Power powder Huel gets £20m fuel boost to keep up growth
Huel, the ‘nutritionally complete’ food that aims to replace a regular diet with an all-in-one powdered meal, has raised £20m in investment to continue its rapid growth.
In UK-based Huel’s first external investment since its launch in 2015, tech investor Highland Europe gave the money to power the powder’s international advance.
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Huel has sold 25 million meals across 80 countries, and has staff in the UK, US and Germany.
The food company’s co-founder, Julian Hearn, said the deal with Highland provided “the means and a wealth of experience to scale Huel into a global leader.”
“These developments present a really exciting time for Huel and the ‘complete food’ category in general. We expect further innovation will follow as a consequence soon,” said Hearn.
Huel has currently been marketed at people who are busy but want to eat “complete” meals with high nutritional value. The company has global ambitions of becoming the “food of the future”, however, claiming it is “offering a sustainable solution for the current food supply chain”.
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Earlier this year, Huel – which takes it name from “human” and “fuel” – said it had a turnover of £14m in 2017. It is sold either unflavoured or vanilla flavour, is made up of oats, brown rice protein, ground flaxseed, pea protein, and various other vitamins and minerals.
Its rivals include US-startup Soylent, which was withdrawn from Canada in 2017 after the country’s food inspection agency said it failed to meet “meal replacement” standards.