Hot & Savoury update - real talk

Huel updates
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Hi all, over the last few weeks I’ve alluded to some changes to our range, as well as many of you suspecting big changes coming. I want to get into some detail on the changes we are making to our Hot & Savoury range (H&S), including delists and a format change. There is a lot going on, I’m going to try and be as transparent as I can but you’re going to have a lot of questions, so drop them below and we will do our best to answer them as openly as possible.

N.B. Current Hot & Savoury Pouch Subscribers will be emailed with a shorter, region specific version detailing the below.

I.e. anyone who has an active subscription containing a H&S Pouch will be emailed. This will happen gradually through the day, so please don’t panic if you haven’t received an email yet.

Tl;dr of the changes

  1. Introducing our new single-serve Hot & Savoury Meal Packs! This will be replacing our H&S pouches to offer a better consistency/texture with Hot & Savoury and give you the perfect portion everytime
  2. This single-serve sachet will cost the same amount per serve as your pouch cost per serve
  3. These will give you the perfect portion every time in a convenient small pouch. These will also be a little easier to take on the go if you wanted to
  4. After a lot of research and analysis, we are delisting our H&S pouches (to be replaced by our ‘Meal Packs’. This is due to Pouches not performing well and not meeting flavour and texture expectations
  5. We are delisting Tomato & Herb, Sweet & Sour everywhere in all formats - this has already happened in most regions
  6. We are delisting Mac & Cheeze in the USA and EU regions in all formats
  7. We are delisting Carbonara and Korma in the UK/EU in all formats
  8. We are delisting Bolognese in the USA, in addition to Alfredo that has already gone in all formats
  9. All these flavours will be taken off the website
  10. But, anyone who is currently subscribed to these flavours will continue to be subscribed until we run out. The run out for existing subscribers will be staggered based on how quickly we get through that inventory (e.g. Tomato & Herb in the USA has already run out and you’ve been migrated to Yellow Coconut Curry)

Before you comment below, please read this post in full and if you choose to post with specific questions, please tell us which region you’re from as it will help us give you more specific information.

Intro

We know that there are going to be so many of you who will be affected by this news and I will go into why now. I’m going to give you reasons like “it’s not performing well” or “it gets lots of complaints”. These general statements might fly in the face of your experience of a product/flavour you love. I would ask you to read this information with an open mind, and try and see from Huel’s perspective how it is important to make these decisions so we can continue to grow and deliver our mission of nutritionally complete food.

What is going on and why? (Long version)

Why H&S is important

When we launched our H&S range in 2020 it was a reaction to the huge amount of feedback from you that Huel needed something savoury for lunch and something you could chew - what we heard was that you wanted something closer to “real food”. We know that many people don’t opt for Huel for these reasons, so it’s important for us to understand why and react to that. Hot & Savoury is part of that solution.

The research we’ve done

We look at a lot of data when we analyse products. This next section is going to sound quite businessy and I appreciate it might sound strange to hear how we analyse the purchasing behaviour of you, our Hueligans. But I want to bring you into this world, because I hope it will help you understand why we make some of the decisions we do.

For the last year we’ve been looking hard at these metrics for H&S:

  • Repeat Rate (RR) - This measures how often you, our Hueligans, come back for more Huel products, whether it’s the same flavour, another flavour, or something totally different. It’s important because it helps us rank clearly which products are preferred and which are good gateways to other products.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) - This metric asks how likely you are to recommend Huel to your friends and family. A high score from you means we’re doing things right and that you’re spreading the Huel love! It’s not directly product related, but we can draw correlations with the above metrics and products to help form a picture.
  • Complaints - While they might seem like bad news, your complaints are actually golden opportunities for us to improve. We appreciate your feedback and aim to turn negatives into positives where possible.

There are certain regional differences in performance of H&S, but there are a few flavours of H&S that are at the bottom of the pile for all these metrics. I.e:

  • a lower % of you buy H&S a 2nd/3rd time
  • they get more complaints, vs other ranges and flavours
  • and you report a worse experience overall

vs other ranges.

However, we can’t ignore the amount of you that buy and love Hot & Savoury. So…

  • Clearly there is a need for Hot & Savoury
  • But we are not delivering a good enough product

What is the problem with H&S?

Fundamentally it comes down to two things 1. Bad product experience and 2. A mismatch in expectations vs reality:

  1. There is an issue with the consistency you get because of separation in the pouch between big pieces of pasta + small powder particles. This leads to some portions heavy on pasta, and others heavy on sauce. No matter how thoroughly the pouch is mixed it will always lead to incorrect portions.
  2. Some flavors don’t quite align with the flavour/texture people anticipate, especially widely recognised meals like Alfredo and Carbonara, which come with extremely high expectations.

