I’ve been a long time Huel customer, subscription based powdered for the most part.
I’d paused my subscription and once I’d ran out and found that RTD was working out better for me but at a cost. I then noticed 8 Bottles of Vanilla at Costco for £20 so have been using this as my way of supply. I’ve also looked on Amazon and a few other websites and all seem cheaper than having a Huel Subscription.
Just always thought buying direct would be cheaper or have some benefit, or am I missing something?
You can get the standard RTD bottle unit price down to £2.85 with a direct sub from Huel, without any promotional code on top, if you’re prepared to put in a large order. You’ll also get the Huel+ points on top which technically reduce the unit cost further by making future orders cheaper.
What is the best before/use by date on the bottles from Cosco? If it’s within the date you’ll consume then it doesn’t matter, but shops will reduce products if the date is running out.
What were you paying per bottle on your sub before you paused it?
The Costco ones expire Jan ‘27. I was using the bags of Powder previously, I was wasting alot though as I’d make them and sometimes not have them so end up throwing it away, at least with RTD I can just pp it back in cupboard/fridge. Works out £2.50 per bottle from Costco, we Generally go there once a month for things we bulk buy so just to remember to pick some up.
I just roughly worked out the value of Huel+ points on a £300 RTD order which works out to roughly 20p’s worth of discount per bottle on a future order, effectively making (all but the first) bottles then £2.65 on a large sub order from Huel compared to £2.50 from Costco.
I don’t know exactly what the order amount needs to be to qualify for the maximum volume discount so I just made up something to around £300 but you could experiment with that yourself to see where the threshold is.
I’m not sure I would agree that 15p is a ‘fair bit cheaper’. With Costco there’s also (most likely) transport/petrol costs and your time, unless you value your time as free.
Retailers will be buying their RTD’s from Huel for less than £2.50 and then mark them up. That’s normal practice. There’s lower margins for Huel in retail but higher volume vs the opposite for direct-to-consumer business. If a retailer chooses not to mark them up that much, to operate on small margins but high footfall, that’s just their model. On the extreme end there’s nothing to stop a retailer selling RTD for the price they buy it for if they want to increase traffic into the shop to buy other things.
Looking around elsewhere, £3 upwards seems to be the average, almost 50p more than large orders from Huel. So Costco are much cheaper than other retailers, going for low margins on products hoping people fill the car on each trip.
To be honest @Coup has pretty much covered every point we would come back with so there isn’t much we can add to this conversation.
So the retail prices are fixed by the retailer, so the prices often differ from those we offer on our website and between different retailers. You also get times where the store in question will run deals where Huel will be heavily discounted as part of a special or something like that. Again that is out of our control.
For example, I know that Huel Lite is currently on club card at Tesco (Nice little plug) where it’s only £3 a bottle I believe. Again that’s not something we have control over as the retailer will pick and choose the deals
How about the actual Huel shop on Amazon Chocolate RTD Black through subscribe and save is £37 delivered where as it’s £41 on subscribe and save on here + £5.99 shipping.
As I mentioned I’m not criticing or moaning just curious as I’d imagine there are fulfilment costs etc through the Amazon outlet that aren’t needed when dealing direct to consumer
