It may be my most embarrassing personal revelation I’m willing to publish on the internet: I have lately been a subscriber to Huel. (Not currently, but I still have a few boxes in my kitchen.) Huel is the powdered shake product that claims to be just as good as any meal that you need to—what’s the word?—“eat.” Or “chew”?
Specifically, when I drink Huel, I drink the higher-protein Huel Black, the version with 40 grams of protein per 400-calorie serving. Recently, a PR person reached out to me to offer samples of Soylent’s ready-to-drink answer to Huel Black, which they call Complete Protein. (The email came in celebration of Soylent’s launch of a vanilla flavor; they’ve had one in chocolate for a while.) Since I already identify as a loser who drinks weird shakes instead of eating food sometimes, I figured I might as well try it out.
What follows are my thoughts on how the two drinks compare, and whether either of them is worth drinking at all.
What exactly are Huel and Soylent?
Both brands’ products are plant-based nutritional beverages suitable for vegans. Both subtly hint you can drink them in place of eating a meal (although the term “meal replacement” is strictly regulated in some places and is associated with weight loss, so Huel doesn’t use the term at all, and Soylent only applies it to some of their products.)
Both Huel and Soylent offer regular and high protein versions of their drinks. Since I follow the protein recommendations for athletes, I typically go for the higher protein products. (I’ve never tasted the original, lower-protein formulations of either one.)
What kind of weirdos drink this stuff?
Lifehacker first covered Soylent back in 2014. The idea of a shake that could replace your meals was exciting and innovative to a certain tech-bro-adjacent demographic. Why “cook” or “think about food” when you could instead not do those things? At the time, Soylent wasn’t yet for sale as a product, but there was a website (soylent.me, now defunct, but archived) where you could look up recipes and make your own.
Rob Rhinehart, Soylent founder, claimed a variety of physical and mental health benefits from consuming only this pseudo-food, instead of the actual food us normies eat (which he called “leisure food.”) Again, the Wayback Machine has preserved a big ol rabbit hole you can climb down—check out one of Rhinehart’s blog posts, from his third month of experimentation, for a compelling example.
Even before that, there was the 2006 case of a man who lived on monkey chow for a week. And in the 1940's, a Cornell food scientist created a bread recipe fortified with protein, calcium, and riboflavin, and offered hints the bread might provide nearly complete nutrition on its own.
For some folks, Huel and Soylent are just a thing you can eat when you don’t feel like eating food. They aren’t necessarily a dieting tool like Slim-Fast shakes, nor do they really fit the typical profile of a protein shake. They are attempting to be a normal-ish meal in liquid form. As for myself, when I drink Huel I’m usually having it for breakfast or a snack, and eating normal food for the rest of the day.
(Fun fact: the term “Soylent” comes from a sci-fi novel in which humans of the future subsist on a slurry of soybeans and lentils...OR DO THEY? The book was adapted into a Charlton Heston movie in which the title beverage is revealed to be made of people. Nevertheless, Rhinehart thought “Soylent” was a cute name for his product. Huel, founded about a year later, is a contraction of “human fuel.” In my house, it lives in a tub that I have labeled “gruel.”
What are the macros of Huel and Soylent’s high protein formulas, and what do they cost?
Health benefits be damned, if I’m buying something to stand in for a meal, it had better have good macros and not be too expensive. Here are the stats:
Huel Black
Soylent high protein
Let’s say you can get either for $2.50; Huel gives you more calories and more protein per serving. If you want to eat 2,000 calories per day, that would take you five servings of Huel ($12.50) or eight servings of Soylent ($20). Both options would give you an enormous amount of protein: 200 grams for Huel, 240 for Soylent. High protein diets aren’t bad for you or anything, but presumably if you’re actually living off this stuff you would want a mix of the high protein and the original formula. Or, just throwing this idea out there, maybe you would eat a real meal every now and then.
If you want to buy some to try for yourself, have at it:
How does Huel taste?
When I first tried Huel, I sampled a few of the flavors. The company suggests vanilla as a base flavor, since they also sell flavoring packets you can add into it. The flavoring packets are fine, but I found that the shake powder itself tended to clump up. I also bought the coffee caramel flavor, which was pretty good, but clumped even worse. I don’t know if the clumping was an issue with just those batches, or if it’s a consistent problem. I do know that I’ve never had problems with clumping when I buy the banana flavor, so banana is my go-to.
I would describe banana-flavored Huel Black as “not bad.” The powder thickens enough to give it a milkshake-like texture. You’ll never crave it like you would an actual milkshake, but you also won’t gag as you try to get it down. It’s pretty perfectly a neutral sort of flavor.
How does Soylent taste?
Soylent’s vanilla protein occupies a similar place on the great-to-terrible spectrum. My teenage son sampled one of the bottles of vanilla; his reaction was “wow, it really tastes like soy.” Well, yes. If you like vanilla-flavored soy milk, this is like a thicker version. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is.
Notably, the Soylent product I tried is a pre-mixed drink, so there’s no issue with clumping. Soylent’s original product is available in powdered form as well, but it doesn’t seem like the high-protein version has made it to that formulation yet.
How bad an idea is it to drink shakes instead of eating food?
Look, I think food is a good and important part of our lives. If you’re so committed to the shake life that you feel guilty or fear cognitive decline from eating a pizza or something, you’re drinking too many shakes.
I also wouldn’t encourage anyone to eat a pure-shake diet, even if it might technically not kill you. Eating a variety of foods is a pretty effective insurance policy against missing out on a nutrient here or there. But more importantly, eating food is part of being a grownup, and it’s not that hard to begin learning how to fit it into your busy schedule. Start with Lifehacker’s guide to how to feed yourself when you have more important shit to do. You might start with eggs, or buy some pre-cut veggies, or begin experimenting using ramen as your canvas.
If you want to live on shakes for a week just to see what it’s like—fine. Humans have done weirder things. But ease your way in, since the fiber content of both beverages can lead to digestive unhappiness if you switch suddenly. The better option would be to swap a shake in for breakfast every now and then, and in the meantime, learn how to do some lazy meal prep so that grabbing a meal from the fridge is easier then grabbing a shake.
