Huel is a consumable product and benefits most from subscriptions. If they didn’t take recurrings, they’d be financially shooting themselves in the foot.
Ultimately, Huel makes more money per order by setting the barrier high (with no mixing and matching). This means customers have to spend more to get what they want. For existing customers, it’s usually not too much of a problem. But for new customers, many get put off by the price, negatively impacting conversion (purchase) rates. The ones who do go through with their order become niche customers (considered valuable in e-com), willing to spend higher than usual. Perhaps they should have a broader approach instead.
As the market leader, Huel has a responsibility to make its products easy to get into. If they bring new customers in, it benefits the complete foods industry as a whole. For us, this means fewer people will think meal replacement shakes are “weight loss schemes” or “fad diets”. It also benefits Soylent, Jimmy Joy, Saturo, Queal and all those other companies in the industry. Increased awareness/adoption is never a bad thing. But that’s enough of my opinion.
Now for the solution: Introduce a flexible minimum order system using units. For example, an order would require 2 units minimum. This would be for the product (type), NOT the variant (flavour). They could have a medium-sized product (e.g. powders, bars) be 1 unit. Bigger items like RTDs could be 2 units. Smaller items like flavour boost pouches could be 0.25 units. Ordering below the 2 unit minimum could either charge the customer a fee (like £5) or be disallowed entirely.
The advantage of this unit system is that size is factored in. People would have to order enough to make it worthwhile for delivery, from an emissions/packaging standpoint. That’s the main reason why a simple cost limit won’t suffice.