A complaint

The consistency and effort of chewing required seem to differ among the H&S product line-up
However we can all agree that there is not much chewing required to consume it or at least have a low bite force requirement to consume.

I know that Huel’s main market is intended towards having a quick and healthy meal replacement shake and they often justify their exorbitant prices by comparing it to those other products and claim that Huel is healthier and that they do not recommend consuming it 100%.
However most of those foods are not a milk-shake they are real foods on which you can chew and enjoy and not just a shake that you have to chug down.
Having Huel in your diet only once or twice would actually make it more difficult to eat a balanced diet because you need to compose/find a nutrionally complete diet with Huel once or twice within it however if you follow the dietary recommendations presented by government agencies then all this complex work has already been done in advance and you can reap the benefits of a quick-to-grab healthy diet plan.

I also do find it disappointing that fear of scrutiny or mockery prevents Huel from innovation/advancement and the continuation of their main fluid diet.

The only way I can see Huel working is having it as means of losing weight as you can easily keep track of the calories however once said weight is lost most people will want to go back to real delicious foods with lots of different flavours and variety.

Maybe that is a good suggestion. Huel can look at pet foods and copy product ideas in the same fashion all pet food brands like cat food do. One has fish, the other beef and yet another has a chicken dish. that way they offer variety through different combinations of ingredients ensuring you get different nutrients that are not always present in one diet that may be nutrionally complete.
I think that nobody claims that we know everything about nutrition and a few test subjects using Huel for a few weeks is not all a quality study. You need at least a few thousand participants on a nutrionally complete meal over decades and keep record of their lifespan and other health and lifestyle factors.

Think about phytonutrients and flavonoids or antioxidants and possibly other substances that we have yet to discover that might play a role in nutrition and food.

I also would really like to see Huel add chocolade with a high cocao content 70% min. 100% preferred to their foods as it contains a great range of antioxidants and is one of the most nutritious foods in existence.

I really would like to see meat flavoured options in Huel.
Something like chicken, beef, sheep, goat etc and have a gravy like consistency and taste.

Did you just make that up?

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I have powder for when I’m going to be out on my own all day (vegan-ish and weird food intolerances) and H&S at home when I can’t be bothered cooking. Three or four times a week, tops. I don’t consider what else I have to eat to get a balanced diet anymore than I think about such things with any other meal.

Maybe it’s because my diet is 70% stews and rice anyway, but I find H&S perfectly chewy. I guess it being only a small part of my diet means I do have food I chew so I’m not “missing out” on an experience.

Huel themselves don’t recommend going 100%, say least to being with. So, er… eat a carrot? I dunno.

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I kindly ask you to re-read the text quoted as you misunderstood what I have written.

Huel recommends not replacing 100% of your diet with Huel.
On the days you do not cook you are effectively only eating Huel 100% on those days hence not what Huel recommends.

What they do recommend is replacing one or two meals a day with Huel and eating traditional food for dinner (and lunch).

So depending on how many meals you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.
They would only recommend replacing one or two meals i.e. breakfast and/lunch usually.

I hope this clarified it, from here on you can re-read my written message.

Also the same holds true for the rest of your arguments all are formed on not haven read my message and understood it correctly.

No, I have not.

As you can see the fear of being mocked and/or scrutinized prevents them from innovation and developing new products and they actively avoid developing new products and stick to their well-known earning products, I assume to avoid risk.

Hence when someone is not willing to innovate they come up with non-arguments. Perhaps someone else can do it, perhaps you can chew a carrot are all bad arguments and not worth responding to.
Why invent cars when you have horses?
Why go to space when we can stay on earth? Etc.
Why have Huel when you can eat traditional foods?

I don’t have H&S for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks :rofl:

I kindly ask you to reread what I wrote because you’ve misunderstood it.

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There’s nothing there that indicated a fear of being mocked. Just a bit of humour. The over-riding sentiment of the post is that it’s probably not going to be bought by many people compared to the cost of R&D.

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Huel powder is the innovation and if anything H&S is a far more sensible or mainstream proposition - along the lines of a healthy pot noodle / cupasoup. It just comes in a sack rather than a single portion.

