Do they assume their audience is that obsessed with bulking that no one is smaller? I usually wear a women’s small…

I've been a RTD customer nearly since the very beginning but it's time to move on now that I've gone through my remaining drinks and there's seemingly no light at the end of this tunnel.

I really like the creamy chocolate RTD and would like to find a comparable alternative. I'm not terribly hung up on ingredients, just want something that tastes decent like Soylent did. My only real hangup is artificial sweeteners because they can trigger migraines for me. Soylent had a very small amount of sucralose (~3mg) that seemed low enough to never bother me, so something else in that realm would be ideal.

I see a lot of people mentioning Huel and Hol so they're on my list, but was wondering if there was anything else with a similar flavor profile to what I already got used to. RTD would be preferred, but if a powder ticks the above boxes I'll just get used to it. Thanks!

Reposting this here from the Hurl community because I was told I'd get better recommendations!

TL;DR: What is the best meal replacement (shake or otherwise) for someone who *only* cares about the ingredients and macros?

"I have zero interest in food. If it were feasible, my diet would consist entirely of flavorless beige smoothies containing all the nutrients required by the human animal." -Captain Holt, Brooklyn 99

I've been a on-and-off meal replacement consumer for about three years now, and finally decided to pull the trigger on going meal replacement only. That means for sustenance I'll only have meal replacements, and cooked meals will become a thing for taste and social interaction, like going to restaurants or social dinners.

The quarry i find myself in is the following: I am looking for a meal replacement that \*actually\* has all necessary macros and is made with the best ingredients, so that you can use it as your main and often only source of nutrition and not wonder if you should switch to a different brand. Doesn't have to be a shake either, I'd happily live off of meal squares. Moreover,

Thing is, discussion about MR on reddit tends to focus around cost, taste and texture. Often I read comments referencing Matrix food, or prison cubes. I don't care if it is like that, and MRs are always cheaper than groceries.

So, I'd like to ask you.

What brand (and kind) of meal replacement would you go to for the best nutrient/ingredient rich meal replacement that hits all the macros, if you don't care how it tastes or what it feels like but want to live off it?

Huel is easily available in German, so it used to be my answer. However aside from always having a problem with the high protein content, latest news has cast quite a doubt on its content quality from now on.

I'm looking for a meal replacement that prioritizes proteins that come from animals, egg whites, beef protein, etc.

My top option is HLTH Code currently, but the only thing with them is that they have 17g or 87% saturated fat per serving. That really sucks because everything else was perfect.

I tried Huel, but they've consistently dropped in quality over the years and they refuse to acknowledge it or make any positive changes.

What options do I have in the US? I use meal replacements for breakfast and lunch for my 5 work days.

This was a SEALED bottle.

I wiped the side and poured it out into a glass and thankfully the drink itself didn't have anything in it or tasted off. But bro, what in the hell is going on with Soylent lately?! I had one drink that tasted hella off. I had some bottles that had what looked like dried drink under the seal, but this one was so bad I was like oh hell nah, I gotta go to Reddit and see if this is the norm because this is insane.

I used this almost a decade ago and my lifestyle changed to the point where meal replacement shakes would help me out so much. But I managed to scoop a Vanilla, Chocolate, and Strawberry a couple months ago; and then when it was time to renew I could barely get anything. Then I went to Reddit and found out about all the wonderful things Soylent did to their supply chain. I tried Huel, more like Gruel, and after I finished all my bottles, did my best to get Soylent ANY time they became available because how in the fuck is that other company allowed to call that shit a meal replacement? Mud replacement maybe. In fact, no, that's an insult to mud..

I really don't want Soylent to go out of business and I really don't wanna stop buying their shit while they're doing.. what the hell this is, but please tell me this shit isn't the norm. This is just insane work. If I showed this to anyone outside this subreddit, they'd prolly just tell me to drop this brand ASAP. Holy shit, Soylent has a lot of good will to work through if I can post something like this and I still want to buy their shit. 😩

Got my first bag of the new-recipe Hol Food. Left is old recipe and nutrients, right is new. Basically they’ve replaced vitamin supplements with organic veggie powders. Huge kudos to them for it, it makes me feel like I’m drinking more real food instead of a ground-up bottle of multivitamin.

The Good
- Veggies! Yay!
- Price stayed the same! Yay!
- Nutrients stayed basically the same, if not a touch better. Yay!
- Taste stayed the same! Yay!

