In a small test kitchen, Tim Urch has laid out a feast of nutritionally complete liquid food. Beakers of slightly different shades of beige stand in line on a counter, with plastic shot glasses ready for sampling.
“That’s our new vanilla,” he says, pouring a small measure of one of the shakes. “What do you think of that? Is it quite sweet, is it not sweet enough?”
Urch is community manager at Huel, a British company that makes meals you can drink. Huel claims that a portion of its powdered food, shaken with water, contains all the nutrients the human body needs, perfectly balanced for optimal nutrition. As well as its powder, it makes a Huel Bar, which is the same idea in solid form, and recently launched Huel Granola. Next, it plans to launch a ready to drink version of its shake, pre-mixed and packaged to slurp on the go. “Sometimes you just want something in your bag that you could pull out as and when,” says Huel founder Julian Hearn.
Hearn founded Huel after starting a new fitness regime for a previous project he called Bodyhack. He had found a diet that really worked for him, but it involved making food from scratch and carefully weighing out all the ingredients. Seeing his results, his friends were keen to copy the diet but thought it was too much faff. “It made me think, how do I make this easier for people, more frictionless?” he says.
He was using protein shakes as part of his meal plan and thought it would be great to make a similarly convenient product that contained all of the nutrients, so it could stand alone as a “complete” food. He met James Collier, Huel’s head of nutrition, in 2014, and they launched Huel in 2015. “Huel is nutrition first and taste second,” he says. “In the early days, Huel was pretty much made on a spreadsheet.”
The main ingredient of Huel is oats, and it also contains pea protein, flax seeds and brown rice protein. As well as balancing macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein, fat, fibre), it contains micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) in proportion to recommended daily intake guidelines. All Huel products are vegan.
In the test kitchen at Huel’s headquarters in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, Urch shows off a range of new products. Currently, Huel offers its powder in unflavoured, original and vanilla. The original is also vanilla but tastes more sweet and fake. “The vanilla flavour wasn’t quite vanilla-y enough,” says Urch.
He also reveals a new “super top secret” coffee flavour. Many in the Huel community currently add instant coffee or a shot of espresso to their shake, he says, so they wanted to make a pre-blended coffee version. Mixed with the vanilla, it tastes pleasant, and not a million miles away from a vanilla Frappuccino. Many Huel users make up their own recipes based around the powder and share them on the Huel website’s forums. Some also experiment with texture. Made to the instructions, Huel is quite bitty, which some people don’t like. Prepare it in advance and leave it in the fridge, however, and it takes on a smoother consistency.
One thing the team hasn’t quite cracked yet, says Hearn, is a savoury flavour – though not for lack of trying. A tomato soup recipe only succeeded in stinking out the office, and the most agreeable savoury attempt so far is a peanut curry or satay recipe. Of the flavour sachets Huel sells to mix in with its powder, Hearn says the matcha tea is the least sweet.
Other upcoming launches include a chocolate-orange flavoured Huel Bar and the ready-to-drink product. Making a ready-to-drink version of Huel, explains Hearn, is significantly more difficult than the powder. “The beauty of powder is that there's no liquid, which means bacteria can't survive, which means that the shelf life is very long,” he says. Adding water immediately brings new challenges to the production process. For example, a liquid product needs heat treating, which can degrade some vitamins and minerals. Hearn says that Huel now has a formula it’s happy with and is currently looking for a manufacturer who has the required expertise and availability to make it.
The idea for the bottled product, says Huel CEO James McMaster, came from the Huel community; in feedback surveys many people asked for a pre-mixed version they could take on the go. The company plans to launch several different flavours in a 500ml bottle and will initially sell the drink through its website, with the potential to expand to retail environments at a later date.
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Huel isn’t the only company trying to disrupt mealtimes; other companies, such as US-based Soylent, sell similar all-in-one solutions. But the idea of a complete food is by no means new, says Hearn. He points to pottage, a coarse stew that many poor people lived off in the medieval ages. “We’ve been so used to food becoming almost an art form by now, people forget that for most of human history it never was treated that way,” he says. “It was fundamentally about getting nutrition and getting it as conveniently as possible.”
With Huel, he aims to go back to basics; the name itself is a portmanteau of “human” and “fuel”. “We wanted to strip it back to what the actual purpose of food is – to provide nutrition,” he says. ”People are very focused on taste now – does it taste good? That is not the primary purpose of food.”
Most people, says Urch, have Huel for breakfast or lunch. “It’s not about replacing your lovely meals with your family,” he says. “It’s when you end up spending eight quid on a Pret panini and coffee purely out of necessity.”
Huel has sold a total of 12 million meals so far and has offices in LA and Berlin as well as Aylesbury. Hearn originally self-funded the company with money he made from selling a previous venture that had nothing to do with food or fitness, promotionalcodes.org.uk. “That business was very successful in terms of cash, but it wasn’t something I was particularly proud of,” he says. The company is now considering looking for external investment, whether through venture capital or crowdfunding, to continue its expansion. “This is going to be a big category and there’ll be big guns come with very deep pockets and we don’t want to be overtaken, “ says Hearn.
For now, he says that he views other companies offering complete food solutions as allies, not competitors. “Our true competition really is the existing solution, which is a sandwich for lunchtime and a cereal or toast for breakfast.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
