Latest RTD price increase

I order 96 bottles every 2 weeks as I’m unable to eat solids. Between the sneaky subscription rise and the extra £1.50 per box they’re adding from the 5th March, my fortnightly cost will have went from £226 to £274.80 in the space of a couple of months.
A 24% rise. Does it contain North Sea oil?

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Ouch that’s a hike and a half. Don’t you get on with the powder? That would help mitigate the cost a bit…I appreciate it’s a totally different product to the RTD.

I could stomach the powder if I was only looking at 1 or 2 drinks a day but not 6 a day. :grimacing:

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maybe have a mix through the day? some powder some RTD? six RTD is a lot of saturated fat - almost triple that of the powder right? With your medical circumstances, although you need some, high intakes of saturated fats may increase the risk of carcinogenesis.

I couldn’t be bothered with the mixing Phil. Too much effort for an end product I’ve got to force down.
Saturo have offered me 25% off for bulk-buy. I’m considering experimenting with 1 day Huel, next day Saturo.

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I only buy in smaller amounts, but I get my RTD from Holland and Barrett because it’s nearly always cheaper than from Huel.

It’s mad that I can buy a variety of flavours from a reseller for less than I can direct.

You would have to question their pricing policies in general though – while it’s great for consumers, H&B seem to be constantly teetering on the edge of oblivion - even after their owner bought back nearly a billion dollars of debt to keep them afloat in the past few years.

H&B pricing policies don’t concern me anywhere near as much as what I have to pay for something.

All I know is that for the volume I want; H&B can sell me RTD cheaper than the people that made it whilst still apparently making a profit on the sale.

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It’s possible RTD is a loss-leader for H&B, thus no profit margin at all.

they aren’t making any profits ar the moment, their last posted accounts showed a pre-tax loss of $45.1M inspite of the big bail outs from their owners.

I’ve never really understood the h&b pricing strategy…if you were to buy their non-h&b branded products when not on sale, you’d often be paying more than you would in most independent wholefood stores, but they always seem to have one offer or another on the go, and repeated quite frequently and often all on at the same time. And then certain things are excluded from offers. It all gets a bit messy.

Then they ditch a lot of their chilled food range and seem to sell just junk food and protein powders /meal replacements and loads of vitamins.

And then they launch a whole new ranged of pricier chilled foods after a couple of years. Obviously whatever they are doing isn’t working for them.

But as @Tristan says, while the offers are on, we may as well make use of them until they go bust.

absolutely.

I agree with you Tom. Just to say that I find the powder so much cheaper and so much nicer. Bottles aimed as people picking one up to try from a supermarket I would have thought Have tried one (got it from foodbank where i work actually) and don’t like the artificial tasting ‘creaminess’ and the over sweetness. Also the fact that buying bottles is waste - despite the fact that the plastic can be recycled its still best not to produce more plastic - and the plastic of these bottles is thicker than I think necessary - picked up a ‘for goodness shake’ milk shake type drink/food and plastic so much thinner - don’t think thick plastic necessary as plastic label protects the contents from sun etc.

It depends on a lot of factors but typically straight/smooth designs like this need to be thicker to be structurally sound as they have no modelling in them to add rigidity or flexibility. This also helps with burst/drop resilience so the bottle doesn’t crack if dropped when full. The FGS bottles are either smaller volume or have different structural shape designs so will have different wall thicknesses.

I wish the powder tasted the same. I only use vanilla RTD as the others seem to have a chemical like aftertaste to me. I agree about the plastics. Saturo comes in tetra-packs.

While Tetra isn’t (mostly) plastic, it isn’t carton board either – it is a multi-layer material and this combination of the different materials makes recycling much more complex. The paper fibres have to be washed away before the aluminium and polyethylene can be separately recycled. This requires a lot of specialist equipment, water and energy. Many recycling centres are not equipped for these processes – so you need to ensure your local facilities can – otherwise its heading to a landfill. Tetra Pak say they are 100% recyclable but it’s 100% recyclable only when you send it to recyclers with the machinery to handle them. In many countries though, Tetra have separate recycling programs available to consumers.

As @Phil_C has already mentioned, this isn’t possible because RTD contains a lot more fat and saturated fat than the powder. It probably contains more less desirable things too compared to the powder. RTD was never designed or intended to be consumed 6 bottles a day so the nutritional profile can be catered more towards taste because the average use would be one a day I imagine.

It also has to be shelf stable for a year when its mixed – the most you’ll get out of the powdered when mixed is day or two in the fridge.

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I think Saturo used to have the thinner bottles mentioned by hbmcd but had to change due to EU rules.
Why is it Huel can’t produce a powder that tastes like the RTD? Are the RTD’s not made with powder?

We have already explained this. They are not the same product. RTD is not designed to be used for 100% nutrition, whereas the powder is. This means RTD can afford to contain higher levels of ingredients like saturated fat which help create a fuller and thicker texture and mouthfeel, whereas the powder is designed for optimum nutrition, not taste.

That’s the crux of it, but I’m sure @Amy_Huel can provide a bit more.

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