WEEKEND READ:The Business of Huel: From a Garage to a €1 Billion Exit

LONDON 23 August -EBM WEEKEND READ-By Nick Staunton

Julian Hearn launched Huel from his garage with two orders on its first day. A decade later it was generating £254mn in annual sales and had agreed a near-€1bn sale to Danone. Behind the powdered meals is a more interesting story about direct-to-consumer economics, founder discipline and how challenger brands become valuable to the giants they set out to disrupt.

Two orders and a garage in Buckinghamshire

When Huel went live on June 17 2015, there was no launch-day surge. Julian Hearn has recalled that the company received two orders. He printed the labels, packed the boxes himself and drove them to the post office. He did not even own a tape gun. The product was being stored in his garage, and Hearn was simultaneously marketer, warehouse worker, customer-service department and founder. He posted links on forums, emailed early customers to ask why they had bought and, on occasion, hand-delivered local orders to understand them better. It is difficult to reconcile that beginning with the business Huel has since become: more than 600mn meals sold, operations stretching across Britain, continental Europe and the US, and annual revenue of £254mn.

Hearn, however, was not an inexperienced founder. He had spent much of his career in marketing, including work connected with Tesco, Waitrose and Starbucks, before putting £1,500 into an online voucher-code company called Mash Up Media in 2008. Within three years it was producing more than £2.5mn of annual profit, and Hearn sold it to Internet Brands in 2011. He could, by his own account, have retired. Instead he began experimenting with Bodyhack, a health business built around detailed nutritional programmes. The problem was obvious: precisely measuring meals might work on paper, but it was impractical for somebody in an office, on a building site or driving a taxi. Hearn’s eventual insight was that the measurement should be done before the food reached the customer. He brought in registered nutritionist James Collier to formulate what became Huel — “human fuel”.

Selling efficiency rather than food

Huel’s early proposition was almost deliberately unromantic. It combined protein, carbohydrates, fats, fibre and essential vitamins and minerals in a plant-based powder that could be prepared quickly and stored for long periods. The company was careful not to position itself simply as another protein shake or dieting product. It called Huel “complete food”. What it was really selling was time.

That distinction proved important. Traditional food companies compete heavily on taste, packaging, shelf position and habit. Huel inserted itself into a different part of the consumer’s calculation: the occasions when preparing a conventional meal felt inefficient. It arrived at the same moment that subscription commerce, online fitness culture and digitally native challenger brands were beginning to undermine established consumer businesses. The food itself was only part of the model. The more consequential decision was to sell it directly through Huel’s own website.

The economics of going direct

Direct-to-consumer distribution gave Huel advantages that were unusual for a young food company. It did not initially need to persuade supermarket buyers to provide shelf space, nor surrender control of the customer relationship to a retailer. The company knew who was buying, what they ordered, when they reordered and how they responded to changes in products or marketing. Huel could test advertising digitally, change its website rapidly and communicate directly with customers through its own forum. Those customers became “Hueligans”, providing both loyalty and a steady stream of product feedback.

This was the architecture on which many of the most successful digital consumer companies of the period were built. Owning the customer relationship could improve margins, but more importantly it produced data and repeat purchasing. As European ecommerce expanded and consumers became more comfortable buying directly from brands, Huel had already spent years learning how to turn digital attention into recurring revenue. It was a capability that Danone would later explicitly identify as one of the reasons Huel was attractive. Danone described the company’s digital execution and direct-to-consumer operation as among its strongest assets.

The founder who knew when to stop being chief executive

Perhaps the most consequential decision Hearn made came after Huel had reached about £9mn in revenue. Rather than assuming that founding the company entitled him to run it indefinitely, he concluded that he was becoming an obstacle to its next stage of growth. HR, finance, legal work and administration were occupying his time, while the brand and marketing work in which he believed he added most value was being neglected.

Hearn made a list of companies he admired, searched for executives who had managed businesses at the stage Huel was approaching and contacted James McMaster. McMaster became chief executive in 2017. Hearn moved towards the founder and chief marketing role. The distinction mattered: one concentrated on the identity and demand engine of the company; the other built the organisation capable of handling increasing scale. Revenue subsequently moved from £9mn to more than £200mn. It is an unusually clear example of a founder understanding that professionalisation does not necessarily mean losing control; sometimes it is what preserves the founder’s creation.

