I have a friend around for lunch when I mix my first batch of Huel. I have laid out gözleme – Turkish flatbreads stuffed with spinach and feta – made fresh, minutes earlier at my local Turkish bakery, and prepared a Greek salad, bursting with tomatoes, cucumbers and parsley. Then I mix the Huel: one part powder (sorry, “nutritionally complete powdered food”) to five parts water. I put it into the beaker they’ve provided, shake it until it’s mixed and then serve it in a glass.
“What’s that?” says the friend. “That,” I say, “is the future of food.” She sips it and makes a face. “Is it supposed to taste like that?” It’s a good question. It claims to be vanilla flavour but it’s like no vanilla I’ve ever tasted – cloying, artificial, incredibly sweet. The texture is of a thin suspension of powdered grit in water. And then there’s the aftertaste, which manages to be both sweet and bitter and lingers unpleasantly on the roof of the mouth for several minutes.
What do you think? “It reminds me of the medicine I had as a child for bottom worms,” she says.
It’s fair to say that I’m not the target market for Huel. You can perhaps divide the world into two groups of people: those who drink protein shakes for breakfast and those who don’t. And I am pretty firmly in the latter. But Huel, a contraction of “human fuel”, is the latest in a long line of products that are tapping into the idea that food is old fashioned, inconvenient and boring, and there’s a more hi-tech, whizz-bang way of delivering the same nutrients more efficiently.
The best known of these is Soylent, an American product launched in 2013, the brainchild of a 27-year-old American techie, Rob Rhinehart. He wrote a blogpost entitled “How I Stopped Eating Food” and kicked off what has become a multimillion-pound business.
Rhinehart’s idea was to strip food back to its basics. “I hypothesised that the body doesn’t need food itself, merely the chemicals and elements it contains,” he wrote. And then he began to experiment. He bought jars of protein powders and vitamins and mixed his own nutritional brew. The result, he claimed, was that he became healthier and more energised while saving both time and money.
It was a nerdy, science-based, experimental approach to food and nutrition that found a natural home among west coast techies and it’s now a darling of the Silicon Valley startup scene and valued at more than $100m. According to the leading venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Soylent, it’s a technology that is “disrupting” food; a hi-tech solution to the age-old problem: what to have for dinner.
And now there’s Huel, a British version, launched last year, which claims to take a more natural approach, though the co-founder, Julian Hearn, tells me he had the idea long before Soylent burst on to the scene.
“We started developing it back in 2012, which was long before I’d even heard about Soylent.”
Was it a bit annoying that they had beaten you to the punch? “Annoying and interesting at the same time. It validated the idea – that this does work. They had got a lot of interest and traction so we knew it was a goer. The downside was that it took us longer to get to market.”
Hearn is something of a serial entrepreneur. He founded an internet marketing business in 2008 and sold it three years later for £2.5m. And when he came up with the idea of Huel, he was attempting to set up a comparison website for dietary programmes.
“The idea was that people are never quite sure who to believe when it comes to diets. So my logic was that you’d run people through different diets, would show the results and then it would be like a price comparison site. At the end, you’d click on the link and would buy the programme.
“But it was incredibly time-consuming and expensive to produce even one of these programmes. I was one of the guinea pigs. My goal was to go from 21% body fat to 11% body fat and it meant I had to cook all my meals from scratch and calorie-control everything. I was also eating a lot of fresh meat to get the protein, but it did work. Friends were asking me how to do it for themselves but of course they’re very busy and just don’t have the time for all that. So I had the idea that there should be an easier way of getting this complete diet in a more time-saving way.”
He brought in James Collier, a sports nutritionist, as a co-founder and he developed what they describe as an all-natural, vegan formula made of “real food”. According to the website, the ingredients include “a carefully chosen blend of oats, pea protein, flaxseed, MCTs from coconut, sunflower lecithin, sea salt, a bespoke vitamin and mineral blend, vanilla flavour and a sweetener”.
But when I talk to Joanna Blythman, an investigative food writer who has written five books on the food industry, she scoffs at the idea that the ingredients are “natural”.
“There is almost nothing in there in its natural form. These are very, very technologically altered hi-tech ingredients. They’re the opposite of what whole, natural foods are. If I read that list of ingredients on a product on a supermarket shelf, I would have a major problem.
