — spoiler alert — soylent green turned out to be made of people. Soylent meal replacement products are far less sinister (though the company sometimes has fun with the reference).

Soylent is ideal for those who might describe themselves as people who eat to live but don’t necessarily live to eat. It also makes an excellent protein source for vegans and vegetarians, and it serves as a relatively healthy meal replacement option for people with little or no free time.

People with soy allergies or those who are strict about consuming organic foods might want to look elsewhere.

Controversial ingredients

Soylent self-identifies as a technology company. It received some of its earliest major financing from the investment arm of Alphabet, Inc., Google’s parent company. As such, its focus is on providing nutrients in its meal replacements using modern technology like genetic modification. Soylent’s lack of organic options and use of genetically modified soy will be a dealbreaker for some. For others, it won’t impact their interest in the product.

Here’s what the science says about some of Soylent’s potentially controversial ingredients:

Soylent’s product range has grown steadily since the company’s inception in 2013, adding new products and flavors and making adjustments to its formulas to improve taste and minimize the potential for gastrointestinal discomfort. Most products are available with a subscription that can save you anywhere from 10-23% with renewal options for 15-, 30-, 45-, and 60-day delivery.

Soylent products are also available in stores and on Amazon. Still, with low subscription costs and a fast shipping turnaround (approximately five days in testing), our testers found the Soylent website to be the best place to buy. Also, the company somewhat regularly updates and enhances its formulas, and there’s no guarantee that an independent seller on Amazon has the most recent formula in stock.

Here’s a quick look at some highlights from the current product lineup:

Almost all of these prices have gone up since our last look into Soylent and its competitors, including a nearly 20% jump in the cost of powdered meal mixes. In July of 2022, that powder cost $67 for the one-time purchase. That $67 has now become the subscription discount price, and one-time purchasers pay $80.

Discount program

Soylent offers discounts on nearly all of its products for certain professionals. Discounts don’t apply to sampler packs or non-food merchandise, and they can’t be applied to subscriptions. You can receive a discount from Soylent if you fall into any of the following categories:

• Veterans and active-duty military
• Teachers
• Students
• Nurses
• Medical professionals
• Hospital employees
• First responders

Huel and other companies have similar programs, but Soylent’s is one of the most far-reaching. For example, despite Huel offering to combine its professional discounts with subscriptions, it doesn’t offer those professional discounts to teachers.

Soylent Drinks are the cornerstone of the company’s product lineup. They fall into three categories:

• Complete Meal
• Complete Protein
• Complete Energy

You might find that one or more of these drink types best suits your needs. For example, most of our testers found that the Complete Energy Drinks and the two Complete Meals that contain caffeine were ideal for morning consumption, while the Complete Protein was a better post-workout.

Complete Meal Drinks

The original Soylent falls under the Complete Meal umbrella. These drinks offer relatively well-balanced macronutrients (protein, carbs, and fats) and a mix of vitamins and minerals that should effectively replace the average person’s meal. Their taste is above average, and our testers found the consistency to resemble a thin milkshake — thick enough to make you feel full but not too thick to drink with ease.

One of the hallmarks of Soylent’s Complete Meal Drinks is that they contain very few added sugars. Instead, the company uses allulose and sucralose as sweeteners. Allulose is far more abundant in its formulas than sucralose.

If you’re unfamiliar with allulose, it’s a naturally occurring monosaccharide that looks, tastes, and performs almost identically to table sugar. It can cause some mild stomach upset, particularly for those with FODMAP sensitivities, but it’s a good sugar alternative for most people.

Complete Meal Drinks have evolved through the years to include nine flavors.

• Original
• Creamy chocolate
• Banana
• Vanilla
• Mint chocolate
• Cafe mocha
• Cafe chai
• Cafe latte
• Strawberry

The original flavor isn’t quite plain; our testers found it tasted like milk that had previously contained some cereal.

Flavoring in Soylent Drinks comes from natural flavors, and the ingredient lists are nearly identical for each iteration:

• Filtered water
• Soy protein isolate
• Maltodextrin
• High oleic sunflower oil
• Allulose
• Canola oil
• Cellulose
• Vitamin and mineral pre-mix
• Soluble corn fiber
• Soy lecithin
• Natural flavors
• Salt
• Gellan gum
• Sucralose

Certain flavors contain additional ingredients like the cocoa powder in the chocolate flavor or the coffee powder in the cafe varieties. Cafe flavors also contain theanine to help take the edge off the included caffeine.8 The original flavor is the only one to contain modified food starch.

This is a shorter list of ingredients than you’ll see from Huel, whose drinks boast superior nutritional profiles but also have a few downsides. One of those is coconut, which is used for Huel’s medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), making it unsuitable for those with tree nut allergies.

Complete Protein Drink

Soylent’s Complete Protein Drink has ten more grams of protein than the company’s standard flavors. It also has far fewer carbs and fats. This drink is ideal for vegans and vegetarians who want to use Soylent as a supplementary source of protein. It’s also a better post-workout than the company’s other products.

