I've run the numbers and...
For the longest time (literally years), I've indulged in drinking Soylent-brand meal replacement drinks. They served multiple purposes.
Fast
It was quick and easy, no meal prep required (especially since I preferred the taste at room temp rather than chilled). Grab a bottle, give it a shake, drink and go. When running late for work (usually caused by poor sleep or weather), it was the ideal breakfast.
Easy
Meal in a bottle. Sometimes, even the effort of grabbing a tupperware out of the fridge is exhausting, and even worse, when you discover you've already eaten all the leftovers. (I almost never have food go bad; it gets eaten pretty quickly, even when I make a large batch and am the only one eating it.)
Palatable
My fellow NDs will get in on this one: sometimes (even often on occasion) I get stuck in the space when nothing sounds good, the thought of consuming, nay, chewing (!) and tasting (!!) food is just... ugh. The thought of eating literally anything makes me feel nauseous, but I know I need to eat. The shakes have kicked in, I've got a headache and starting to get a little dizzy (because I've been procrastinating getting food given how much revulsion it's causing me). Meal-in-a-bottle is my loophole. I can sip or gulp it down, and there's the chore of eating done.
But there's a problem
I've been getting my Soylent through Amazon subscribe-and-save. Well, Amazon is not someplace I want to be spending my money. (I've long since stopped using it for anything that I can get elsewhere (except where it saves me a significant amount of money), but this past winter, I decided to try to make the push to cut it off entirely.) Soylent was the last and largest hold-out.
So I ran the numbers.
Soylent through Amazon S&S, Soylent direct, a number of recommended ready-to-drink meal replacement alternatives... and it didn't look good. Buying Soylent through Amazon's subscribe-and-save plan was the least expensive option, even less than buying it direct (the corp charges a pretty steep shipping fee that I don't get with Amazon, even without a Prime subscription).
Time to start looking at powders!
Many years ago, when Soylent first released their 2.0 chocolate powder, I got a coupon code for a sample batch... it was revolting. It was so bad that by the time I got around to try it (a few days after delivery), Amazon had already disabled the reviews. So I wasn't going to give them a second chance (also, it looked likely that it too would have been cheaper through Az's S&S).
I found (on the Soylent subreddit of all places) a discussion of other folks doing what I was doing, looking for something other... something better.
Super Body Foods (now rebranded to Basically Food) was both one of the highest recommended options, but also one of the cheapest. Except there was one catch: no samples. So I bought a 2.5 lb, $25 container of Boost.
I like it.
It meets two of my use-cases, Easy and Palatable, but I have yet to run it against the third, Fast. (I've been unemployed the last five months, and haven't yet had any time constraints around my consumption.)
It's been good with both oat and almond milk (I haven't tried it with cow milk, and not planning on trying it anytime soon). I also ran the numbers on the combined price between powder + milk vs liquid Soylent, and discovered that as long as the price per container (~1.5L) stays below about $9-10 (and BF stays at $1.25/serving), BF + ND milk will be cheaper. (ND milk is about $3-5 per container right now.)
I do have a couple of complaints about BF though.
For one, the website shop listings show tubs. It arrived in a bag. I prefer tubs.
Fortunately, I have an old tub from my Chirps (RIP) protein powder that was almost empty, so I moved the remainder to a smaller container, cleaned it out (making sure to dry it thoroughly), and transplanted the bag into the Chirps tub. By the time I'd completed the washing and drying, I'd consumed a number of servings, which was good because it was a pretty tight fit. If I buy more BF Boost, I'll either need to find a larger tub or transfer the powder half at-a-time.
Curiously, I was able to cut out the info panels from the bag and they almost perfectly cover the old Chirps labels (which I wasn't able to peel off). I didn't want to discard the info for a variety of reasons, and having only an electronic copy didn't feel ideal.
Secondly, I don't like the scoop it shipped with.
BF Boost came with a surprisingly large plastic scoop (57g), which was fairly difficult to use while it was in the bag, and even worse when I'd transferred it to the tub. Furthermore, attempting to "level" the scoop mostly resulted in the powder getting tamped down inside the scoop, which both messed up the measure and left the milk fairly chunky. Instead, I found a smaller metal scoop that I had lying around and estimated the conversion rate between the two (~2-2.5 rounded scoops of the metal to ~1 scoop of the plastic), and have been having a much better time of it.
I think I'll likely buy another batch, but I don't yet know if I'll be setting up a subscription for it, given that I haven't yet calculated my consumption rate. (So far, I'm drinking it about as often as I was at the peak of my Soylent consumption, but how long that will hold and how long the bag will last with my "adapted" scoop, I can't say.)
Leave a comment or continue reading: other Saturday posts, more pros and cons, or explore my March.