What are we doing about it?

We are delisting some H&S flavours in all formats

After we have reviewed the data, there are some clear patterns with the flavours that are performing well:

  • They have a stronger flavour or are spiced (e.g. Mexican Chilli, Gochujang Noodles)
  • They are more general, universal flavour profiles and not specific to dishes (e.g. Fiery Chick’n Noodles)
  • They are not cheesy/creamy (these ‘cheesy/creamy’ flavours aren’t working - Alfredo, Carbonara, Mac & Cheeze)

We are going to be delisting a number of flavours that are not working. We are doing this regionally because the flavours that do, or do not work are different in each country.

UK/EU/DE Delists

Grains: Tomato & Herb, Sweet & Sour, Korma

Pasta: Carbonara (pouch only) and Mac & Cheeze

N.b. The UK will continue selling Mac & Cheeze in a Meal Pack for the time being as we review.

USA Delists

Grains: Tomato & Herb, Sweet & Sour

Pasta: Mac & Cheeze, Bolognese, Alfredo Cup

These flavours will be delisted in all formats unless otherwise stated. The changeover will be gradual as we run down our stock levels. Generally we will do this by:

  1. Removing from the website product pages so that new subscribers cannot purchase
  2. Continue fulfilling existing subscriptions
  3. Moving your existing subscriptions to a different flavour when we run out of stock

Full list of flavours below.

The Perfect Portion

In addition to this, it is clear that pots perform better than pouches (based on the metrics I outlined above). We know this from tests we’ve run. In Germany/UK we sold Pots and Pouches of certain flavours at the same time and compared the results.

So why did Pots perform better? One of the reasons is they provide a “perfect portion”.

Our pouch of Huel Hot & Savoury contains 7-servings. It is made up of 3 parts:

  1. Grains or Pasta or Noodles - the main bulk of the product
  2. The powder - flavour, spices, dried herbs, vitamins/minerals, protein
  3. ‘Inclusions’ - the protein pieces, dried vegetables

To ensure you get all the nutrition we state on the pouch, we drop these into each pouch in 2 or 3 stages. When they arrive with you these parts are still separated into these layers. This requires you to mix them thoroughly to homogenise the contents of the pouch. This isn’t easy to do and as a result your first scoop might be heavy on pasta, and your last scoop mostly powder.

This is a big problem for your product experience and based on our data this is driving a lot of first-time customers away from Huel. Offering single-servings is a way to control each of those servings and ensure that every serving contains exactly the right mix and reduces margin for error.

Pots are a potential solution, but these are more expensive to produce and take up more room in your cupboards.

Introducing our Huel Hot & Savoury Meal Packs

We are going to be phasing out all of our Hot & Savoury 7-serve Pouches. The remaining flavours, i.e. the ones not listed above, will move into individual Meal Packs.

This will be a smaller pouch containing 400kcal of Hot & Savoury, they will be sold in boxes of 7 servings. We are really excited about this as we think it is going to be a massive improvement to your product experience.

  • Perfect portion every time
  • Improve the texture of final product
  • Easily portable
  • Allows us to do a mixed box in the future

I know from comments here that you have been concerned our solution to H&S will be to launch everything in Pots and make them more expensive. This is not the case.

We are launching this single-serve format at the same low price of H&S Pouches currently. I.e. you will incur no increased cost, only a change in format.

To make your H&S single serve, you just need to tear open the pouch, pour the contents into your bowl or reusable cup and continue with your usual water instructions. No scoop needed!

Obviously there are tradeoffs here. We know some of you like having flexible portion sizes and compact storage with H&S Pouches. Hopefully from the information above, you can see that we need to compromise on a few of these to improve the product experience.

When will this happen?

This will happen at different times for different flavours and markets. Here is a rough timeline. The dates here are likely to change based on how fast we sell stock, however the order of events won’t.

We are tackling the USA first because the data for H&S in the USA are more acute than the UK or European markets.

USA

  • From November 2024
    • USA - Tomato & Herb, Sweet & Sour Grains delisted
  • December 23rd 2024
    • USA - All pouches will be removed from the USA site. Subscriptions will continue to be fulfilled until stock is run through
  • December 31st 2024
    • USA - Single-serve sachets launch on site for remaining Grains and Pasta flavours (along with 2 exciting Noodle flavours)
  • ~End of April 2025
    • USA - most H&S Pouches run out and you will be moved to an equivalent single serve sachet option

If you’re subscribed to any of the Pouch flavours being delisted, you’ll automatically switch to a different flavour of Pouch from our great range of Hot & Savory options. I.e. we won’t move you to a ‘Meal Pack’ straight away as we know you like our Pouches.