The Complete Protein Drink is currently only available in a chocolate flavor. Our testers found that the protein drink’s flavor paled in comparison to the creamy chocolate Complete Meal drink. The taste of the protein, which is mild but present in other flavors, is too strong here.

Complete Energy Drink

Soylent’s Complete Energy Drink contains 100mg of caffeine per bottle. Interestingly, the company’s Cafe Mocha Complete Meal Drink contains 150mg of caffeine per bottle. But the Complete Meal Drink has more than twice the calories and carbs of the energy drink.

Ultimately, if you’re only looking for energy and not a complete meal replacement, Soylent’s Complete Energy Drink is a great option. But if you’re looking for a caffeine boost in the morning to accompany your complete breakfast replacement, we recommend the cafe mocha Complete Meal over the Complete Energy Drink. By comparison, Huel’s Iced Coffee Caramel contains just 65mg of caffeine. If you don’t want to give up your morning coffee, this might be a better choice. But if you want to streamline your morning routine as much as possible and save a little money on your caffeine needs, Soylent is superior.

The Complete Energy drink is only available in a chocolate flavor.

Soylent Powder is a more economical option to access the company’s meal replacements than its pre-mixed drinks. The powders’ ingredient profiles differ slightly from pre-mixes, with filtered water being the most obvious exclusion. You can add water or mix the powder into any drink of your choice to get the flavor and texture that works best for you.

Soylent Powders come in original and cacao flavors. The cacao flavor is the only drink in Soylent’s lineup with artificial flavors. We recommend the original flavor or a pre-mixed drink if you want to avoid those.

You can get Soylent Powder in large pouches, small tubs, or individually packed servings. Those individual servings are great if you need to travel with some powder, but the large pouches save you a lot more money, and the small tubs offer moderate savings and require a little less storage space.

Our testing team found that the powders had an excellent flavor but would only thoroughly blend with water, milk, or a milk substitute with the help of a blender. Stirring, whisking, and using the Soylent shaker cup didn’t quite do the trick, and our testers often found clumps of dried powder in their drinks. This is nearly identical to the experience we had with Huel’s powdered mixes, so it’s more likely that powdered meal drinks aren’t easy to mix than it is that Soylent does a poor job in making them. Between the two, we preferred the flavor of Soylent’s powders.

Given that Soylent’s most appealing feature is convenience, we think it’s worth the extra cost to invest in the pre-mixed drinks whenever possible.

Soylent flavor boosts

If you try Soylent and fins you aren’t thrilled with its flavor options, you can purchase flavor boost packs. The flavor options of these packs don’t align perfectly with the available flavors of Soylent’s drinks and powder mixes. In some cases, they can punch up existing flavors by doubling down on caramel or strawberry tastes. In others cases, they’ll either act as complimentary flavors or as standalone flavors you can add to the company’s original, unflavored drink.

Here’s a look at the available flavors for powder boosts:

• Matcha
• Strawberry
• Caramel
• Peanut butter

The flavors come in packs of 12 for $8, or you can get a sampler pack including three packets of all four flavors for the same price. They’ll add 15-25 calories to your drinks, and most consist of little more than maltodextrin, natural flavor, vegetable juice for color, and sucralose for added sweetness. None of the flavor packs don’t contain sucralose.

Huel used to offer flavor boosts, as well, but the company has since discontinued them in favor of expanding its catalog of premixed flavors. But as far as we can tell, that catalog has not grown since Huel eliminated the boost offering.

Soylent Squared Bars aren’t quite the total meal replacements you can get with the company’s drinks. They’re more snacks than anything else, with just 100 calories per square. Still, they offer the same great balance of macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals you get with those drinks. Compared to Huel’s two bar types, each of which offers 200 calories, this might seem a little slim. But it’s worth noting that Soylent’s bars taste a lot better than Huel’s.

Soylent Squared Bars come in chocolate brownie and peanut butter chocolate chip flavors. The ingredient lists for each flavor are nearly identical, with the order of ingredients proving the only significant difference. They include:

Soylent also once sold a limited edition Soylent Green bar. The ingredients were more or less identical to the list above, but the flavor was rather different. The company intended for that flavor to be something of a secret, but our testers found they tasted a little like green apple-flavored candy. We include this information here despite the bar’s absence from the lineup to highlight the company’s awareness of the source of its name. The tagline for the bar was even, “As good as humanly possible.”

Soylent accepts all major credit cards, PayPal, and AmazonPay. Soylent also partners with a no-interest financing company, Afterpay, which you can use to spread your payments to Soylent over a set period.

Shipping is free on all U.S. orders $50 and up. That covers nearly every edible product on the site except for single cases of individual powder packs. Orders under $50 will be charged $9.95. That’s a lower free shipping threshold than Huel, but the charge for smaller orders is a bit higher.

In most cases, Soylent products are not eligible for return for food safety reasons. The company will work with you if a package contains the wrong contents or arrives damaged. However, you must notify Soylent within 14 days in such a case, and the company’s return policy does not apply to purchases through third-party sellers. Huel, conversely, has a 30-day policy, and you can send back food items as long as they aren’t opened.