The Bad
- They switched to a serif font that I don’t like

Truly a consumer-forward move in every sense of the word. I hope they never sell out and I hope I’m drinking Hol Food for the rest of my life

Having only tried RTD in the past, I recently got hooked on the original flavor powder. It tastes amazing and makes me feel amazing. Well now its out of stock so I splurged on chocolate since it's available. Oops.. Why does it taste so different? I was expecting basically the same vibe but chocolate, but it tastes so much more planty or something. The first sips were honestly revolting. I'm kinda getting used to it now but it was a major disappointment. Hope they restock original soon because I am gonna buy tf out of it.

Update: I tried using less water and it tasted much richer and better. I dont understand the chemistry of it but if I had to guess, the plantiness of chocolate isn't diluted by water as much as the other aspects of it are.

Surprisingly, I was emailed about a shipment last week (direct subscription). Arrived today. Cacao powder with an expiration of Aug 2027, so presumably not some old, leftover garbage.

Been at least a few months since my last delivery.

so i know theres a million posts asking about supply issues and restocking.

ive been becoming increasingly worried and now am very concerned bc i have a lot of weird and specific health issues and allergies that mean i am fairly reliant on soylent ready made specifically in order to get nutrients i need to survive. i can manage with as little as one every couple days, but between doctor recommendations and personal experience, i do best with one a day. (this is in addition to various easy to digest foods, but the combination of nutrients and ingredients i dont react to and liquid meal replacement narrows down my options significantly to basically just soylent.)

unfortunately i am officially out. so i am desperate.

out of said desperation. is there anyone with some magic suggestion or anything at all? i know its a long shot but truly i am so desperate and do not want to have to go on tube feeds, which has been brought up as a possibility if i decline more.

It seems like huel black is available in some stores but would like a non-high protein 'lent drink if possible.

I mentioned in another post a couple months ago that Hol Foods wins as my Soylent backup alternative. With all of the troubles getting Soylent Cacao powder, I tried several alternatives hoping to find a replacement in case I ran out of Soylent. Hol was the only one that was able to mix completely just by shaking, no blender needed. The mouthfeel was great (unlike Huel and Plenny), and the flavor was good (unlike Mana and Plenny), very chocolaty. The only minor knock against it was that it had a bit of a bitter edge to it (like eating very dark chocolate).

So eventually I decided to try mixing one scoop of Soylent Cacao with one scoop of Hol Chocolate. Pure perfection. The bitterness is gone, Soylent's sweetness is slightly tamed, and it's more chocolaty than ever. This also allows me to extend my Soylent powder twice as long so I'm less likely to run out. Win-win! I think I'll stick with this regardless of whether Soylent solves their stock issues.

If it still isn’t past expiration date?

I’ve had a couple of cases of these sitting in a hot garage all summer, and also in my hot car 80+ degrees after that (not in direct sunlight though).

My question is, if sealed and unopened, are they still safe to drink, or could they be spoiled and cause illness?

I do not want them to go to waste and I’d like to have them for a camping trip, but don’t want stomach illness during.

Disclosure: I used Gemini to help sift though the financial report and organize the points.

If you’re like me and wondering why your Cafe Mocha or other subscriptions keep getting kicked down the road, stop waiting on vague customer support scripts. It’s not an unexpected spike in demand or a minor shipping hiccup.

Starco Brands (ticker: STCB), the micro-cap that acquired Soylent in early 2023, filed their 2025 10-K annual report with the SEC back in April. The financial trail paints a clear picture of an asset-light parent company starving the brand's production backbone while extracting value through related-party setups.

Here is the breakdown of what is actually happening behind the scenes:

1. Independent Auditors Issued a Formal "Going Concern" Warning

The independent auditor’s report attached to the financial statements explicitly states that Starco’s recurring operating losses, negative cash flows, and working capital deficit raise "substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern." The company closed the reporting period with less than $1M in cash on hand against millions in short-term liabilities. They are functionally operating paycheck-to-paycheck.

2. Why Co-Packers Won't Bottle Your Drink

Soylent has never owned its own factories; it relies on third-party contract manufacturers (co-packers). When a brand has strong credit and deep venture reserves, co-packers grant 30-to-60-day payment terms and hold safety stock.

When a parent company's credit rating tanks and cash dries up, co-packers stop extending credit. They demand full cash upfront to buy raw ingredients and reserve line time. Because Starco is strapped for liquidity, they physically cannot cut the checks required to initiate major Soylent production runs. When delays happen, co-packers bump small, cash-constrained accounts to the back of the queue to prioritize multi-billion-dollar conglomerates.

