As I just opened my 10th 5lbs container, I'll leave a review in the occasion of the milestone. mostly, what motivated me to write a review was the 9th container that came with a "defective" product and upset a lot my patience, took a toll on my diet and deeply jeopardized the trust on the brand (will be explained below).THE NEEDS:having to take protein shakes at least twice a day, 7 days a week, flavor is the Achilles heel of all of them. Almost all whey protein brands and flavors available on the market have a decent to delicious flavor in my opinion, apart from just a few minor exceptions that tastes awful. but drinking it consistently at least twice a day, every single day for years in a row changes the perspective on flavor. a product that is delicious may quickly start to saturate the palate and turn into an unbearable experience. after hopping through several flavors from several brands, I landed first on Isopure brand, which I consumed roughly 40lbs along the time. it's a great product for sure.at a given moment in my life, my need have changed and I was forced to keep 24/7 pristine plain natural blood work lab results in order to constantly prove 100% perfect natural health condition (for reasons that I do not want/need to disclose here). at this point, keep taking Isopure products was completely out of consideration as all of them are enriched with high levels of several vitamins and minerals, which makes it a great product, but still on the most expensive side of the whey available in the market and no longer suitable for my needs, as excessive vitamins and minerals would be caught and fail my blood work. just like the vitamins and minerals, I had to stop with creatine and beta-alanine (that mistakenly fails blood work for kidney and liver malfunction, respectively). so on my new diet journey I had to find a new whey protein that was good enough, without any added vitamins and minerals, cost effective and the most important, tasty and capable of resisting the test of time. after running through several brands again, I found out that most supermarket branded whey proteins (e.g. walmart, wegmans, giant, aldi, hy-vee) are on the cheapest side of the wheys, usually not enriched with anything and tasty, but only wegmans passed the test of time keeping tasty after several shakes over months. but I also needed to have a reliable source of whey on the contiguous 48 states, as I needed to travel nationwide constantly and wegmans is pretty much a wealthy neighborhood upper east coast chain, not available in the rest of the country. so I was left with anything sold online that could be shipped nationwide and my 1st source was amazon.on my journey through amazon whey proteins, I finally landed on Nutricost vanilla flavored. Nutricost is noticeably one of the cheapest supplements brand in the market awarding 1st place for most of their products and 2nd or 3rd place loosing only for a minimal fraction of pennies. their whey is good enough for non professional athletes like me, with absolutely no addition of vitamins and minerals, with an amazing flavor that on the edge of 50lbs already consumed has proven its excellence. their vanilla flavor combines very well with water, milk, breakfast cereals, cake mixes and almost every fruit you could name to prepare a smoothie on a blender (being my favorites the mango and peach smoothies). not the easiest to mix on water or milk if you only have a spoon or shake, but for sure fairly easy. and when compared to the price of the brands with vitamins and minerals enriched whey proteins (e.g. Isopure), Nutricost is still the best from the point of view that you can purchase any vitamins and minerals supplement available on the market, in addition to the "plain" Nutricost whey protein, that would better fit your supplementation needs and still keep it cheaper than buying a whey already enriched that hardly will suit your supplementation needs.THE INFAMOUS 9TH CONTAINER:Nutricost's traditional Vanilla flavor is supposed to be sweetened. the only unsweetened whey protein that Nutricost sells is also unflavored (that I never bought). but I received as my 9th 5lb container an unsweetened Vanilla flavored whey protein. at that time I though "is this a defective batch or their new formula from now on?" and this doubt wasn't answered till I've ordered the 10th container and find out that it came sweetened again. and the toll the unsweetened whey took on me was gaining 8lbs of weight in 1 month as I had to sweeten 5lbs of whey with sugar, making me to drink almost 2 years worth of sugar in a single month, as I wasn't willing to reduce the respective calories on the rest of my already very restrictive diet. I could've used artificial 0 cal sweeteners for sure, but at the risk of unintentionally adding too much artificial sweetener and make it taste like battery acid, I preferred to be safe with sugar than sorry with sweetener. it was for sure disappointing, to say the least. this experience put a very big concern about Nutricost quality control and honesty, given that one of their containers came "defective" but the 8th, 9th and 10th containers are all marked with the same expiration date 09/2026 and same LOT#23091348, even coming from 3 different Amazon warehouses (nearby Baltimore MD, Daytona Beach FL and Lincoln NE), bought each one in different months and clearly having a different batch on the 9th container. if Nutricost ever have interest on find out what happened, I kept the 8th, 9th and 10th containers, being the 8th empty and contaminated with both 8th and 9th container products, the 9th with 3-4 scoops of leftover preserved and not mixed/contaminated, and the 10th full (opened 1h ago for taste testing). if Nutricost or any representative ever get in touch I'll update it here, if not updated is because I didn't get contacted.