Soylent, the company best known for its meal replacement drinks that provide a complete nutrient profile for the human body, is dipping its toe into the nootropics space. At least, that’s sort of the case via their newest product, Coffiest.
It’s basically coffee-flavored Soylent aimed at combining breakfast and coffee all in one convenient drink. And the company, founded by biohackers for biohackers, in many regards, has added nootropic compound l-theanine to enhance the effects of included caffeine while reducing the likelihood of jitters.
In that regard, they make be taking a page out of Nootrobox’s GO CUBES playbook by creating a new category of product that uses theanine to smooth out the caffeine kick. Of course, these two products are themselves very different: GO CUBES are edible, chewable coffee not designed to replace a meal, whereas Coffiest is basically a coffee-flavored breakfast shake + caffeine. Their use case scenarios will be different, and there’s a chance both will appeal to the same crowd, just for different times of day.
Why L-Theanine?
The caffeine + l-theanine stack is a potent nootropic combo on its own (in a ratio of about 1:2, so 100mg of caffeine and 200mg of l-theanine is fairly standard). Theanine naturally occurs in green tea and is an amino acid that can have calming, but not sedative, effects in mammals. It has few reported side effects, and when paired with coffee and other caffeine sources, studies suggest it can actually enhance caffeine’s focus-boosting properties while reducing the chance of jitters and feelings of over-stimulation. Basically, it “smooths out” the caffeinated kick so many people want.
Interestingly, Coffeist contains a ratio of 150mg of caffeine to just 75mg of l-theanine. That gives me the impression that the theanine seems to be more of a final addition to round off the product as opposed to a core focus.
Soylent already has a lot of traction among many in the biohacking space, and while their core products don’t contain nootropics, this could be a sign of new things to come.