Pouches (US only)

  • Tomato & Herb → Yellow Coconut Curry – already happened
  • Sweet & Sour → Thai Green Curry – from mid January
  • Bolognese → Chick’n & Mushroom Pasta – from early April
  • Mac & Cheeze → Chick’n & Mushroom Pasta – from mid April

Pots (US only)

  • Chick’n Alfredo → Chick’n & Mushroom Pasta – from early March

Please note that these dates are subject to change based on demand, and an earlier/later switch may occur if demand increases. We’ll keep you informed with further communications nearer the time.

UK/EU markets

  • December → April 2025
    • UK/EU - various Pouch flavours removed from site. Subscriptions will continue to be fulfilled until stock is run through
  • April 2025
    • All Pouches removed from UK/EU sites. Subscriptions will continue to be fulfilled
    • Single-serve sachets launch on site for remaining Grains and Pasta flavours.
  • ~June 2025
    • As H&S Pouches run out and you will be moved to an equivalent single serve sachet option. We expect this to be complete by June 2025

I don’t have detailed run out dates for the UK/EU because they’re still a few months away and are more subject to change.

The future range

These are the flavours that will be available on our website to purchase. This doesn’t include flavours only being fulfilled to subscribers in the background.

USA

Pot

  1. Korean BBQ Noodles
  2. Spicy Gochujang Noodles
  3. Japanese Curry Noodles (a.k.a Katsu)
  4. new flavour
  5. new flavour
  6. Chick’n & Mushroom Pasta
  7. Cajun Pasta

Sachet

  1. Thai Green Curry
  2. Mexican Chilli
  3. Yellow Coconut Curry
  4. Spicy Indian Curry
  5. Chicken & Mushroom Pasta
  6. Cajun Pasta

UK & EU markets

Pot

  1. Korean BBQ Noodles
  2. Fiery Chick’n Noodles/Spicy Chick’n Noodles
  3. Katsu Curry Noodles/Chick’n Curry Noodles
  4. Hoisin ‘Duck’ Noodles
  5. Spaghetti Carbonara (UK Only)
  6. Pasta Bolognese

Sachet

  1. Thai Green Curry
  2. Mexican Chilli
  3. Madras
  4. Pasta Bolognese
  5. Chick’n & Mushroom Pasta
  6. Cajun Pasta
  7. Mac & Cheeze (UK only)
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I don’t know of another company that takes the time to explain things so comprehensively to its customers in an open-discussion format. :+1:

The one question I have is about any additional plastic packaging. I hope it’ll be minimal, if maybe the sachets will be made from thinner material than the pouches.

I’m not a regular H&S user, tried it and I liked all the flavours but found the pre-mixing off-putting, so these changes sound good. :slight_smile:

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thanks @Mark_Huel very informative post - to echo the above question, will the meal packs be in MLP packs or mono material for recycling?

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Appreciate the love, it’s equally important that we keep you all looped in best we can :star2:

Our Hot & Savoury Meal Packs use the same material as our multi-serve Pouches, but yes the plastic packaging has increased due to moving to single-serve. This decision wasn’t taken lightly. We found that many customers weren’t able to get consistent portions in a multi-serve format and this led to a bad customer experience and more complaints. While not recyclable, our pouches are lightweight and account for less than 3% of the product’s carbon footprint. We have had to balance a number of factors and are always reviewing our packaging :raised_hands:

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Can I ask what went wrong with the mono material? After it was introduced on Essentials, it was supposed to replace all pouches by mid 2023.

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Respect for the comms Mark :+1:

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I like the move to pouches. Will make it especially easier for work.
I do re-itterate my hope that there will be more grain products to replace sweet & Sour and Madras both of which I use. In fact ti’s a shame that all the grains packs are ones with heat now… :frowning:

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Really good question.

When using recyclable packaging on other ranges we saw a high increase in damaged orders so needed to be cautious here.

That being said you know we are always looking at how we can improve our packaging and staying in line where technology improves. For us, any changes must genuinely reduce our impact! Using a recyclable flexible plastic pouch is significantly more expensive and there is currently limited recycling infrastructure for flexible plastics - based on recent studies :heart:

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Thanks for the detailed information. I’m looking forward to the meal packs as I’ve had the issue with inconsistency using the pouches before and the pots are unnecessarily bulky for my use.

Here you write that Carbonara will be delisted in all formats.

However, here it’s only the pouches. And Carbonara is still in the list of pots of the future range.

