Julian Hearn did not get a launch moment. On 17 June 2015 the Huel website went live, the product sat in his garage, and as he puts it, that was it. No spike, no buzz, just a business that technically existed. The first day brought two orders. He printed the labels himself, wrote on the boxes, realised he did not own a tape gun, went out to buy one, then worked out how to stack pallets so he could pack orders without wrecking his back.

Two years later he says Huel had gone from zero to £9 million in revenue. Every day count in this story is measured from that 17 June 2015 launch date, which Hearn lists on his own bio page at huel.com, so the first customers arrived on day one and the £9 million mark sits roughly 730 days out.

The route in was unusual for a health brand. Hearn is not a nutritionist and not an engineer. He left school at 16 with almost no qualifications, worked in a shop for a year, then spent two years digging holes in the road as a labourer. His girlfriend told him he was too bright for that, so he went back to college, then to university, then spent about a decade climbing the marketing ladder at MFI, Tesco, Waitrose, Starbucks and Emap. In 2008 he put £1,500 of his own money into his first company, Mash up Media, and by its third year it was making over £2.5 million profit a year. He sold it to Internet Brands in 2011.

That sale bought him the freedom to pick a second act, and the first attempt did not work. He launched Bodyhack in 2012, paused it in 2013, and started work on Huel instead. He is direct about the pattern: "Huel is not my first company but it's my most successful. Why? I've learnt along the way by failing." The nutrition science behind the product came from James Collier, a registered nutritionist who lists himself as Huel's co-founder. Hearn brought the brand and the demand.

For the first three months after launch he did every job in the business. Orders meant getting in the car and driving to the post office, standing in the queue with a handful of parcels, then doing the same thing again the next day. At the same time he was posting links in forums, replying to messages personally, emailing customers to ask why they bought and how they found Huel, and hand delivering local orders so he could meet buyers and understand what made them buy. He describes those months as manual, repetitive and unglamorous, and as the foundation for everything that followed.

His own explanation for why it worked is not a tactic. He says Huel satisfies a latent demand, healthy convenience food, and that the company opened a category rather than fighting for share in an existing one. The rest of his advice is about the customer relationship: understand what customers want, talk to them, be a customer yourself, engage on social media, then give them what they want. He also argues that doing every job yourself early is what makes hiring work later, because you can teach the next person exactly how you want it done.

The most unusual decision came at the £9 million mark. Two years in, Hearn concluded that being both founder and chief executive was not working. He was buried in HR, legal and finance meetings and months would go by without him touching brand or marketing. His summary is blunt: he was doing a job he did not enjoy and, by his own account, was not very good at. So he wrote a list of 40 brands he respected, went hunting on LinkedIn for someone who had already run a business at the stage Huel was entering, and sent James McMaster a cold message. McMaster took the chief executive job and still holds it as Huel heads into its twelfth year. The boundary was set on day one: McMaster runs the business, Hearn runs the brand.

The numbers after that are his own too. By the end of the fourth financial year, 31 January 2019, Huel had passed £40 million in revenue and over £60 million since launch. 2019 alone generated more than £57 million, with over 50 million meals sold and a team past 100. In March 2020 Hearn reported an annualised run rate of $100 million and more than 100 million meals sold, noting that in Red Bull's first seven years it sold about 85 million cans. The sixth financial year came in at £103 million while profitable on an ebitda basis, with a team over 200 and 200 million meals sold. The first outside money arrived in 2018, £20 million from Highland Europe at a £220 million valuation, after Hearn had bootstrapped the company to a £40 million run rate. In March 2026 Danone announced a definitive agreement to buy Huel, with the release noting the deal was still subject to closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

The part worth copying is not the scale, it is the shape of the start. A marketer with one exit and one failure behind him, a domain expert alongside him for the thing he could not do, a product shipped before anybody was waiting for it, and three months of packing boxes by hand while asking every single buyer where they had come from.