If it was in single serve pots it’s a far better march for supermarket shelves than any other product they make.

I was referring to that they did not want to proceed with a kibble like product due to fear of scrutiny, memes and brand face loss.

That is always the case, the smaller it is the more you can charge, however why do we have pet food that comes in massive bags of tens of kilos and a single Huel bag lasts about 3.5 days if you consume 2000 kcal/day hence this is a way to make more profit and deprive the customers of bulk discount.
You get more discount for having a subscription and get a higher discount for having more bags in it.
Still since the shelflife is 12 months why are there not bags of Huel worth more than 3.5 days?
There are dog food bags of 15 kg perhaps even more.

I do not like how people here are so defensive of Huel as a company. You like a company and get defensive about it.
However this same exact behavior makes the company able to get away with such marketing schemes which should be less the case in the 21st century with how customers are becoming increasingly aware of companies and trying to combat injustice.
As customers you should be able to criticise a company and ask for improvement.

This is why I dislike the idea of Huel dominating the market as the sole top brand.
It basically is by the far largest company out there and does not have a lot of competitors it also has a monopoly hence innovation and improvement might be impeded or you get such practices of super high prices for small bags.
This is why when phone companies compete the phones get better and prices drop hence customers benefit.

No, you don’t like people who have a different opinion to you. Huel aren’t ready to make a kibble at the moment because they don’t think it’s profitable. That’s it. Nothing more or less.

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That’s not true in the slightest. Huel are deservedly successful and are probably the most visible due to ad spend, sure, but you’re poorly informed.

I’m not going to name other brands on here, but there are a literal 100 on the market with similar products. Quite a few of them operating from the UK. Huel definitely aren’t the biggest and are far from having a monopoly, that’s why they’re careful with new products and respond to customer feedback.

Regards kibble. Dry foods like that are demonstrably bad for animals. To make the same for people just seems silly to me.

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I would love a kibble form of Huel and still mourn the muesli. I like chewing. Bake my own for now.

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Agree completely re cats. Cats have a low thirst drive being evolved from desert animals to get much of their water intake from the bodies of prey animals. A 100% dry kibble diet is very risky for cats and can lead to chronic dehydration and even kidney failure.

Dogs on the other hand drink for fun and can do fine on nothing but good quality kibble. Humans the same I expect.

Hey again Douglas, I will reply to all your points, however I think the overriding message here is, to be blunt, you think that kibble for humans is a great idea, but we don’t think it’s as good of an idea. you want something that is chewable, but have decided that our Bars and our Hot & Savoury are not appropriate for this. As a result you are saying that we aren’t innovating (because we don’t want to make human kibble). This isn’t the case, for example Hot & Savoury has been a hugely successful innovation across all metrics - it just doesn’t hit your chewing requirement.

This is illogical. By having Huel once or twice it means you have one or two fewer meals to make/buy during the day. That is easier not harder.

I think if you are suggesting that the process of calculating your days nutrition and comparing to government guidelines is simple you haven’t looked outside your own group of peers. Measuring your daily nutrition accurately, even with software like MFP, is arduous.

Again, you’re cherry picking what you see as innovation. Hot & Savoury and our CP Bars are innovations, you just don’t see them that way. We have new product lines and iterations in the pipeline. We just disagree on how popular a kibble would be. Generally when we launch entirely new product lines the intention is to appeal to a new group of customers as well as our current audience. Hot & Savoury is a good example of this.

*in your opinion. There are hundreds of thousands of Hueligans who would not agree with you that losing weight is the only way Huel can work. You are cherry picking information.

We already offer huge variety. All of which contain a full spectrum of nutrients (nutritionally complete) 3 different H&S pastas, 6 different H&S grains, Bars, Complete Protein Bars, Complete Protein, Black Edition, v3.0 as well as Ready-to-drink.

We also do not claim to know everything about nutrition (but we know a heck of a lot) and we also know our trials were not valid in the same way a peer-reviewed study at scale is. However they indicative and carried out with as much scientific rigor, control and objectivity as could be possibly expected in good science.

