How a Failed Fitness Website Became a €1 Billion Brand
Danone is set to acquire Huel for ~€1 billion. And it all started with a failure called Bodyhack.
Julian Hearn left school at 16 with almost no qualifications. Spent a couple years doing manual labor before working his way up the marketing ladder at Tesco, Waitrose, Starbucks. In 2008 he started his first company (an affiliate marketing business) from zero and sold it in 2011.
After the sale, he got obsessed with fitness and built a site called Bodyhack where he used himself as a guinea pig - strict diet, minimal exercise - and got himself into the best shape of his life. The problem was the diet plan was so precise and time consuming that nobody else could follow it. Customers wanted the results but not the work.
So he went one level deeper. What if the nutrition was just in the product itself?
He found a nutritionist named James Collier, put in £220,000 of his own money, built the store on Shopify. He was still in good enough shape from the experiment that he posed for his own product photos. Every dollar counts. He'd already lost £80,000 on Bodyhack but believe in what he could create. Huel went live in 2015.
The space is crowded now and was growing then. Soylent was already there. What Huel did differently was refuse to be a supplement. Whole-food ingredients, complete nutrition, built for people who cared what they put in their body. The community they built called themselves Hueligans.
When James McMaster came on as CEO in 2017, the goal was to build an internationally recognized brand doing over £100 million in revenue. They reported £214 million for 2024.
For Danone, this is a bet on where food is going. A $6 billion category growing fast, and a brand that already owns a loyal corner of it with DTC infrastructure they'd never build from scratch.
Julian Hearn is selling his entire stake. Roughly £400 million.
CPG is full of brands chasing trends, even if that's not how they began. Huel was built around a problem, and just kept finding better ways to solve it.
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For more on what it takes to build in CPG, check out my podcast The Long Aisle, where I go deep with founders and operators, exploring how they think, how they live, and what keeps them going. Heres the Link.
