After a short hiatus, due to the start of the new school year and all that entails I am back with a new review of an items that might be a little bit more relevant considering the time period. This is the time of year when bottled protein drinks and smoothies are life. Considering our household, with one growing teen and a high school athlete we are always willing to try out something else to help supplement appetites, and if it can help be more balanced or to balance out their diets overall theb it's a plus. So with that we decided to give the Koia Vanilla Bean Protein Drink a try.
I spotted this in Wegmans which has a nice sized selection of these kinds of drinks as well as cold soups in the dairy case adjacent to the milk. While I'm not a cold soup and bone broth person so I highly doubt I'll be trying those, looking at the plant based smoothies and milk alternatives and trying them out is something that we can do in my house hold. The thing about Koia is of course the health benefits. Their drinks are Vegan with plant based protein and and almond milk. For people who can't have Soy, none of that here so it's definitely a sort of niche product. The Vanilla Bean flavor also has 18g of protein.
If you're like me and not the biggest fan of these types of drinks you might have some trepidation about drinking the Koia protein drink, but opening it up, it smells like a regular vanilla milkshake which is a good thing. One of the things that can turn you off of a specialized drink like this is that they can smell like a petri dish almost. Koia avoids this easily and both of my kids dived right in without pausing like they normally do. The texture is smooth and while it does have a slight powdery protein feel to it, it is nowhere near as bad as some of the drinks and mixes I've had in the past.
Now the color isn't the best but it's not going to turn you off of it. I mean it's a vanilla bean smoothie. The chocolate does look much more appealing however. The one negative I had was the pure cane sugar/monkfruit sweetener combination. I pretty much can say I hate pure cane sugar and this one has a serious after taste with it. If it weren't for that I would have polished it off. That's unfortunate because at 4.99 for one 12 ounce single serving bottle, this isn't cheap. However, if you do suffer from some food allergies this might be a viable protein drink option for you.
No protein drink is going to give you everything that you want so there are plenty of options out there to cover what your specific needs are. I've never had a truly "healthy" one that I felt like tasted so awesome I didn't notice the ingredients that gave benefits or weren't included for health reasons, but this one could have been very close. If you don't mind pure cane sugar, this could be a go-to for you, especially if you're trying to avoid Soy. If you don't like it though, this probably won't make the cut for you unfortunately so I will be giving two ratings.
Rating: If you like Pure Cane Sugar 4/5
If you don't like Pure Cane Sugar 2/5