SOYLENT’S NEW CREATION IS COFFEE AND BREAKFAST IN A BOTTLE
As soon as you wake up you’re already late. You snoozed again, three times this time, and now your meeting starts in exactly the time it’ll take you to put on shoes, leap in the car, and put the pedal to the floor all the way to the office. So you don’t eat breakfast. Or worse, you scarf down a donut that you’ll feel in your gut and wear on your shirt for the rest of the day. But maybe tomorrow, Soylent hopes, you’ll grab a Coffiest instead.
Coffiest is Soylent’s newest creation, the latest in its line of meal-in-a-bottle products. Like regular Soylent, it’s meant to give you a broad nutritional base, basically taking all those parts of the “complete breakfast” you’d see in a 1990s cereal commercial and cramming them into Soylent’s standard 400 kcal bottle.
A bottle of Coffiest also has 150mg of caffeine, which isn’t actually all that much—more than in a small cup of diner coffee but less than half what you’ll get from a Grande Pike at Starbucks. And just for good measure, Coffiest also includes 75mg of L-Theanine, a supposedly more even-keeled energy supplement that some people swear by even though the scientific evidence isn’t necessarily overwhelming. All together, it’s a 400-calorie meal for about $3.10 a bottle. We haven’t tried it ourselves, but given what we know about Soylent and coffee, Coffiest probably tastes like caffeinated Cheerios. And, let’s be honest here, you’re gonna fart a lot the first few times you try it.
The idea for Coffiest has been brewing (sorry) at Soylent for a while. There’s a big community of Soylent users sharing recipes and ideas on Reddit and elsewhere, and one of the most popular ideas was adding espresso shots, coffee powder, or coffee extract into Soylent 2.0 to give it an extra kick. Even people at Soylent were doing it. So with a little caffeine and a little cocoa powder, it became a new thing.
The company also announced the Soylent Bar, a 250-calorie protein bar for on-the-go snacking. The bar’s not available yet, but it’s coming soon. Together, they might create a subtle but important shift in how people think about Soylent. When it first came out, Soylent was received like a fad diet—eager testers flooded the internet with stories about What Happened When I Only Drank Soylent for a Month and debated Soylent-based weight-loss tips. Lots of people freaked out about the flavorless future, the cultural beauty we’re losing in the name of expedience, and why some of us seem to hate eating. Someone even had aSoylent dinner party, which just sounds awful. That’s not how you Soylent.
It’s like it says on the label: While not intended to replace every meal, Soylent can replace any meal. WIRED’s own Joe Brown, at whose desk you’ll always find a Soylent box or twelve, says that “I don’t drink Soylent in place of delicious food, I drink it in place of bad food—because it’s better than take-out.” Or, in the case of Coffiest, it’s better than a Boston cream. It’s a quick, healthy alternative to a drive-thru when you don’t have time for anything else.
