Had a chat with Gully. Tl;dr It seems that this has all been considered but either it wouldn’t work/would reduce shelf life/degrade nutrients/or increase environmental impact in other areas for only a benefit in marketing spin.
Cans
Cans take up much more space the flat pouches to do ship. We could ship maybe 300 cans on a pallet to the manufacturing site, but let’s be charitable and say we can ship 1000. We ship more than 50,000 pouches per pallet currently. So we would be dramatically increasing the amount of lorries travelling the country, whether that’s to the manufacturing site or to to the consumer, and therefore the amount of energy used.
Aluminum production generally does use less energy than plastic, especially because aluminium is recycled much more. However, the energy use after production is drastically in our pouches favour.
Aluminium pouches
We have also looked at aluminium pouches. We couldn’t pack more than 100-200g, as you cannot reseal aluminum pouches unless you bind plastic to them. Which ruins the point of them. So we would be using significantly more material than our current pouches. This is also not considering the fact that aluminum is heavier than plastic, so again, more material is used, and more energy is used producing and transporting this.
Paper pouches
Paper pouches are ideal for other products. However, because of the nutritional profile of Huel, paper cannot be used. It does not provide close to the oxygen or moisture protection required for Huel to maintain the nutritional profile. Huel is a fundamental part of many people’s diets, and the nutritional profile remaining stable is of absolute paramount importance. Again, you can improve the protection of paper by adding plastic, but this doesn’t match our pouches and ruins the point of using paper.
Currently
So for Huel, recyclable plastic pouches are the best solution right now. We have been reached out to by companies claiming they can produce 100% recyclable plastic pouches in the past. However, the materials used are very, very rarely recycled, especially in curbside recycling, and provide less protection than our current pouch. They also do not regularly transport the amount of powder we ship, so the risk of bursting is higher. If we are going to change our pouch, we want it to be more than lip service that risks the nutritional profile and chance of burst pouches.
We are working on this constantly. Employees at Huel care as much about the issues of plastic pollution as much as anyone, and there is a great wish within the company to find a solution to reduce waste. However, that has to be an actual solution, and not something just to mislead you all so you’re placated and just makes for gR8 MaRkEtInG.