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Soylent Coffee: Nootropics, fat, carbs, protein—but will it give you the toots?

Soylent makes a break for the breakfast table with “Coffiest” and “Soylent Bar.”

Lee Hutchinson – Aug 9, 2016 11:04 am | 166

It’s been two years since we took our first sip of Soylent (which means it’s been two years since a few thousand people started following me on Twitter because I talked about farts). The liquid food product has been through a bunch of iterations since, including a premixed variant, but it’s remained essentially the same product: a beige liquid of indeterminate taste that purports to give your body everything it needs to survive. But today, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart announced that the company is moving in a new direction: breakfast.

This morning’s announcement marks the release of Coffiest, Soylent’s first spin-off product. The new offering has the same ingredient makeup, nutritional mix, and 47/33/20 percent fat/carb/protein calorie distribution as the 2.0 premixed version, but it also adds coffee flavoring, 150mg of caffeine per serving, and 75mg of the nootropic L-theanine. According to Rhinehart, a bottle of Coffiest supplies the drinker with about 400 kilocalories and about 20 percent of the daily recommended values for “all essential vitamins and minerals.” Soylent provided us with a copy of the drink’s nutritional information sheet for folks who want to take a peek.

“A lot of people are skipping breakfast,” Rhinehart told Ars in a phone interview. “We wanted to provide a convenient and also really tasty option for them to enjoy in the morning.”

Additionally, the company will also be releasing a nutrition bar, called the Soylent Bar. This one will deliver 250 kilocalories per bar, and has a macronutrient breakdown of 38/43/19 percent fat/carb/protein.

Coffee talk

The flavor of Soylent has been a divisive topic since release. Early Soylent variants had a taste best described as vaguely sweet bread with a tangy, artificial sweetener aftertaste. Later iterations went for a more neutral taste, the better for customers to flavor the drink themselves with vanilla or fruit or stranger things. Adding the right flavor of coffee to the mix took quite a bit of doing, with Rhinehart exercising tight control over the flavor profile.

“Coffee flavor is extremely complex,” he told us. “The direction I gave was a little bit of a more darker, richer roast…so it’s a little darker coffee. A little bit of cocoa powder, just a barely perceptible amount, but it rounds out the flavor nicely.”

Soylent scientists at work in the food labs refining Coffiest’s flavor. Credit: Sony Pictures Television

“It was a huge challenge to develop a coffee flavor that would survive processing,” he continued. “You can’t take any risks with health or safety, so we have to eliminate any sources of contamination from the product and that involves heat. So we had some great food scientists and flavor scientists work out a flavor system that combines natural coffee extracts with an artificial flavor system. And it turned out pretty great.”

Rhinehart also explained that Coffiest’s nootropic add-in is there to take the edge off the drink’s caffeine load. “L-theanine is commonly found in something like green tea,” he said. “[It] seems to smooth out the effect of caffeine. So we have two mild nootropics, all of the nutrition as 2.0, and some really good, rich coffee flavor.”

Nutrition addition

When asked about the state of Soylent, Coffiest’s current nutritional information, and ingredient spread, Rhinehart told us that he’s pretty happy with how things at-large are going right now. He said the latest reformulation lines up directly with the recommendations of the company’s nutrition adviser.

“It’s hard to know what might be perfect,” Rhinehart said. “Based on our expert’s opinion, this is a very applicable macronutrient breakdown for the bulk of the population.”
Early fears that Soylent might lead to malnutrition (or sudden death, according to one concerned reader who e-mailed me to demand I stop drinking Soylent immediately) haven’t yet been matched by reality, although the product has only been available for a couple of years. In spite of a heavy metals scare that seems to have been specious, evidence of any harm from Soylent consumption appears absent. Rhinehart said that he’s hoping long-term studies will eventually put to rest any doubts about the product’s healthiness—which he believes in wholeheartedly.

Ingredients and vegan powers

Both Coffiest and the Soylent Bar are vegan-safe; Coffiest is essentially Soylent 2.0 with coffee and caffeine, so it uses the same ingredient set as the bottled formula. The bar uses similar ingredients, relying on algal sources for protein.

Fear not: consuming Soylent, Coffiest, or Soylent Bar will not cause you to lose your vegan powers. Credit: Universal Pictures

“The beverages use algae oil as a source of fat, and we’re doing a lot of research into single-cell protein, and eventually incorporating that into the products—perhaps sooner rather than later,” Rhinehart said when asked about sustainability in sourcing the product’s ingredients. “In the bar, we use this great new ingredient, which is an algal flour, that provides not just protein but some fat and fiber as well…even with the bar, we use a single-cell ingredient that is great to work with, low cost, very sustainable, and very nutritious.”

What what

And, yes, I teased it a bit in the headline, so let’s go ahead and talk briefly about poo-gas. Rhinehart assures us that the gastrointestinal issues suffered by myself and some other early Soylent users have been completely settled. According to the founder, neither Coffiest nor the Soylent Bar will cause consumers to erupt with what I once referred to as “horse-killing farts.”

I am not sure whether this news brings joy or sadness to a lot of you, but there you go. Still, the jury is out until I can actually pour some Coffiest into my gut, and Rhinehart says samples are on the way. Those of you who think my finest work on Ars has involved chronicling the things my butt does, stand ready. I may be about to paint my masterpiece.

(OK, that metaphor ended up in a place I didn’t expect.)

The when and the how much

Coffiest is available for purchase today at the Soylent site, and it should run $39 for a pack of 12 servings (or $37.05 with a recurring subscription). This works out to a per-meal cost of about $3 with the subscription rate, which compares to a current per-meal cost of about $1.92 for the Soylent powder at its lowest cost. The Soylent Bar will launch later, with availability yet to be announced, and it’s expected to cost about $2 per bar.

We’ll have more on Coffiest as soon as we get a sample in hand. I’m not sure if it can replace my Baratza grinder and French press, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

Listing image: Soylent / Rosa Labs

Lee Hutchinson Senior Technology Editor

Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.

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