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And now for something completely similar…another six Soylent alternatives!

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The second part can be found here. The common Errata page contains any corrections to original articles.

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As luck would have it, we stumbled upon another six commercially available Soylent alternatives, so we promptly took a closer look. Today, we’ll discuss these contenders:

• KetoSoy
• Aussie Soylent
• Uber Chow and Uber Cookies
• Ketofood
• Purelent
• SoylentLife

KetoSoy

Probably the newest addition to the family of Soylent-like foods (launched only in December 2014), KetoSoy by Ted from the U.S. has its goal set right in its name: it’s a tool to achieve ketosis. Ketosis is a metabolic state in which your body uses fat for fuel, instead of carbs – which can help you manage your weight and control your blood sugar. This is achieved by eating as little carbs as possible, which can indeed prove difficult to achieve in a normal diet. KetoSoy aims to ease this process for you by selling a mixture containing only 21 grams of net carbs per day, while “classic” diets easily contain more then 200g of cabs per day. Ted himself is on a ketogenic diet which inspired him to create this product.

Price: from $12 (9.87 EUR) per day

Pros

• they send the vitamin packs separately, so that you can eat less or more of the powder (and get less or more calories) with the amount of vitamins unchanged
• Ted states in his About section that there is a team of people in the company, not just himself
• the complete list of ingredients is present here (at the bottom)
• ships to EU, though it isn’t cheap
• if you like it sweet, you can get a sweetener in a form of liquid sucralose or liquid stevia with your order for free

Cons

• the price is a bit high for only 1800 kcal per day – though this is admittedly a product for a specific group of people with their specific needs, not the chow for the masses
• who is in the team? Is there any food technologist or dietary expert?
• you’ll get 45g of saturated fat per day while eating exclusively KetoSoy. American Heart Association recommends limiting the saturated fat intake to less than 7% of your daily calories, which would be around 14g per day for 1800 kcal

Web: http://www.ketosoy.com/

Aussie Soylent

This one comes directly from the other side of the world. Yep, you guessed it – it’s an Australian alternative to Soylent! You can choose from three versions – “classic vanilla”, “premium” and “chocolate”, and all of them are the normal 2000kcal-per-day meals. They use 4 servings per day (like e.g. Ambronite and People Chow) instead of “classic” 3 meals, as they believe that people prefer to have 1/4 of their daily intake for their breakfast, 1/4 for the lunch and 1/2 for their dinner.

Price: from $13.17 (10.63 EUR) per day

Pros

• supposedly partnered with a vitamin producer to develop a mineral and vitamin blend tailored to Aussie Soylent
• comes in three versions – “classic vanilla”, “premium” and “chocolate”
• “premium” and “chocolate” versions need no oil
• complete ingredient list in FAQ

Cons

• as there are not many alternatives down there, they’ve been overwhelmed by demand and seems like the product has been out of stock for a month and counting. Hopefully the production line wil be fixed soon
• “classic vanilla” needs canola oil, which is not included – though they state it would be pointless to ship it as it is readily available in Australia
• shipping only to Australia (and New Zealand upon agreement)
• there’s not much info about the team and people behind this on the website

Web: http://aussiesoylent.com.au/

Uber Chow and Uber Cookies

Straight from Florida, US hails a producer with monicker “Uber”, selling his enhanced version of People Chow titled Uber Chow on the Powdered Food Marketplace. Uber Chow is supposed to be “oriented on health and longevity”, which should be achieved by addition of a few special supplements like Trehalose, Collagen, Glucosamine, MSM, Artichoke extract or Reservatrol (whatever all of that stuff means). He also sells these supplements separately, so that you can boost your own DIY recipe. But that isn’t all – he has also his own cookies up his sleeve, effectively creating a competition to MealSquares. Uber Cookies are again sold on the Powdered Foods Marketplace and supposedly contain enough excess of micronutrients to compensate for the baking process. You have to eat 8 of them to get the typical 2000 kcal. We hope Uber will continue doing his magic and comes up with a few other variants in the domain of calories, macronutrients of flavours.

Price: $10 (8 EUR) per day for Uber Cookies, $8.57 (7 EUR) per day for Uber Chow

Pros

• selling an “enhancer” for your DIY recipe is quite an original idea (if it actually works, that is!)
• cookies! There certainly aren’t many solid distros around yet and this one seems to be priced reasonably

Cons

• some additional info about Uber himself wouldn’t hurt the image I guess
• Uber Chow (the pre-mixed full recipe) is shipped without the oil and it is recommended to take omega 3 capsules with it
• doesn’t ship to Europe

Uber Chow Web: on Powdered Foods Marketplace
Uber Cookies Web: on Powdered Foods Marketplace

Ketofood

If you’ve read the part 1 of this overview, you already know the guy selling this stuff already appeared on our stage – that’s right, I’m talking about none other than Chris Bair, hailing from the USA. This recipe was originally created by a person known in the DIY Soylent community by his nickname “QuidNYC“, whose recipes currently occupate the second and the fith place amongst the five most popular DIY recipes (Ketofood being the latter). Containing only 19 grams of net carbs per day (and a LOT of fibre), this is probably the only Keto soylent you can buy nowadays – next to KetoSoy, of course.

