My Muscle Feast Review: 4 Years Drinking Their Whey Isolate

In this article I’ll share my experiences & opinion on three Muscle Feast products I’m very familiar with:

• Grass-fed Whey Isolate (unflavored)
• Grass-fed Micellar Casein
• Grass-Fed Whey Isolate (chocolate)

I’ve been drinking their unflavored whey isolate powder for 4+ years now.

I’ll discuss their ingredients, nutrition facts, & amino acid profiles, as well as other important features such as their manufacturing practices & product purity standards.

And I’ll compare these Muscle Feast protein powders head-to-head with those made by the biggest elephant in the fitness supplement room, Optimum Nutrition.

Last update on 2025-03-14 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Muscle Feast review summary

Muscle Feast’s grass-fed whey isolate and casein products are purer, cleaner, and have a better nutritional profile than a majority of the protein powders available these days.

These particular Muscle Feast products are very reasonably priced, considering the extra lengths the company goes to in order to maintain this higher standard.

The whey isolate product I review in this article has an excellent buyers’ satisfaction rating of 90% across the online world, with over 4,000 reviews giving it a combined 4.6⭐ rating.

Science resources included

As is my custom here on heydayDo, I will provide links to all of the relevant sports science & medical resources, clinical studies, and nutritional data used in this article.

 

Muscle Feast & me

My intro to Muscle Feast’s products came about because a few years ago I decided to give up my longtime loyalty to the protein powders made by Optimum Nutrition, and explore a cleaner option for my daily go-to whey.

I had been drinking O.N. Gold Standard whey & casein for over 15 years.

The reason I started looking for a better quality protein product was motivated by a simple health-based goal: reduce my daily intake of a product that has unwanted artificial sweeteners.

After a bit of nosing around the crowded protein powder world, Muscle Feast’s grass-fed whey isolate & casein became my new 1-2 protein punch.

You can click on the blue name or the pic to check current price or read Muscle Feast Amazon reviews.

Muscle Feast Grass-Fed Whey Isolate

(For this part of the review I’ll be looking at their unflavored powder, which is the one I drink. It comes in 4 other flavors: Mocha, Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry Cheesecake.)

Notable features

Excellent owner satisfaction

90% 4&5-star rating, 4.6⭐ from 4,000+ online reviews

 

Minimally processed

• Undenatured – means no acids or heat used;
• Cold microfiltration – means no chemical or ion exchange methods used during the separation of the pure protein from the whey by-products.

These high-quality processing methods are much different than your run-of-the-mill whey powders.

 

Very clean

Muscle Feast’s grass-fed whey isolate has none of the following things in it, unlike many mass-produced protein powders:

• artificial sweeteners or colors
• “natural” artificial flavors
• fillers or other additives
• amino spiking
• sugars or sugar alcohols
• soy
• gluten

Also, being a whey isolate almost all of the lactose has been removed, making it well-tolerated for people who have some trouble digesting milk and regular whey powders.

 

Muscle Feast Whey Isolate Nutrition facts

• 90% of each serving is protein
• Low sodium compared to other brands
• Negligible sugar & fat

 

Amino acids profile

• 5 grams of BCAAs per serving

 

Ingredients

As you can see, there are only two ingredients, whey protein isolate and sunflower lecithin.

 

Whey protein isolate

Bottom line: Purest protein source available.

* By definition, whey isolate has at least 90% protein, as fat & lactose have been removed. (1)

* Sports science has shown that weightlifting supplemented with whey isolate yields significant increases in muscle & strength. (2)

* Studies have also shown whey isolate aids muscle recovery from exercise-incurred damage. (3)

 

Sunflower lecithin

Bottom line: It’s an emulsifier added to make mixing the protein powder with liquid a lot easier.

Sunflower lecithin comes straight from nature, and is extracted from sunflower seeds. (4)

Its role in foods & drinks is to make unlike things blend together easily, which in our case refers to water and protein powder. (5)

Actually, sunflower lecithin is a popular health supplement that’s been shown by medical science to provide a few benefits:

• lower cholesterol
• improve digestion
• help breastfeeding moms
• may improve heart & brain health

Taste

Bottom line: For me, Muscle Feast’s unflavored whey isolate is very easy to drink; it tastes like watered-down skim milk.

But I find that their vanilla & chocolate flavors have too much stevia in them for my taste buds.

My taste bud disclaimers: 

1. My taste buds seem very finicky nowadays, compared to 30 or 40 years ago. I think eating real clean food for years has something to do with it, but I’m just guessing.

2. I have been drinking milk &/or milk products like whey & casein powder my entire 60+ years of life. Milk & me are tight.

3. I believe that we each have our own unique taste preferences, so my opinion about how something tastes doesn’t really matter anyways.

 

A note regarding other Muscle Feast flavors:

I started with their chocolate flavored version since I’d been drinking Optimum Nutrition’s chocolate flavored whey blend all those years.

I did not like the taste of Muscle Feast’s chocolate whey isolate, nor their Vanilla.

They use way too much stevia in it for my taste buds, and that was a couple of years after they supposedly reduced the amount of stevia in it.

I switched to unflavored and my taste buds thanked me.