I assume the first quote is a typo and Carbonara pots remain available in the UK. Can you please confirm this?

I currently have a Carbonara pouch subscription and it’s my favorite flavor (and unlike other flavors, Carbonara doesn’t seem to be prone to the consistency issue). I’d prefer seeing meal packs for Carbonara but I can live with Carbonara pots. If Carbonara is going away completely, I might want to stock up on pouches.

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I was never going to get it bang on first time lol!

Carbonara will be staying in Pot form for UK only.

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Also, welcome to the forum! :raised_hands:

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Sounds like a good move.

Currently trying the pots as i want to mix up my lunches with something solid and liking the flavours so far.

With something like pasta bolognese is the taste the same between the pots and H&S? Just because H&S range does seem cheaper overall. And will pot flavours be coming to this? Seems like this way could be better in terms of packaging reduction than the pots

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Awesome to hear, which one is your fav so far?

I found that the flavour was the same but with the pot I got the right balance between sauce and pasta and every portion was perfect.

Right now we are focussed on solving the consistency issues we’ve had with our Pasta and Grains Pouches. We like our Noodles in Pots, but that isn’t to say that won’t change in the future. I’d love to hear what you would like to see in the future?

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Oh FFS!!! :rage: :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: Carbonara is my favourite of the pastas!! Removing it is a travesty!

I’ve never had an issue with this, so as far as I’m concerned it’s a skill issue for those who apparently have a problem.

How many people have actually complained about the cheesy flavours vs. those who like them & have continued to order them‽

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Delisting Mac&Cheeze in the EU is very much :sob::sob::sob: My absolute favorite.
While I get your points of pouches vs. sachet I really have to think about H&S if I’m forced into portion sizes. Since I’m a very active person I usually split each pouch into 5 portions.
I also have to admit that I’m not a big fan of this change regarding waste…

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Annoyingly I’ve invested in a number of pots to avoid as must waste as possible and been reallyplease with the weight loss results and simplicity of not thinking about lunch.

I only really like the carbonara so pretty grumpy bout the Change

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Gutted Carbonara is discontinued in the UK. This has been my favourite flavour since introduced, bought every month, and is the only flavour my mother likes that gets her to regularly buy a bag to keep Huel at her workplace. Lost 2 customers there, and now she’ll be getting crappy unhealthy Tesco meals again. (Pots are more expensive, wasteful, require more storage space and are pointless when I can use pouches/sachets just as conveniently.)

The Carbonara IMO is by far the best flavour ever introduced. What is going on with the hot Huel meals? Mac & Cheeze flavour ruined and turned from regular purchase to never again, then Korma gone, then Carbonara gone. Sweet & Sour gone too.

Really don’t understand the Carbonara one. Whilst I of course don’t have the data behind the scenes, it always seemed like a very popular and positively reviewed one.

@Mark_Huel is there a pic of the sachets available at all? The sachets are a great step forward, it’s just disappointing that Huel’s hot meal output has been narrowing into a generic copy/paste formula recently.

"what we heard was that you wanted something closer to “real food”." – absolutely, but every new flavour being essentially the same template but seasoned differently, with the same generic dehydrated chicken-like chunks (even in the Hoisin Duck one which doesn’t make sense), and more and more pasta based, isn’t a great outlook for future hot Huel meals to me. The flavourings of the new pot flavours are brilliant, genuinely spot on excellent, but with everything else about it seemingly identical feels like I’m in a dystopian future where a machine has 3D printed a pot of edible food using the same template but flavoured differently.

There are so many examples of great diverse meals out there. Such a shame to see Huel discontinuing several diverse, tasty meals and doubling down on the mostly generic ones.

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@Mark_Huel Really appreciate this update and the detailed explanation. Some pretty fascinating in-depth analytics there! Sounds like Huel have thought hard about the way forward with H + S.

Nothing useful to add really except I’m really looking forward to the new pouches. I’ve really struggled with making sure I have the right portion and tend to under-serve myself just to be on the safe side which I know isn’t good for me. At least now ill be able to rely on the single serve portions to have the full nutritional content.

Anyway, onwards and forwards!

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Carbonara will be staying in Pot form for UK only :raised_hands:

Complaints for Mac & Cheeze are much higher than other flavours, but it’s important to note that we aren’t just looking at complaints. We’ve looked at a whole host of factors and unfortunately have made the decision to remove Mac & Cheeze in the USA.

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Have you considered renaming Carbonara to avoid the issue of people expecting a meal that tastes exactly like a traditional Carbonara? As it sounds like the biggest issue might be the expectation/comparison, not necessarily the taste of the meal itself.

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