Price: from $10 (8.07 EUR) per day

Pros

• until KetoSoy, this was the only Soylent alternative for ketogenic diet available
• all the info about the recipe is readily available and this is the most popular ketogenic recipe on DIY Soylent tool website
• multivitamin and vitamin D2/K3 pills are packaged separately, so that you can scale the amount of calories from the powder (similar to KetoSoy)

Cons

• you have to supply your own oil blend (MCT oil + canola)
• only one version – 1800 kcal – but as I mentioned while reviewing KetoSoy, this is a specialized product, not the staple food for the masses
• no shipping to EU (only UK and it’s definitely not a budget option)

Web: https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketofood/

Purelent

What was I saying about the Netherlands becoming the European soylent superpower? That’s right, Purelent is Dutch. Looks like this one’s pretty recent, too, as the page changed a few times throughout my visits. One interesting thing to mention is that originally, their FAQ section copied the FAQ section of Queal almost to the letter. We asked Queal about this directly, suspecting this might be another Queal project, but they were as surprised and confounded to discover this as we were. By the way, when I first examined their website, I stumbled upon the name “Amealzing” in several places – looks like some renaming took place here. It also looks that Queal is not the only distro that Purelent “borrowed” stuff from.

Edit: A few months after, we got contacted by Purelent commenting on these issues. They say the FAQ and nutrition facts were copied from other distros just for the development version of the website, which was public back then by mistake, which they regret.

Price: from $5.91 (4.83 EUR) per day

Pros

• we said in the first part of this series that Joylent is the cheapest European alternative – well, this seems to be the cheapest alternative now
• 4 flavours: banana, chocolate, strawberry, vanilla + you can choose to get multiple of them within one order

Cons

• plainly copying website features from another distribution (like Queal FAQ) is probably not the best start you can get
• sulphur and cholesterol are not listed in the the nutrition info…wait a second. The nutrition profile and ingredient list are almost exactly copied from Joylent, another Dutch distro! In fact, only the amount of carbs differs. What is this? Edit: since then, Purelent got their own nutrition profile (still no sulphur though!)
• detailed list of ingredients would be interesting to see
• only one caloric/macronutrient variant available
• maltodextrin, soy flour…alright, alright, I know, I’m just saying
• who’s behind this? Some names and photos of the team would probably help the credibility
• well, I gotta ask: is this just a scam or a very clumsy way of kickstarting your business by copying others? Have anyone actually received any product from this producer? Edit: apparently, it seems the latter is the case and Purelent is real. The version of the website we found back then probably wasn’t meant to kickstart the product.

Web: http://purelent.eu/

SoylentLife

It seems that Dutch are truly enterpreneurial in nature, as this distribution is once again coming from the Netherlands. Their website was unfortunately available only in Dutch (during the time of writing this article), therefore it proved to be a bit harder to thoroughly examine. Interestingly enough, they write here that they base their recipe on these US DRIs instead of European. Now I might be wrong, but I figure that having a name so close to the “official” Soylent might prove problematic in the future (which also goes to Aussie Soylent), even though they state in their disclaimer (Google Translate to the rescue!):

Any reference to or likeness with other food with ‘soy’ or ‘life’ in the name is pure coincidence and it is not our intention to create this association.

Price: from $6.08 (4.97 EUR) per day

Pros

• 2 variants: for men and women. The female variant contains 1990 kcal (or 2003 kcal as per this nutrition profile, as there seems to be a slight discrepancy between the product description and that latter info). The male version has 2573 kcal. They also mention “Light” and “Active” versions you can get upon contacting them directly via email
• 5 flavours: vanilla, chocolate, lemon meringue, banana, strawberry
• low cost

Cons

• 335 grams of carbs and 168 grams of protein in the version for men seem a bit too much to me, though I understand you have to get that calories from something, so this might just be my own preference. That’s still a lot of protein though
• maltodextrin, soy flour…
• I wasn’t able to find a truly detailed list of ingredients on the website
• who’s behind this?

Web: http://www.soylentlife.nl/

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So, that about wraps it up for today. We would never have imagined that another 6 alternatives will come to our attention so quickly, thus I’m not going to say that “this is it, end of the series”. Once we’ll find 6 distros again, there will be part 4. Feel free to send us feedback, comments and tips for distros we haven’t covered yet.

May this winter’s snow be powdery!

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Disclaimer: if you have found any incorrect information or you have additional notes to text or images, or you have specific copyright claims on the images used in this article, please feel free to contact us. If you are the producer or the distributor of one of these products and want us to review your product more closely, feel free to contact us too.