 

Mix-ability

Thanks to the lecithin, this whey isolate powder mixes easily in a shaker bottle.

I gave it 5 or 6 seconds of low-energy shaking, and it was blended & clump-free.

See reviews & current price on Amazon

Muscle Feast grass-fed whey isolate summary

Muscle Feast’s unflavored grass-fed whey isolate powder is a very clean, two-ingredient product made with very good manufacturing practices.

It has excellent nutritional & amino acid profiles.

And it costs less than its whey isolate competitors, some of whom include unwanted artificial sweeteners or those darn Natural Flavors.

The unflavored version tastes good and is easy to mix too.

 

How much protein powders really cost

Quick note worth mentioning…

The best way for me to determine true prices of protein powder products is to figure out the cost per gram of actual protein in the powder, not the cost per gram of the whole powder.

Retailers typically display either:

• cost per serving (in grams)
• price per ounce

Cost per serving is not a good indicator, nor is price per ounce like Amazon shows us on product pages.

Neither of these tell you anything about how much you’re paying for protein and how much you’re paying for all the other stuff the manufacturer added.

The reason I believe this is important is because so many protein powders have things in them besides pure protein, and the amount of those things varies widely.

Some protein powders are over 90% protein by weight, others are in the 70% range…or lower.

 

How to figure out a protein powder’s protein percentage

It’s pretty easy. Let’s use the whey powders from Muscle Feast & Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard as our examples, my Muscle Feast Unflavored first.

1. On the Muscle Feast nutrition facts label, grab the serving size (24 grams) & the serving’s protein amount (21.5).
2. Divide the protein amount (21.5g) by the serving size (24g).
3. 21.5 ÷ 24 = 90%
4. So 90% of what you’re paying for is protein, 10% for the other stuff.

Now I’ll do the same thing with Optimum Nutrition.

1. Serving size 30.4 grams, protein amount 24 g.
2. 24 ÷ 30.4 = 79%
3. 79% is protein, and 21% of your money’s spent on other stuff.

79% isn’t the greatest protein percentage but it’s far from the the worst you’ll find with the biggest-selling protein powders, as you’ll see below.

This ranking is taken from my article MyProtein vs. Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard.

 

And here are some very low protein percentages for two of the most popular ready-to-drink protein shakes on the market, from my article Core Power vs. Muscle Milk.

 

Muscle Feast vs. Optimum Nutrition whey

I’ll be comparing the chocolate version of this Muscle Feast grass-fed whey isolate to the O.N. product I drank forever, their Gold Standard Double Rich Chocolate whey isolate blend.

 

Buyer ratings

Muscle Feast                 90%, 4.6⭐ – 4,000+ online reviews

Optimum Nutrition    92%, 4.7⭐ – 200,000+ online reviews

 

O.N.’s Gold Standard Whey is the biggest selling protein powder in the world, and those 200,000+ reviews are your proof.

 

Ingredients

The chocolate-flavored Muscle Feast whey isolate has just the two ingredients, while Optimum Nutrition’s has all this:

 

Things to note

• “Natural flavors” are artificial, as you may know (8)
• Artificial flavors & artificial sweeteners
• Not pure whey isolate – may cause lactose issues
• The lecithin here is soy
• Harsher production using heat, acids, chemicals

 

Nutrition Facts

 

Protein % per serving

Muscle Feast               90%

Optimum Nutrition   79%

 

Fat

Muscle Feast                      0.2 grams

Optimum Nutrition          1.5 grams

 

Carbs

Muscle Feast                    0.2 grams

Optimum Nutrition        3.0 grams

 

Amino acid profile

* Muscle Feast Whey Isolate & Optimum NutritionWhey Blend have a similar amino acid content (around ~5g of BCAAs per serving), although Optimum Nutrition doesn’t publish their amino acids profiles.

 

Taste

Compared to the clean milk taste of Muscle Feast’s unflavored whey, the O.N. powder tastes processed, given it has two artificial sweeteners in it, sucralose & acesulfame potassium.

 

But if you don’t mind artificial sweeteners, then O.N. Gold Standard is a very good choice compared to other, similarly-produced protein powders.

 

And the Optimum Nutrition chocolate whey tastes a lot better than the chocolate whey version Muscle Feast makes, due to the excessive stevia taste Muscle Feast uses that I mentioned earlier.

 

Mix-ability

Optimum Nutrition’s Gold Standard whey mixes very easily, like Muscle Feast’s powder does.

 

Cost

Again, the comparison is with cost per gram of protein, and then standardized to a 25 gram serving size.

Optimum Nutrition      $0.70 per 25g

Muscle Feast                   $0.91

 

Summary: O.N. vs Muscle Feast

* Optimum Nutrition costs less but still delivers the same amount of protein & branched-chain amino acids as Muscle Feast’s grass-fed whey isolate.

* Optimum Nutrition’s whey blend may cause issues for those who are lactose intolerant, since it is not a pure whey isolate.

* O.N.’s whey powder has artificial sweeteners and soy in it while Muscle Feast’s powder is very clean.

* Muscle Feast’s manufacturing processes are gentler on the whey than Optimum Nutrition’s. This may result in better micronutrient quality, though those things are hard to measure.

