Chocolate is the flavor most people pick first. Cocoa is loud enough to hide a weak sweetener or a flat texture for the first few shakes. By the second week you can taste what it was hiding, and the tub either keeps getting scooped or it doesn't. We make a chocolate powder ourselves, so these answers come from the bench as much as from the cupboard.
A good chocolate protein powder tastes like cocoa and feels smooth when you swallow. Most disappointing tubs fail on one of those two. Either the sweetness hangs around after the chocolate has gone, or the texture leaves a dry film behind.
Try it with whatever is in your cupboard right now. Make one shake, take a sip, then wait ten seconds. Whatever is still on your tongue at ten seconds is what you will be living with on day twenty. A customer who bought a second pouch for a friend described the flavor we were after: "Chocolatey, satisfying but still light some how. Just right for an afternoon snack!"
Try It Yourself
The sweetener is usually working harder than the cocoa. A sweetener with a flavor of its own sits on top of the chocolate and lingers after you swallow, and that lingering sweetness is what most people mean when they call a powder artificial. Check the sweetener line before you check the flavor name.
If a powder starts like candy and finishes like a lab, flip the tub over and read what is sweetening it. Ours is allulose and monk fruit, at 0g total sugar and 0g added sugar in both flavors, with no sugar alcohol in the bag.
Pour the liquid into the glass or shaker first, then add the scoop on top. Powder dropped into an empty cup packs into the bottom corner, and those clumps are hard to break up afterward. Stir or shake right away, then give it a few seconds to settle before you drink.
With NØRSE CØDE you can skip all that. We built SmoothBlend so it dissolves in whatever you are pouring, hot or cold, with a spoon and no blender. Stir it into the coffee you already made, or into water, milk or oat milk.
Milk makes a richer, rounder drink and water makes a lighter one. Both are fine, so pick by what you want from the glass. Water is also the harder test, because there is no fat in it to cover for a thin flavor.
Fill one glass with water and one with the milk or oat milk already in your fridge, use the same scoop in each, and drink the water one first. If you like it there, it will work any way you pour it, and the milk glass becomes the treat on the days you want chocolate milk. If you only like it in milk, the milk is doing the work. Better to find that out with one glass than with a whole tub.
Anything wet and thick takes a scoop: oatmeal, yogurt, a smoothie, overnight oats. Stir it in and the chocolate flavor comes along with it. It turns a plain breakfast into a chocolate one without a second pan or a second dish.
One customer wrote: "Love the chocolate flavor! Anxious to try the Vanilla. Really like the clean ingredients, mixes well with milk, yogurt, fruit, etc. I use it right after working out at the gym and with my morning yogurt/berries/granola." Yogurt is thicker than a shake, so start with half a scoop the first time. With less liquid around it the chocolate comes through stronger, and you can add the rest once you know how you like it.
It depends on the powder and on you, and the label is the first place to look. Long ingredient lists with gums, fillers and sugar alcohols give your stomach more to deal with than a short one does. Whatever you buy, start with one scoop for a few days and see how you feel.
Our label is short on purpose: only 9 natural ingredients, no artificial sweeteners, gums, or fillers, and prebiotic acacia fiber in the blend. Here is what one customer wrote about the chocolate: "This is the first plant protein powder I've tried that doesn't make me gassy or bloated. The chocolate tastes great and I drink it almost every day and still love it." That is one customer's experience. Your few days with it will tell you more.
Start with chocolate if you mostly drink it by itself or with milk. Start with vanilla if it is going into fruit, coffee or oatmeal. Both flavors have 20g of protein per serving and the same short label, so the choice only depends on what else is in the cup.
If you want to see what is in the bag and why, the ingredient page goes through it line by line. For the other half of this choice, we wrote a guide to the best vanilla protein powder.
Like chocolate, with a smooth finish and nothing lingering behind it. We spent over a thousand iterations across two years getting there, and in a blind taste test more people chose NØRSE CØDE than Orgain and a leading whey protein combined.
A customer who tried it after a flyer sat on their counter for a year put it this way: "It's smooth, clean, and tastes great." Most of our iterations went into the smooth part. The pea, rice and barley blend and the acacia fiber give it body without a gum, and we make every bag ourselves in our own facility in Petaluma, California. If you are still choosing between brands, our guide to the best protein powder lays out how we would pick.
A bag of ours is 14 servings, so one scoop a day gets you through about two weeks. If the last scoop tastes different from the first, send the bag back. The 60-day money-back guarantee has no questions attached.
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Backed by a 60-day money-back guarantee. If it is not the smoothest protein you have had, send it back.
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