From internet brand to supermarket product

The second transformation was physical retail. Huel’s early success had come from avoiding supermarkets, but remaining purely online would eventually have limited its addressable market. Ready-to-drink Huel made the product easier to understand on a shop shelf, and the company began moving into mainstream retail. Powders were followed by bottled meals, Black Edition, Hot & Savoury, protein products, bars and supplements. In the US it expanded into Target, Costco, Whole Foods, GNC and Sprouts.

This omnichannel shift is important because Huel did not abandon direct-to-consumer economics when it entered retail. Instead it layered retail reach on top of an existing digital customer base. Britain remained its largest market, with latest annual sales rising 26.5 per cent to £139.3mn, while US turnover increased 12.4 per cent to £75.4mn. Huel said it was available in more than 17,000 UK stores and more than 100,000 stocking points. The result was a company benefiting from both the scale of conventional retail and the customer knowledge of ecommerce — precisely the hybrid model becoming increasingly important as British brands look for new ways to reach consumers at home and across Europe.

Turning growth into profit

Many consumer start-ups can buy revenue. Fewer demonstrate that the revenue is economically worthwhile. Huel’s latest financial year strengthened its negotiating position because the company was doing both. Revenue reached £254mn, up 19 per cent, while pre-tax profit increased 40 per cent to £19.4mn. More than 600mn meals had been sold over its first decade. The business had also taken relatively little institutional capital compared with many companies of similar scale.

Its first major outside funding arrived only in 2018, after Hearn had bootstrapped Huel to roughly a £40mn annual revenue run-rate. Highland Europe invested £20mn at a valuation of about £220mn. The company later raised another round at a substantially higher valuation, bringing in investors including Idris and Sabrina Elba. By then Huel was no longer merely an ecommerce experiment. It was becoming the sort of profitable, internationally recognisable consumer platform that large strategic buyers find difficult to reproduce internally. That trajectory resembles a wider pattern in European growth companies: once a challenger achieves both scale and an entrenched customer community, incumbents face a choice between competing with it and buying it. Vinted’s rise from European disruptor to multibillion-euro retail force demonstrates the same shift in bargaining power, even in a very different market.

Why Danone paid close to €1bn

In March 2026, Danone agreed to acquire Huel in a transaction reported at close to €1bn. The precise story of who first approached whom has not been publicly disclosed, and there is little value in manufacturing a dramatic takeover narrative where none has been established. The strategic logic is more revealing. Danone is buying a younger consumer demographic, a fast-growing complete-nutrition category, a powerful digital marketing operation, a direct customer relationship and a brand with substantial room for international expansion. Huel, in return, gets something expensive and slow to build: Danone’s global manufacturing infrastructure, R&D capabilities and distribution across more than 120 markets.

For Danone, the acquisition also illustrates the evolution of a company whose relationship with growth, sustainability and shareholder returns has not always been straightforward. EBM previously examined the boardroom battle that removed former Danone chief Emmanuel Faber after investors questioned whether the group was balancing purpose with financial performance. Under Antoine de Saint-Affrique, Danone has pursued a more disciplined portfolio strategy. Huel fits neatly into it: functional nutrition, premium positioning, strong growth and capabilities Danone itself admits it does not possess to the same degree, notably direct-to-consumer marketing and community management.

The £1bn lesson

The UK Competition and Markets Authority cleared the proposed acquisition in August, removing the principal British regulatory obstacle to the deal. Huel’s journey towards a near-€1bn exit therefore completes one of the more unusual British consumer-business stories of the past decade: from two orders and boxes packed in a Buckinghamshire garage to becoming sufficiently valuable that one of the world’s largest food groups decided buying it was preferable to building an equivalent itself.

The lesson is not that powdered meals were a hidden gold mine. Huel succeeded because several decisions compounded: solve a specific consumer inconvenience, own the customer relationship, build community before chasing mass distribution, professionalise management before the founder became a bottleneck, and enter retail only after the brand already had demand. Danone is ostensibly paying close to €1bn for nutrition products. What it is really buying is the decade of consumer behaviour, brand equity, digital capability and organisational learning that sits behind them.

The powder was always the easiest part to copy. The business around it was not.