Huel dwarfs Soylent through subscription and retail
$315M/year Soylent for the UK
Huel won by turning meal replacement from a niche hacker product into a repeat grocery habit. Soylent proved people would drink complete meals, but Huel built the broader machine, a UK first brand, powders and ready to drink meals that fit everyday lunch routines, a DTC subscription engine, and a retail footprint that now stretches across 25,000 plus stores. That combination let Huel reach about $335M in trailing revenue by July 2025, while Soylent peaked around $75M in 2022 and then lost momentum after its 2023 sale to Starco.
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Huel matched the market it entered. In the UK, replacing lunch with porridge like powder or a bottled meal was easier to normalize than Soylent's original Silicon Valley pitch of engineering away food. Huel also kept more than half of revenue anchored in its home market as of 2024, which gave it a dense base for word of mouth, referrals, and retail sell through.
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The channel mix is the clearest operating difference. Huel started with subscriptions, then layered on supermarkets, Target, and GNC, with supermarket sales already 33% of its $140M UK revenue. Soylent moved heavily into US retail, but under Starco the brand became more exposed to lower margin wholesale and more uneven shelf presence, even as Starco promoted Walmart, Kroger, Publix, and Meijer rollouts in 2024.
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The gap matters because this category now rewards brands that behave like modern protein food companies, not just functional beverages. Huel sits closer to a scaled food brand with healthy gross margins, operating profit, and multiple form factors, while smaller peers like YFood and Jimmy Joy remained regional and Soylent stayed narrower in both geography and brand meaning.
From here, the leaders in complete nutrition are likely to look less like supplements and more like high protein everyday food brands. Huel has already crossed that line, and Danone's ownership should push it further into mainstream retail, more formats, and more countries, widening the gap with Soylent unless Soylent rebuilds both distribution consistency and brand identity from the ground up.