"Natural"?

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I think “complete” means that the macro-split and amount of micronutrients added is balanced and agrees with official recommendations.

Of course there is more knowledge on long term effects of “natural” food, which may be the reason why many people think that might be better. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence…there is no plausible reason why synthetic food or meal replacements should not work equally well.

Anyway…meal replacement does not automatically mean “unnatural”, and “normal food” is not always “natural”…according to the official (regulatory) definition. But nevertheless many people seem to be more convinced of the latter…mad world…

22

This is the “appeal to nature fallacy”. It would be amazing if Huel explicitly called this out by name on the website, and talked about how it does or doesn’t affect their approach to what they do.

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23

We haver this article.
I know it doesn’t explicitly call out the appeal to nature but what do you think?

24

People usually compare it with Soylent, where they are proudly pro-science, pro-GMO, pro-future, etc.

Huel has not taken such a stance where they’d try to educate people that natural does not imply good.

25

I can see how that’s better for marketing but I still find it really disappointing.

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I’m not a fan of this comparison and I’ll explain why. Soylent don’t have a choice. They use soy as an ingredient and over 90% of the soy produced is GMO, so you either embrace it or keep it on the down low.

The article above is exactly that. So is our processing article.

We can certainly put on our to-write list an article tackling natural vs synthetic. What would you like to see that isn’t in here?

Would you not say that the conversations we’re having on the forum are educating people on how natural ingredients impacts our formulation and more generally?

Honestly a marketing campaign around “natural isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” just isn’t that exciting to the general public. I’m sure @Tim can add more to this but from a marketing point of view it doesn’t add much.

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28

Well, they could have not used soy… But that was a deliberate decision made on balance of nutrition, sustainability and texture.

There’s got to be value in pitching the use of natural ingredients as a USP, otherwise so many companies wouldn’t do it surely.

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29

Yeah I get what you’re saying, I just meant there’s no choice once you settle on soy.

Totally, it’s a huge selling point that a lot of companies centre themselves around and it impacts their ingredient choices. We always have been and always will be nutrition first.

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30

Oh for sure re Soy/Soylent, but GM was definitely a deliberate choice. I wonder if Oatlent would have been as much of a phenomenon.

Make your mind up lol :wink:

I did a bit of googling earlier and stumbled on a fairly interesting piece on Euromonitor about it actually, it’s a little dated but still worth a read.

31

I think you’ve misunderstood a bit. An entire campaign around natural isn’t what other companies market to you or synthetic is just as good as natural isn’t likely to be of interest to most people. It’s the exact opposite of marketing a product as “100% natural” etc.

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