Soylent Wants to Replace Your Morning Coffee

Now, it’s aiming for your coffee.

To recap: Soylent is a meal hack that portends to give you all the necessary calories and nutrients of a regular meal in bottled, blandish-but-drinkable form.

Today, the company launched Coffiest, which is essentially Soylent + coffee. A bottle of Coffiest contains 150 mg of caffeine — about the same as a 16 oz. cup of java — as well as 75 mg of L-theanine, an amino acid often found in green tea that’s good for relaxation and boosting cognitive performance. It also helps reduce caffeine “jitters.”

At 400 calories, Coffiest acts as a full meal and offers 20% of your daily nutritional requirements. And, yes, it does contain real coffee as an ingredient.

All well and good, but how does it taste?

In a weeklong test last spring, we recommended the formula behind the vastly improved, ready-made Soylent 2.0, which tasted kind of like cereal milk. We had some issues using Soylent as a full-meal replacement (read: digestion, uh, “problems”), but overall felt like some people could easily incorporate the drink into their lives.

At the time, we hated the combo of Soylent and coffee, a popular recipe on Soylent message boards. We called the DIY java mix “bitter and unappetizing.” Fortunately, Coffiest seems to have solved the taste problems, offering a mix that’s pretty close to the cereal milk flavor of its 2.0 product. One note after an hour of testing, though: drink it cold.

The company also just announced the launch of Soylent Bar, a solid food take on their namesake product that, at 250 calories, works best as a snack or small meal. Coffiest is available online for $37.05 for a pack of 12 ($39 if you’re not a subscriber); the Soylent Bar will be available soon, and availability for several more Soylent products on Amazon is in the works.

And no, People isn’t listed on the ingredients list.