Originally planned to drink these mostly on the weekends, but the box arrived at my apartment and my curiosity got the best of me. Honestly, I've certainly had worse energy drinks. It tastes a little synthetic, kind of like a banana that was made in a lab where they couldn't quite get it right. Taste wise it wasn't so bad, but it wasn't terribly filling for 400 calories.

An update to this: this is one of the few huel flavors that my wife does not mind eating (yes, I have roped her into this somehow as well. For more on persuasion, please see Cialdini's influence: the psychology of persuasion). If you have not already torched your expectations by drinking chocolate protein powder, this probably tastes the most like "a relatively normal fruit smoothie" compared to the other flavors' "a surprisingly filling protein shake". As such, I have bumped this up by 0.5 points – it has some staying power.

I think this tastes a bit less like "food" compared to banana. It tastes, in my opinion, a bit better than Banana, and the texture is slightly more tolerable in chocolate form. The general lack of sweetness in these beverages I think works well with chocolate, which works fairly well even a bit bitter. Overall better than expected!

Gotta say, tastes weird. Still drinkable enough. It doesn't really taste like berry, it tastes like the berry flavoring they use for captain crunch. But like, worse.

Eww. I once had vanilla casein protein powder which I got scammed into thinking would be good for baking, and this pretty much tastes just like that to the letter. I had to throw out that tub of casein fairly quickly because I hated it so much. Drinking all four of these in the variety box is going to be very difficult.

After a full day of only meal replacement drinks, I'm going into this excited that I get to eat some solid food. Admittedly two huel RTDs and one scoop of whey protein with water has filled me up pretty well, but I think 930 kcal is not an appropriate amount of food to be eating so I'm eating a bit of this stuff as well. Cooking it was pretty convenient, as far as instant meals go.

The huel pasta was generally pretty mediocre. The biggest shock to me was that the taste was really mild, to the point of being honestly quite bland – visually it looks like it's supposed to have a lot of seasoning in it, but it pretty much just tastes like pasta and tomato sauce. It seems super healthy from the macros, and it was easy to cook, but I think I'm going to need to get some sort of hot sauce or seasoning to use when I prepare this in the future. I'll admit I am a bit disappointed: it's kind of bland, and it probably needs additional ingredients to make it go the distance, which reduces its convenience. I will say, it sort of just seems like normal food (albeit normal food that has been freeze dried), so my criticism here comes from a place comparing it to other real food: it's probably better than the RTD drinks, but it's less funny that it's mediocre.

The first of the v2 flavors. I had a big lunch and then did a big workout, so I'm going into this pretty excited to get some food. Drinking it, I'm a little ambivalent. At this point I am starting to be able to perceive the gestalt of "huel taste" common to all of these beverages, and this more than the v1 bottle just tastes like huel with some cheap strawberry flavoring tacked on top of it. At first I thought "oh, it is interesting that this tastes sweeter than the chocolate version, even though they are probably the same. I wonder if that's because of a mental association with each flavor and a level of sweetness." However, I looked at the bottle and these just have 5g of sugar instead of 2g of sugar, which explains that. You might like this one more if you like sweeter stuff, and while it still tastes weird it's still a fair improvement over the Berry flavor from the v1 box. Overall not bad, but not good.

Tastes like I am drinking a candle. Would not recommend.

Not really a fan. This doesn't taste sweet enough to really sell "caramel" as the flavor it's going for, and it tastes kinda salty (as the name suggests) which makes me actively feel thirstier as I drink it. "It tastes like sea water" is perhaps a bit harsh to describe this, but it's fairly close. If sea water tasted like this I would be like "oh, wow, this sea water tastes like food!" which is perhaps not a stunning endorsement for this product.

Pretty much what it says on the label. Tastes like coffee. There's actually 65 mg of caffeine in this, which is amusing. The texture makes it weirder than any coffee I've ever had (and I'm honestly not a big coffee guy) but if you like coffee then this is probably a good bet for you as far as huel flavors go.

The black editions in general have way more protein than the alternatives. What you get in exchange for this benefit, of course, is that it tastes more like protein powder (i.e quite a bit worse).

A relatively new flavor! This tastes okay. I would call it a pure downgrade from the regular chocolate flavor, mostly because the mint taste is much more prominent than the chocolate taste. It does have a pretty nice thin mint kind of vibe to it, but it's a lot less sweet tasting than I expected from the descriptions.