This is a totally unrealistic expectation. Not only to expect a research team to study Huel specifically, but to think that a nutrition study would be able to have thousands of participants in a controlled environment.

Are you suggesting your idea of kibble is akin to the invention of the car?

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Well I am glad to hear that they are not the sole market in this area and I already knew this although I had not heard about Bulk and MyProtein having similar products.
What I did refer to though is that Huel has monopoly on the premium and the best meal replacement meal. Meaning that they do not opt for inferior ingredients, are by far the largest regarding customers and this niche and always stay up-to-date to it.
This is exactly why I want Huel to be the one to produce such a product as I do not trust other companies with my health enough to develop such a product.

I am happy that they do and that is exactly why I am here.

This is not something I agree with. Domesticated animals often are inferior health and resilience wise due to poor breeding practices. Even in the 20th century they kept inbreeding(incest) dog breeds in order to preserve a look or get traits even traits that are unhealthy and harmful. Think about shorter snouts, shorter legs, back problem due to wanting a lower hind leg to front ratio.
Inbreeding caused a lot of hereditary problems so taking dogs as a sample group is bad since most dog breeds are not healthy to begin with.

As you can see you too have improperly read my first post. It is not necessarily about kibbles, I mostly referred to non-liquid food types like kibbles. Why kibbles? Because they also claim to be a nutritionally complete meal, so it is meant as an analogy. In order to give the Huel team an idea of what type of product we want as a lot of people want a solid food on here that does not break the bank.

I am going to share a link on here on why kibble is considered a bad food source and I am going to try and show how this can be solved.

Yes, Kibble is Bad for Your Dog: 7 Issues with Dry Pet Food – Raw Bistro.

  1. Feed Grade Ingredients

"What’s alarming is that pet feeds that are allowed to contain diseased animal material and meat ingredients sourced from non-slaughtered animals - with no disclosure requirement.

The FDA says, “Processed pet food, including pet food consisting of material from diseased animals or animals which have died otherwise than by slaughter, goes through high heat processing, which is designed to kill harmful bacteria…”

Rendering is one of the processing methods of sanitizing otherwise putrid, inedible animal by-products and animal waste. Many ingredients in pet food today are from rendering plants.

Consuming these highly processed ingredients leads to other issues:"

  • My response - Often you see ingredients used in pet food not being human grade and not hold to the same standards as human food products when can be solved by using Human grade ingredients and avoiding these processes that cause loss of nutrition. Or like how Huel cooks their H&S and still ensures a high nutrition value.
  1. Highly Processed Ingredients
    "Many of the nutrients in kibble are lost during the high-heat process, so flavor enhancers and synthetic nutrients are added to replace what has been lost.

Different types of acrylamide and other carcinogens are created in this process that could be detrimental to your dog’s long-term health."

  • Again this can be avoided by not using those ingredients and opting for a different method of processing the food which I will come to later on.
  1. High-Starch Carbohydrate Content
  • Can be solved by having the same great nutritional value as the rest of their products.
  1. Low Moisture

Like I said it does not have to be the exact same product. Huel can innovate a new product that negates these negetive side-effects like their Huel bar but is in the same price range as the powder 3.0 and black edition. Many people already microwave their bar for a few second up to 30 seconds. So why wouldn’t we be able to add a bit of water at home to make not super dry the same way you add water to almost all Huel products?

Etc.

Now, you would ask what type of kibble or pellet is actually good quality and would I use as a prime example.

HARRISON’S BIRD FOODS

Let me explain why: Pet birds have not gone through the thousands of years of bad breeding practices of humans and are still identical or almost identical in genetic make-up to their congeners in the wild. Hence they are very healthy and mostly free from inbreeding.

Have a quick read at how they are made and you can see their website yourselves.

EXTRUSION NOT PELLETIZATION
The Harrison’s Bird Foods nuggets in the Coarse, Fine and Superfine products are made by a low temperature extrusion process. This differs to many other products on the market which are ‘cold pressed’ or ‘pelletized’ rather than extruded.

