Shakeology, Garden of Life, and Vanilla.

Post Published on December 12, 2013.
Last Updated on April 29, 2016 by davemackey.

I’ve written a few posts about Shakeology in the past (Three Days on Shakeology, A Little TMI – Five Days on Shakeology, Shakeology – Almost a Month Later). It has been nine days since I last posted about Shakeology (don’t worry, I plan on slowing down the pace of Shakeology posts, I’ve just been focusing some energy and effort on it, since I am trying to figure out how to get the optimal diet for 2014) and I have a few things to report.

First off, don’t buy the Strawberry! I know I said it isn’t that bad, but I received my shipment of Vanilla a few days ago and I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to go back to Strawberry. In comparison to Vanilla, Strawberry tastes like sand! I have no clue why this is – the ingredients seem fairly similar – my only guess is that for some unknown reason Shakeology is using a finer milling process for Vanilla than for Strawberry (if this is the case, PLEASE Shakeology, make Strawberry more finely milled).

Secondly, I’ve been looking at what my other options are as fall as meal replacements. Shakeology is a bit pricey. It runs around $4/shake plus the cost of Almond Milk and Frozen Fruit. I’m guessing this adds another $1/shake – so $5/shake. This isn’t horrible – but it isn’t great either. I looked at IdealShape, but most of its ingredients seemed artificial (like Ensure) and I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back to that sort of synthetic meal replacement. I also looked at Garden of Life RAW Meal (Vanilla). I had tried RAW Meal perhaps a year ago and found its taste to be quite sandy (I couldn’t finish the container I’d purchased), I’m not sure if this again can be attributed to milling process and/or whether their flavored versions would taste better (I purchased the original, unflavored). I’ve included below a comparison of the ingredients in Shakeology Vanilla and Garden of Life RAW Meal Vanilla. Note, if you really want to compare apples to apples, you should double the Shakeology numbers – as their serving size is half that of Garden of Life’s (but then you’d be spending $10/shake!).

I also continue to look at Soylent, which is really taking shape – but they haven’t released their 1.0 spec so I am unable to provide include them in this comparison – but I hope that will change and I can update this chart within the next few weeks.

For ingredients the numbers indicate the order of the ingredients on the packaging – which is supposed to be in descending order of quantity (e.g. the first ingredient, should be the ingredient there is the most of). Please let me know if I made any mistakes or if some ingredients are the same but the two companies use different names and I’ll adjust the chart accordingly.

One final comment – Shakeology powder costs around $125 for 30 servings. Garden of Life powder costs around $70 for 28 servings. It can be a little tricky at first – you have to note that while you get more powder with Garden of Life, there are only 14 servings in a container – so you’ll need two containers to roughly equivocate Shakeology. In other words, Shakeology is around $1.50 per serving more than Garden of Life.