Wait what, you’re manufacturing in the states and then shipping it 4,000 miles to the UK!? That’s insane. You couldn’t find anywhere closer to handle manufacture @Tim_Huel, surely that’s a typo or something?
Really disappointed by that. I was mostly fine with the explanation about buying ingredients internationally when they were available in the UK, but this I just don’t get at all - together they really damage the credibility around the minimum impact on the environment you claim to aim for in the Huel mission statement
I think RTD could be a really good option for convenience, especially if it were possible to get it in stores as well.
One sandwich at my college is £2.75, for what generally isn’t a balanced meal, meanwhile I could put a few bottles of RTD in my car, which would leave me food for college at all times. (I realise that I could have powder in my car but that would also require a clean shaker which would be easy to forget) It would also be handy for the winter months when you are advised to keep supplies in the car or for long car journeys where regular Huel may be inconvenient due to there being nowhere to stop.
What i would like to see is those of us who order the powder to be able to add one of each to our order, that would hopefully help with the shipping issue but allow us to try them out.
it’s the UK one I’m more confused about. Austria makes sense for EU, after all, it’s in the EU. But UK page says America. That’d be even more ridiculous if there’s Austrian production.
Yep. I’m all team Huel, but no one can deny shipping a product which is what, 75% water? Across that distance isn’t a waste of fuel, storage and emissions. It does kind of go against the ethos.
Great points raised here, thanks for the comments. Some of our suppliers have factory capacity constraints so we have had to utilise two factories for now, we are currently reviewing the mid to longer term options though. For launch this was our only option to ensure continued supply and de-risk the launch and customer demand for our RTD. We will continue to review as we understand the demand and suppliers adjust capacity.
We now sell to 80 countries, out of 5 warehouses (and growing); making product in each country isn’t possible to manage, nor find the right factory in each market.
It’s worth noting that waterborne freight is far more energy efficient than other modes of transporting freight (second only to rail). Chart below from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Ships transport about 90% of world trade, but now only account for 2.2% of the worlds total CO2 emissions.
In addition, the latest generation of containerships carry the same amount of goods and products as 10,000 heavy trucks, but only 1 gram of fuel is used to move a tonne of cargo one kilometre.
We always transparent with you, hopefully you can see we’ve disclosed far more information here to you than most companies would. Arguably some of this is commercially sensitive, but we want to give you the full picture.
To clarify, RTD is not just powdered Huel, it’s a totally different product that is far more complex than powder and can sustain 6 months shelf life, whereas Huel Powder mixed with water does not.
Wait, so with those stats I’ve done some quick maths:
USA --> UK = ~7000km
Austria --> German = ~700km
Shipping is 3g/tonne/km, therefore 21,000g emissions per tonne to UK (considering we aren’t shipping the 18,000 tonne capacity of a ship, clearly there’s mostly other people’s freight)
Lorries is 80g/tonne/km, therefore 56,000g emissions per tonne to Germany (in the argument to ship to UK (2000km) this takes that to 160,000g/tonne).
I suppose you have to factor in the environmental cost of road or rail freight from the factory/warehouse to port and then from port to distribution centre/warehouse but certainly it is interesting and complex. Shipping is an expensive part of any distribution process either financially and/or environmentally.
