Huel: How educational content built a billion-pound business

Content Website

Huel

The move

Huel didn’t launch with a flashy ad campaign. When Julian Hearn founded the company in 2015, he had a product most people didn’t understand, a powdered meal replacement, and no budget for traditional advertising.

So Huel did something different. They built a content machine.

Huel’s website became a nutrition encyclopaedia. Articles explaining macronutrients, micronutrients, the science behind complete nutrition, comparisons of different diets, guides to meal planning. Not thinly veiled product pitches, but genuinely useful content that answered the questions people were already searching for.

The content library grew to over 2,500 articles. Topics ranged from “What is vitamin B12 and why do you need it?” to detailed breakdowns of protein quality scoring. Each piece was written to a standard that would satisfy a nutritionist, not just a content marketer.

This wasn’t content marketing as most companies understand it. It was building an educational resource so comprehensive that Huel became the default answer to thousands of nutrition questions on Google. By the time readers understood what complete nutrition meant, Huel was already positioned as the obvious solution.

The approach helped build Huel into a company valued at over £1 billion, with revenue hitting £72 million in 2023 and customers across 45 countries.

Why it worked

Most DTC brands spend heavily on paid social and influencer marketing. Huel invested in organic search instead. The logic was simple: people who search for nutrition information are already interested in nutrition. Converting them is cheaper than interrupting someone scrolling Instagram.

The content strategy worked because it was genuinely educational rather than promotional. Each article stood on its own as a useful resource. You could read Huel’s guide to protein and walk away more informed, whether you bought their product or not. That built trust in a category where trust matters enormously.

Huel also understood that their product required education. Nobody wakes up wanting powdered food. But plenty of people want to eat better, spend less time cooking, or understand what their body actually needs. Huel’s content bridged the gap between “I want to eat healthier” and “this powdered meal actually makes sense.”

The SEO flywheel was powerful. Each article ranked for specific long-tail keywords. Those rankings drove consistent organic traffic. That traffic built brand awareness without ongoing ad spend. As the content library grew, so did the compound returns, more articles meant more keywords, more traffic, and more potential customers entering the funnel at zero marginal cost.

Julian Hearn has spoken publicly about how content marketing was central to Huel’s early growth. In interviews with The Grocer and various startup podcasts, he described how the company prioritised educational content over paid acquisition because the unit economics were dramatically better.

The principle

If your product needs explaining, don’t fight that with simpler messaging. Lean into it. Build a content library so thorough that you become the authority on the problem your product solves. The education itself creates the demand.

This only works if the content is genuinely useful. Thin articles written purely for SEO rankings get traffic but don’t build trust. Huel’s content worked because it would be worth reading even if the company didn’t exist.

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