Feb 27, 2026
HUEL
Complete nutrition company Huel has expanded beyond its core meal replacement offering with the September 2025 launch of Daily Greens Ready-to-Drink, a lightly sparkling supergreens beverage available in Apple, Cucumber & Mint; Peach & Hibiscus; and Blueberry, Lemon & Thyme.
These drinks target busy professionals, fitness enthusiasts, and health-conscious consumers who want drinks that taste great but also do something good for them. The RTD cans deliver just 25 calories per can with 42 vitamins, minerals and superfoods with adaptogens and 4g of dietary fibre Beverage Daily, creating a new category in the daily greens market.
The powder version launched in 2024 showed strong demand, prompting the convenient RTD format to capture on-the-go consumption occasions and retail impulse purchases. Huel operates a hybrid B2C model with direct-to-consumer subscriptions and retail distribution across 25,000 locations globally HardTank.
Simply put Huel is a success story. It has taken just under ten years to move from an idea to revenue above £200m. Kudos! Building a successful and sustainable brand is hard. All categories are competitive and challenging, having a good idea and launching, usually with finite resources and limited budget, is only the first part of a marathon journey. Sadly, most fail.
Huel is well past its start phase, but their journey highlights why branding, and the brand model, has been key to their, and other entrepreneurial, success narratives.
Central to this is that they started with the idea of building a brand, not just selling some products. As the Founder, Julian Hearn says, ‘I wanted to create something I was proud of.’ He had a set of values, a single-minded vision and created a team to build a brand – distinctive modern identity; challenger mindset; focus on quality; innovation (in new products, packaging and in early adoption of digital marketing); underpinned by investment in marketing – to deliver it. We are sure there were a few mistakes, lots of hard work and some luck along the way, but it highlights the importance of ‘unreasonable’ single-mindedness, relentless consistency and a complete commitment to the brand building model.
In fact, we would go further: the brand business model defines the only way a start-up can do what Huel has done. It is why we need to be vigilant in making the UK a great environment for launching and building brands. Without this it will be harder for the next generation of entrepreneurs to replicate what Huel has done.
