Huel turned meal replacements mainstream

Huel won by turning meal replacement from a niche utility product into an everyday food brand people could openly buy, talk about, and build a routine around. Earlier products like Ensure and Boost lived in medical and senior nutrition aisles, and Soylent carried a coder efficiency vibe. Huel instead packaged complete nutrition as normal lunch for busy professionals, with powders, shakes, bars, and hot meals sold through subscriptions and supermarkets, which made the category feel less clinical and less subcultural.

• The product framing mattered as much as the formula. Huel was founded in 2015 around vegan, nutritionally complete food, not a supplement. That let it sit closer to porridge, ready meals, and grab and go lunch than to elderly nutrition drinks.
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• The brand widened the category beyond early adopters. Soylent still presents itself as a complete meal built around convenience and affordability, but its brand history is closely tied to tech worker use cases. Huel was built for a broader consumer identity from the start.
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• That mainstream positioning translated into scale. Huel reached an estimated $335M in revenue by July 2025 and expanded into 25,000 plus retail locations globally, while Soylent peaked much smaller and later pulled back from lower margin retail distribution.
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Going forward, the winning companies in complete nutrition will look less like supplements and more like modern food brands. Huel has already shown the playbook, broad product range, habitual use case, retail presence, and brand language that fits ordinary consumers, which is why larger food companies now see the category as a real consumer packaged goods platform.