See O.N. reviews & current price

See Muscle Feast reviews & current price

 

Muscle Feast grass-fed micellar casein

For this part of the review, I’ll be looking at their unflavored casein, which is the one I used to drink.

Notable features

Very good owner satisfaction

89% 4&5-star ratings, 4.6⭐ from 300+ online reviews

(The score for unflavored is much higher than these numbers indicate. Most of the negative reviews were due to the taste of their flavored versions, and reviews of all flavors get dumped into 1 overall rating on Amazon & elsewhere.)

 

Nutrition facts

• Protein % per serving: 83%

Amino acid profile

• 4.3 grams BCAAs per serving

 

Ingredients

Just like its whey isolate sibling, this MF casein only has two ingredients:

• micellar casein
• sunflower lecithin

 

Micellar casein

Casein is sold in two forms, hydrolysate & micellar. Micellar casein is the slow-digesting form, ideal for taking at night before bed.

 

Taste

My unflavored casein tastes like milk, plain & simple, so I’m all good with that.

And like the chocolate whey isolate they make, Muscle Feast’s chocolate casein has too much stevia in it…for my taste buds anyways.

But since casein is a richer & naturally slightly sweeter milk product than whey isolate, the stevia doesn’t dominate nearly as bad…so I’m OK with it.

 

Mix-ability

For casein, this mixes really well in a shaker bottle.

Other caseins I’ve tried — including Optimum Nutrition’s — can mix in a shaker fine, but need more elbow grease for sure.

 

Muscle Feast micellar casein cost

• cost per gram of protein: 3.5¢
• cost per 25 gram serving: 88¢

 

Bottom line summary: Muscle Feast grass-fed micellar casein is another excellent protein product that’s very clean & nutrient-rich with an affordable price.

I love the unflavored version and easily recommend it.

But I dislike the flavored caseins Muscle Feast makes due to their heavy-on-the-stevia taste.

See reviews & current price on Amazon

 

Muscle Feast casein vs. Optimum Nutrition casein

For this comparison, this Muscle Feast grass-fed casein will go up against another Optimum Nutrition product I drank for years, their Gold Standard Micellar Casein with the Chocolate Supreme flavor.

 

Ingredients

Again, Muscle Feast uses only two ingredients — micellar casein & sunflower lecithin — while Optimum Nutrition has a whole lot of non-protein things in theirs, notably:

• Natural & artificial flavors
• Artificial sweetener sucralose
• Artificial sweetener acesulfame potassium
• Fillers (“Gum Blend”)
• Added salt
• Soy lecithin
• Proprietary blend called Aminogen**

**Aminogen is a mystery concoction marketed by supplement companies as an aid to protein digestion. 

Search online and you’ll see a lot of supplement sites selling Aminogen who will tell you about a research study that showed how effective it is. 

Tsk tsk. That study was run by Triarco Industries, the company that produces & markets Aminogen. (10)  😏

 

Nutrition Facts

Lots of salt

Optimum Nutrition has 280 mg of sodium in each serving of their casein.

That’s over 1200% more salt than is in Muscle Feast’s casein (280mg vs. 23mg).

 

% of protein per serving

Muscle Feast                   83%

Optimum Nutrition      70%

 

Fat

Muscle Feast                 0.5 grams

Optimum Nutrition    1.0 grams

 

Carbs

Muscle Feast                1.2 grams

Optimum Nutrition   4.0 grams

 

Amino acid profile

Like with their whey, Optimum Nutrition doesn’t publish its amino acid profile.

They simply state on the package “nearly 5 grams of BCAAs”.

Muscle Feast’s casein has 4.3g of BCAAs, so I guess we can call that a wash, given O.N.’s vagueness on the matter.

 

Taste

Like with their whey comparison, Muscle Feast’s unflavored casein tastes better to me than O.N’s casein & its artificial sweetener afterglow. 😜

But my taste buds like Optimum Nutrition’s Chocolate Supreme more than Muscle Feast’s chocolate casein product, since Muscle Feast’s stevia amount is too much for me.

 

Mix-ability

Both mix easily, though the Optimum Nutrition needs a little more energy to get it done.

This is because it’s a thicker product thanks to that gum blend filler.

 

Casein comparison summary

Bottom line: I think the Muscle Feast unflavored grass-fed micellar casein easily shows itself to be the superior protein powder in this duel.

• It’s actual protein cost is cheaper
• It delivers a higher % of protein per serving
• 30% of the O.N. serving isn’t even protein
• Too much salt in the O.N. casein
• O.N. uses several artificial ingredients

See Optimum Nutrition casein reviews & current price

See Muscle Feast casein reviews & current price

 

Wrapping Up

Related protein powder articles here on heydayDo

The Hunt For The Best Optimum Nutrition Flavor

MyProtein Impact Whey vs. Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard

Best Protein Powders Without Artificial Sweeteners

I hope that my in-depth look at Muscle Feast’s grass-fed whey isolate & micellar casein protein powders is useful to you, and that the comparisons to similar products from Optimum Nutrition is helpful too.

I wish you well on your fitness journey.

– greg