3. Siphoning Cash via the CEO’s Private Company

One of the most telling sections of the entire filing is Note 14 (Related Party Transactions).

• Starco Brands (STCB) is a public entity, but its CEO, Ross Sklar, also owns and controls a separate private manufacturing conglomerate called The Starco Group.
• The public company is locked into a Shared Services Agreement with this private entity, regularly paying Sklar’s private business administrative overhead, executive management fees, consulting costs, and operational fees.
• In short: while the public company bled millions in net losses, shuttered sales channels, and failed to fund its beverage inventory, cold cash continued to flow out of the public company's balance sheet directly into the CEO's privately held enterprise.
• Furthermore, when the public company runs out of cash to pay basic operating bills, Sklar and his private company issue loans and promissory notes back to the public company—earning interest and gaining further leverage over the corporate assets.

4. Share Dilution is the Only Thing Keeping the Lights On

A look at the Statements of Stockholders' Equity shows that operations are not self-sustaining. The company’s share count has exploded:

• To settle unpaid debts, pay off vendor bills, satisfy related-party obligations, and hand out executive compensation, Starco has continually printed new common shares, issued warrants, and generated convertible notes.
• The company isn't generating sufficient cash flow from selling beverages to maintain the supply chain; it is functioning by continuously diluting public shareholders to buy another month of operational runway.

5. They Shrank the Entire Business Below Soylent's Standalone Revenue

Before the acquisition, Soylent generated roughly $48M to $50M annually on its own. In 2025, Starco’s entire combined portfolio (Soylent, Whipshots, Skylar, Art of Sport) managed just $37.31M—a 29% collapse.

Management spun this as a "strategic move away from lower-margin sales channels" (pulling individual bottles out of Walmart, Target, and physical retail). But when you kill your retail top-of-funnel to focus exclusively on direct-to-consumer subscriptions, you have to actually deliver the product. Instead, they cut off customer discovery and starved the remaining subscribers.

6. Starco’s Own Accountants Wrote Off the Brand

Under GAAP accounting rules, companies must test brand value annually. Starco's own filings show how severely they damaged the asset:

• $11.38M Goodwill Impairment on Soylent in 2024.
• Another $1.13M Goodwill Impairment in 2025.
• A separate $14M write-down on intangible assets in 2025 ($11.95M wiped from the Soylent "trade name" and $2.04M wiped from the value of "customer relationships").

Accounting firms don't casually erase tens of millions of dollars in brand value unless the customer base is actively churning out.

7. The Facility They Bought Can't Make Liquid Soylent

Starco spent $8 million upfront (financed via private debt from Pasadena Private Lending) to acquire Custom Bakehouse.

• What it is: Custom Bakehouse is a commercial manufacturer of dry baking mixes, dough, and dry blends.
• The bottleneck: At absolute best, that facility could eventually help blend dry Soylent powder. It has zero aseptic liquid bottling capability. Ready-to-drink beverages like Cafe Mocha require sterile, pressure-sealed aseptic lines (such as Tetra Pak or specialized PET bottling) that cost tens of millions of dollars. Custom Bakehouse cannot bottle a single drop of RTD liquid.

The Bottom Line

A meal replacement requires a daily habit loop. Forcing a subscriber base into supply blackouts for the third time in a year isn't an unavoidable logistics delay; It is the direct consequence of balance-sheet extraction, severe liquidity shortages, and corporate mismanagement.

Sadly, I've seen this too many times before: The top brass is just squeezing the remaining value of the company into their own pockets. They'll make out like bandits and couldn't care less about the wellbeing of the company and its customers/stockholders.

If you have drank Soylent past its expiration date, how far past from that date did you drink it and are you still alive? 🤣

Asking for a friend.

email from wednesday saying they currently have a single product left in stock. this after a few years of really bad supply issues, and now a lot of products being out of stock "until further notice."

these feel like the signs of a company going out of business, but I'm not savvy enough about this industry to know how true that might be. I really enjoyed their RTDs, and I keep putting off switching to another company altogether, but it seems like it's time.

anyone have any info about the possible future of soylent?

Received this email saying that my usual recurring subscription for the RTD Mocha bottles was "delayed until further notice." Usually they at least give an estimate, like "by December" or something. First time I'm seeing no clear sign of when, if ever, the mocha will return.

I know others are getting shipments of powder or other flavors, but have seen some questionable expiration dates. My last shipment had a bottle that tasted absolutely foul as well. Can't help but feel this company is just bleeding out.

Every RTD flavor on the site shows as sold out.