This method of manufacture:

Produces a food with increased digestibility

Preserves the ingredients’ natural flavours and enzymes which can be lost in a pelletization process

Destroys microtoxins and digestion inhibitors

Does not degrade vitamins

Prolongs storage without the need for artificial/chemical preservatives

This process leads to a more natural product than some methods, and therefore there is some variation in sizes and colour of piece.

This high-quality production process is also one of the reasons (another being the use of human-grade, organic certified ingredients) why the Harrison’s range is a little more expensive than other formulated foods. You are paying for quality at every step of the process, to provide a better product, for the optimal health and enjoyment of your bird.

I made it clear a few times that the kibble is meant as an analogy.

And I am satisfied with the bars however the price ranges makes it out of reach for many of us that do not want nor can pay thrice the amount of what it would normally cost to make traditional food from the supermarket or the powder for example.
I even suggested a possibility on how this could be solved with but I mean a company might have more insight knowledge on how such a product can be developed.

The Huel H&S differs greatly in consistency of solidness, chewing required and bite force, some need more chewing than others. I have not yet tried all but the ones I did, two bags now of different flavours, did not meet my standard at all for chewing. It was more like baby food in consistency.

I agree, Huel is innovative and a great company and I am happy with what it already has achieved and how it listens to it customers but as you mentioned earlier

This is what I referred to with preventing innovation based on fear of loss of face, scrutiny or mockery prevent.
Which I can understand. Such a new product should not be made to resemble animal foods as this can off-put many new customers and cause harm to the image of a company however it was to give an idea of what can be achieved and perhaps it can be developed in cookies or brownie format.

Not at all illogical. If you have two meals of Huel 800 kcal. You now need to figure out how much you need to eat to reach your caloric goals and also make sure that you rechieve all the nutrients one needs. We know that Huel claims to be 100% Nutritionally complete at 2000 kcal so if you have 2 meals that supposedly means depending on which nutrient we are speaking that you are at least half way.
Now it is your job to figure it out for the rest of your diet.
Consider that the average iq is 100 and a lot of older people are not that good at navigating themselves tech-wise or simply as Huel is targeted for busy individuals and they simply do not have time to type in every food item into an app…
On the other side a government formulated diet has already been approved and by entering your age, weight, gender etc. you receive a diet based on your own needs instead of just having 100% complete at 2000 kcal which might not necessarily work with senile, smaller, sedentary people that have lower caloric needs

I actually suggested the opposite. Government agencies have developed diet plans in a simple format to the general public for improved health and longevity.
Now if you sway away from that diet plan it now rests on the individual to make sure that he receives everything he needs and not exactly convenience.

I have already addressed this point in my previous point in this message.

Again, Huel is targeted to convenience and saving time. If you can avoid having to prepare food and calculate your dietary needs that saves time.
If you eat Huel once or twice it now has taken that convenience factor away by having you need to calculate a diet with one/two Huel meals incorporated into it to ensure all nutrients are received and a healthy diet is acquired.

What I referred to is variety in the powder 3.0 singled out as well as the Black edition or bar alone.

If you look at the ingredients list of Black edition and check all the flavours they all contain nearly identical ingredients. So if you were to consume the Black edition 100% and not any other Huel products that would mean no variety.
As opposed to pet foods that have different ingredient lists for their flavours.
I have not yet looked at the ingredients list of H&S but looking at how you get served a different dish with each flavour I assume that this comes the closest of variety in one single product line-up namely H&S exclusively.

Sure but 4-10 people and for a few weeks is really meager. I cannot consider a proper study or to find comfort from it that long-term Huel usage would not negatively affect my health or longevity. so to say that Huel did not find any potential negative consequences being on a Huel diet 100% for only a weeks based on ~ 10 people is not qualitative. Hence why I suggested such a claim or inference can only be made based on a proper study and test group size during a long enough period of time.

Analogies exist for a reason.

I can understand but the article suggests or infers that Huel is safe for long-term usage if consumed 100% of the time and this is why I am so worried about this infernce based on a few test subjects for a few weeks.
If such a claim or inference is made it should be based on proper scientific research.

Just remember you will be old one day yourself. I can manage technology quite well thank you.

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Huel should make popcorn :popcorn::sweat_smile:

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I’ve just about mastered Wordle.

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