Huel maturing from hypergrowth startup

The deceleration shows Huel has crossed from startup style land grab into scaled consumer brand building, where adding each next dollar of sales depends less on viral new customer growth and more on repeat buying, retail shelf expansion, and supply chain execution. Revenue rose from about $157M in 2021 to $200M in 2022, $248M in 2023, and $299M in 2024, while growth stepped down from roughly 57% to 27%, 24%, and 21%, even as the business turned profitable in 2023 and expanded margins in 2024.1 2 3

• Early Huel scaled like a classic D2C breakout, with revenue jumping from about $95M in 2020 to $157M in 2021 as online acquisition and a simple recurring product set worked. The later slowdown is what usually happens once the easy online audience is largely captured and growth shifts to broader, slower retail distribution.1 2
• The slower growth does not mean weakening demand. In 2024 Huel more than doubled retail distribution to 25,000 plus stores globally, reached about 70% of UK supermarkets, and built a UK business with supermarket sales at more than one third of local revenue. That mix is typically lower velocity but more durable than pure D2C growth.1
• Compared with peers, Huel looks less like Soylent's boom and bust curve and more like a scaled food brand maturing into efficiency. Huel at about $335M trailing revenue in July 2025 was still growing 22% year over year, while also operating around 60% gross margin and about 10% EBITDA margin, far ahead of what most meal replacement brands sustained at scale.3

From here, Huel's next phase is likely to look more like a large packaged food company than a hypergrowth ecommerce startup. Growth should come from deeper US penetration, more shelf space, and margin gains from owned manufacturing, which means a slightly slower top line can still produce a meaningfully more valuable business over time.1 3