By Harold Phillips | March 2026
The experiment started because I was bad at lunch.
Not bad at eating it. Bad at planning it. Every Sunday I'd do my meal prep like a responsible adult: a pot of dal, roasted vegetables, whatever grain was on sale at No Frills. Monday through Wednesday I'd eat it. Thursday I'd be halfway through a $15 sandwich from a place near the office, telling myself it was fine. By Friday I'd stopped caring entirely.
The waste bothered me more than the money. (Though the money bothered me too.)
I'd seen Soylent come up online a few years back, the original meal replacement that positioned itself as "food, but optimized." The kind of product that gets written about either by tech bros who think eating is a distraction from productivity or by journalists dunking on those tech bros. Neither group seemed like a reliable narrator. I bookmarked it, forgot about it, found the bookmark again during one of my quarterly subscription audits, and decided the only way to actually know was to try it.
So I ordered a case. Then I drank it for lunch, every workday, for a month.
What I Was Actually Testing
This is the part where I have to be honest about my motivations, because they weren't particularly noble.
I wasn't trying to eat healthier. I wasn't trying to lose weight. I was trying to stop spending $50–$60 a week on lunches because I couldn't get my act together on Thursdays. The meal replacement pitch (nutritionally complete, fast to prepare, won't make a mess on your keyboard) is genuinely appealing if you work hybrid and eat at your desk more often than you'd like to admit.
My partner thought this was, in their words, "extremely you." They were eating actual food at the table when they said it.
I told them I'd report back.
The First Week
The Soylent I tried was the Ready-to-Drink bottles, original flavour, which the packaging describes as "neutral" and which I'd describe as "imagine a vanilla protein shake that went to therapy and learned to moderate its emotions." Not bad. Not good. Just present.
The first few days were fine. You don't really notice you're not eating lunch so much as notice you're not making decisions about lunch. That part I liked. There's a small tax on every meal you choose (figuring out what you want, whether you have it, whether you're going to regret it), and meal replacement removes that entirely. You pick up the bottle, you drink it, you're done.
By Thursday of the first week, I was still on track. This felt like a personal record.
A Tangent About the Word "Optimize"
The thing is, "optimize" comes up constantly in the meal replacement world, and I find it slightly suspicious. Not dishonest — just revealing.
Calling something optimized implies there's a target function you're maximizing. Optimized for what, exactly? If the goal is "nutrients per calorie," sure. If the goal is "satisfaction per minute spent eating," food wins by a lot. "Optimized" is tech-world language that slips into wellness marketing and sounds rigorous without telling you anything about what's actually being traded off.
I'm not saying this to be critical of Soylent specifically. I'm saying it because I realized, about eight days in, that I'd been thinking about meal replacement the wrong way. I was trying to solve a logistics problem with a nutrition product. The problem was never that my lunches were nutritionally incomplete. The problem was that I didn't have a system that actually worked on Thursdays.
Worth keeping in mind if you're considering the same experiment.
The Part Where I Stopped Feeling Like a Person
Around week two, something shifted — not physically, just psychologically.
Lunch is social. Even if you're eating at your desk, there's something about the ritual of food that signals a break. A bottle of beige liquid consumed in fifteen minutes while scrolling Slack does not feel like a break. It feels like you're refuelling a machine. I started looking forward to the end of the workday in a slightly desperate way I don't usually feel.
I'm not sure whether that's a Soylent problem specifically or a "liquid meals don't satisfy the same part of my brain that food does" problem. Probably the second one. Either way, I noticed it.
Beans knocked a full bottle off my desk sometime in the third week. I watched it happen in slow motion and felt, briefly, like I'd been given permission to go get a real sandwich. I didn't. But I thought about it for longer than I should have.
Cost: The Part That Actually Made Sense
Here's where I have to be fair. The numbers worked.
A case of twelve Ready-to-Drink bottles ran me about $55 CAD (I ordered from Amazon, though I've seen them at some Shoppers locations). That's roughly $4.60 per lunch. My previous average was somewhere between $12 and $16 a day, depending on how badly I'd failed at meal prep that week. Over the month, I spent around $100 on lunches instead of my usual $250-ish.
That's real money. And I stopped throwing out meal prep leftovers I'd optimistically made and then not gotten around to eating, so there were savings there too, though I haven't tried to quantify them exactly.
If cost and convenience are your only metrics, meal replacement wins. That's an honest conclusion, even if it's a joyless one.
The Nutrition Question (I Cannot Fully Answer This)
I'm not a nutritionist and I'm not going to pretend I did a rigorous health analysis here. Soylent markets the Ready-to-Drink as nutritionally complete for a meal: macros, micronutrients, the whole pitch. I have no reason to think they're lying.
What I can say is that I didn't feel worse. I didn't feel better. I had the same energy I usually have, which is to say: moderate. I wasn't tracking my blood sugar or running labs. I was just a person drinking beige bottles for a month and noticing how I felt, which is about as scientific as most of what I write.
If you have specific health goals or dietary concerns, talk to someone who actually knows things. I'm just a project manager from Leslieville who thought this might fix his Thursday problem.
Would I Do It Again
Probably not full-time.
But I'm not done with it either. What I do now (and this feels like the actual conclusion to the experiment) is keep a few bottles in the fridge for specific situations. The morning I have back-to-back calls and genuinely won't have time to eat. The week my partner is away and I can feel my habits deteriorating in real time. The day I've been staring at a spreadsheet for four hours and the idea of deciding anything, including what to eat, feels like too much.
As a patch for specific failure modes, it's actually useful. As a full replacement for food eaten like a human being at a table? It doesn't work. Not for me.
The $150 I saved is in my TFSA now. I'll probably spend it on a very good sandwich eventually.
Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.