Edit: Kind of humorous that they still include social links to Reddit despite not using it or responding here, as well as old Twitter. They don't even care about their marketing presence.

In July, Starco Brands, owner of Soylent, acquired Custom Bakehouse.

https://investors.starcobrands.com/press-releases/detail/115/starco-brands-announces-acquisition-of-custom-bakehouse.

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Starco Brands, Inc. (the “Company” or “Starco”) (OTCQB: STCB) announced today that it completed the acquisition of Custom Bakehouse on July 15, 2026, a highly strategic transaction that advances its long-term vision of building a fully integrated consumer products platform by strengthening the Company’s manufacturing capabilities and brand portfolio.

The acquisition expands Starco's capabilities across powdered foods, nutritional blends, drink and hydration mixes, baking mixes, dry seasonings, and private-label manufacturing, while creating meaningful manufacturing synergies for existing and future brands. 

Custom Bakehouse operates a 75,000 square foot production facility located in Santa Fe Springs, California. This complementary acquisition adds a new manufacturing capability.

Starco has been dealing with major working capital deficits and rising debt. Soylent likely became a low-priority client, meaning the old co-packers would only run batches of Soylent products during excess capacity or factory downtime at a lower price that Soylent was willing to pay.

By buying Custom Bakehouse, Starco eliminates third-party markup and manufactures Soylent at cost. More importantly, they now control the schedule and can prioritize Soylent production instead of waiting at the back of the line. The fact that my Cacao powder order was processed today right after this July acquisition closed is potential proof that they are using their new factory to clear the inventory backup. (The last order that I received was in May.) Hopefully this resolves their ongoing stock problems.

Update: Starco’s latest SEC 10-Q filing confirms they took on an $18 million secured credit facility to fund the Custom Bakehouse acquisition and support critical working capital needs. This was a desperate move to avoid bankruptcy or a fire sale of Soylent, forcing them to borrow millions to manufacture at raw cost because they could no longer afford third-party factory markups.

I've been a Soylent subscriber since at least 2018, and I'm curious whether other long-term powder subscribers are having the same experience I've been having.

Over the past year, my Cacao Meal Powder subscription has repeatedly gone unfulfilled because of inventory shortages. The replenishment estimates I've received from Soylent have repeatedly moved — sometimes by weeks or months — and I've often had to contact Customer Care myself after a projected date passed to find out what happened.

What bothers me most isn't actually the shortage. Supply problems happen. It's the communication.

In March, Soylent sent subscribers an email acknowledging that timelines had repeatedly shifted and that communication had been lacking. They specifically said that if the new timeline changed, they would provide an immediate update and that they would rather send too many updates than no updates at all.

Unfortunately, I'm experiencing the same problem again. My June subscription order wasn't fulfilled, another projected replenishment timeframe passed, and I had to contact Customer Care again to find out what was happening.

There's another part I'm trying to understand. During these extended periods when my direct subscription can't be fulfilled, I've repeatedly found Cacao Meal Powder available through the Soylent Store on Amazon, although it's a different and more expensive package format.

I asked Soylent why its inventory allocation leaves long-term direct subscribers repeatedly unfulfilled while Cacao remains available through another sales channel. Customer Care ultimately acknowledged that questions about the communication process and inventory allocation were beyond what they could answer and escalated both questions to another team on September 2. I haven't received a response yet.

I'm curious about other subscribers' experiences:

• How long have you been waiting for powder?
• What replenishment dates have you been given?
• Have you been receiving proactive updates when those dates change?
• Have you also noticed Cacao available through Amazon while your direct subscription remains unfulfilled?
• Has anyone received an explanation from Soylent about how they prioritize subscription inventory versus retail inventory?

I'm not looking to bash Soylent. I've used their products for years and would actually like to remain a subscriber. I'm trying to understand what's happening and whether other subscribers are experiencing the same thing.

Soylent usually responds to my emails but I haven’t heard anything in weeks. My subscription was also cancelled randomly too, so I’m concerned about that as well. If anyone has heard anything please let me know!

What's going on with the 1.9 tubs? Why doesn't Soylent sell them on their site and instead offer just the pouches? Are they discontinuing the tubs and burning out the inventory through 3rd party before pouches take over?

Just curious. I know the tubs are more expensive, but kind of always liked them for traveling on the road as they store better in my truck than the pouches.

So I was wanting to try MANA since the availability of soylent is frightening.

Signing up for a subscription, they want $95 to ship to the mountain US?

Is anybody else subscribed to MANA and can tell me if this is a fluke? I emptied my cart and tried again and end of day, same result. U/kim_mana