“Look at the eighth item on the ingredient list. It’s called a ‘vanilla flavour system’. I mean, seriously, what is that? It’s not vanilla extract or vanilla pods or vanilla grains or even vanilla essence. You are talking about the very rarified regions of food processing and industrial food chemistry where basic ingredients are being mucked around with and transformed. There are these very intense chemical sweeteners in there. There’s sucralose; that’s something like 200 times sweeter than sugar. There’s maltodextrin – that’s another sweetener. And xylitol – that’s another one. It’s all just rubbish. And then there’s ‘pea protein’, which sounds good, doesn’t it, but what the hell is it? You’re treating peas with a number of complex, chemical reactions to extract some sort of beige powder.
“If I had to eat this, I’d lose the will to live pretty quickly.”
She’s not the only one. I have a friend to stay and in the morning I lay out muesli, yoghurt, peaches and plump ripe cherries. And then mix her a glass of Huel. And there it is again, what I’ve come to think of as “Huel face”.
Catherine Collins, the principal dietitian at London’s St George’s Hospital NHS trust, tells me that her immediate response to the list of ingredients is that “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”. She calls the formulation “interesting” and compares it to “a milk-based version we use for very sick patients as a ‘tube feed’”. It’s what it reminds me of too – Complan, the powdered sachets that my mum tried to make my dad drink when he was having chemotherapy and couldn’t stomach ordinary food.
It does raise the question of why you’d want to eat that when you’re not desperately ill, but there are takers. On Twitter, I find a Swiss software developer, 36-year-old Nick Balestra, who tells me he’s been eating nothing else for the past two weeks.
“I used to work remotely at home and I had time and all my things around me. But now I’ve moved to London and it’s a big effort to find the time to cook in the evening and to prepare food to bring into the office. I have a very healthy lifestyle and I like eating healthily. I read about it and thought I’d give it a go.”
How are you finding it?
“It’s super good. I kind of even like the taste. It’s very oaty. It’s like having porridge or similar. At first, people at work looked at me like I was an alien. They were like, ‘Are you sure?’ And, ‘Do you want some normal food?’ But then you tell them about it, how you save time and money and how it’s totally healthy. I have a colleague who’s a super-sporty guy and he’s just ordered some. And even my girlfriend, she quite likes it.”
The trick, he says, is to use less water and eat it “like porridge with banana and cinnamon”.
I ask Hearn about the extreme sweetness. “It’s very difficult to get right. We’ve done research and we have an equal split of people saying it’s not sweet enough and those who say it’s too sweet.” And the aftertaste? “It’s difficult to define. It could be the peas and rice. It’s a natural, earthy taste. Or it could be sucralose, though it’s not really an aftertaste.”
He arranges to send me the unflavoured version and suggests using a blender, making it with ice and adding coffee or fruit to it. I have one guinea pig left. My running partner, Catherine, is exactly the type of person who drinks protein shakes for breakfast. I mix two versions: one is the vanilla powder with fresh blueberries and one is the unflavoured version with a bit of honey and fresh raspberries. At the end of our run I pull them out of my rucksack.
She tries the blueberry one first. “What’s in it?” she says. “Sucralose. Maltodextrin. And xylitol,” I say. And a “vanilla flavour system”.
“No,” she says definitively and pushes it aside. But the unflavoured, unsweetened raspberry one almost passes muster. “It’s OK,” she says, eventually. “I’d add more fruit and a banana, but I could drink that.”
Ruby Tandoh, the Great British Bake Off runner-up who wrote an influential piece earlier this year about the problematic nature of “clean eating” said that she believes that products like Huel are a result of the anxiety we increasingly have around food. We may want to maximise the health benefits of food, but as she points out, the research is simply not there yet and it denies the “mental, emotional and social wellbeing” aspects of food, “and to absent yourself from that seems like a terrible self-sabotage. We’re not robots: food is more than just our fuel.”
According to Hearn, all this is to miss the point. “The thing that most people have for breakfast is toast and that’s optimised for taste. It’s not optimised for nutrition. It doesn’t provide everything that you need, whereas this does. We’re not saying eat this instead of a nice dinner with friends. We’re saying have this for breakfast or for lunch if you don’t have time to prepare a perfect, balanced meal.”
For Blythman, however, it’s “very much an American corporate view of food. The minute I hear ‘the food of the future’, I groan. It’s something that big venture capitalists get very excited about, like all the failed lab meat that never quite caught on.”
Food is about more than food, she says – it’s culture and civilisation and small moments of happiness in otherwise bad days.
“Appetite is such a fundamental drive. It’s part of what we do every day to make our lives a little bit nicer. Even if your boss is horrible or you’ve had a bad day, it’s just that little nice thing you can do for yourself. And these products just don’t get that at all.”
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