Huel's first day was two orders, packed without a tape gun

The story

Julian Hearn has told the Huel scale-up as a job he had to put down. "I grew Huel from £0 to £9 million in two years and then I did something most founders find impossible. I stepped back from the CEO role." Two years in, trying to be both founder and CEO was not working. "I was buried in HR, legal and finance meetings. Months would go by without me touching the brand or marketing. I was doing a job I didn't enjoy and frankly, wasn't very good at." Those pounds are a founder-reported two-year path, not a first-day cash total.

He did not describe a search firm. He described a list. He wanted a partner who had already been where Huel was heading, not someone from a giant corporate or a tiny startup. "I made a list of 40 brands I respected, hunted on LinkedIn and sent James McMaster a cold message. Since then, we have gone from £9 million to over £200 million in revenue." James, he wrote, is still CEO as they head toward a twelfth year. The split he wants on the record is blunt: "He runs the business. I run the brand." The later "over £200 million" is a founder revenue claim for the years after that handoff. It is not the garage day, and it is not independently audited here.

A separate LinkedIn post is the launch day people usually skip. "Everyone loves talking about the launch day of their new business. Almost no one talks about what actually happens next. When I launched Huel, there was no moment. The website went live and that was it. No spike. No buzz. Just a product in my garage and a business that technically existed. The first day we did two orders." Two is a count of parcels, not a revenue figure. He did not attach a ticket size, a basket value, or a first-day pound total. Treat the two orders as day-one volume. Do not turn them into sales.

He packed them himself. "It was just me I printed labels, wrote on boxes, realised I didn't even own a tape gun, went out to buy one, then worked out how to stack pallets properly so I could pack orders without wrecking my back." Every order meant getting in the car, driving to the post office, and standing in the queue with a handful of parcels, then doing the same thing the next day. At the same time he was posting links in forums, replying personally, emailing customers to ask why they bought and how they found Huel, and even hand-delivering local orders to meet people. "Those first three months weren't a sprint. They were manual, repetitive, unglamorous." The photograph on that post, he added, is the first office-warehouse, not the original garage.

His UK bio puts a calendar under the garage. "2015: on 17th June Huel was launched, from my garage." He lists himself as founder and chief marketing officer. The operating advice on that page matches the tape-gun morning: take action, get a product to market, and "do every job in the business for at least the first 6 months so you can teach the next person how to do it the way you want it done." That six-month instruction is a method, not a headcount. It is also not a claim that day one was a revenue event. The bio and the launch post agree on the setting. They disagree with any retelling that needs a spike.

The same bio, in its UK-facing copy, states the bootstrap in pounds. Hearn writes that he bootstrapped Huel to over £40 million in revenue, and a valuation of £220 million, within four years of launch. The 2018 line is: after bootstrapping to a £40 million annual run rate, the company took £20 million from Highland Europe, valuing it at £220 million. Those are founder-reported pounds on his page. Keep them in sterling. Do not rewrite them as the dollar figures that appear when the same path is localized for a US storefront, and do not fold them into the two-order morning.

A later snapshot on that bio is the ninth year: "We've just completed our 9th year in which we generated £214m rev + ebitda profitable." Read that as a founder bio line for a completed year, revenue plus an ebitda-profitable claim, not as proof of the two-year £9 million path and not as a translation of any dollar run-rate. The CEO post's "over £200 million" and the bio's £214 million sit in the same currency family. They are still his numbers, disclosed on different pages, and they are not independently verified here.

In March 2020 he published a different unit altogether. "When I started Huel in my garage in June 2015 I never ever thought we would have grown so big and so quickly. In less than 5 years we have sold over 100 million meals." He compared that with Red Bull's first seven years, about 85 million cans in his telling. Then: "We are now on an annualised run rate of $100m." That run-rate is dollars, founder-reported, annualized, from a 2020 post. Leave it in dollars. Do not convert it into the £9 million, the £40 million, the £214 million, or the two parcels. Meals are volume. The dollar line is a run-rate claim. Neither is day-one revenue.

Why he built Huel, on the bio, is pride rather than a cash target. His first company, Mash Up Media, sold in 2011; he calls that one a cash generator that made the family secure but not a business he was proud of. Huel, he wrote, would still matter at a tenth the size. The tests he named were whether friends would wear the clothing unprompted and whether his son would tell friends that daddy runs Huel. Both, he said, had been achieved. That is brand language from the person who later hired a CEO so he could touch brand and product again. It is not a substitute for the two orders.

Keep the file in three trays. Tray one is 17 June 2015: website live, no spike, two orders, a missing tape gun, a post-office queue. Tray two is sterling scale: £0 to £9 million in two years, a cold LinkedIn note to James McMaster from a list of forty brands, then £9 million to over £200 million, with a ninth-year bio line of £214 million revenue and ebitda profitable, and a 2018 Highland cheque of £20 million at £220 million. Tray three is the 2020 dollar run-rate of $100 million beside 100 million meals. James runs the business. Hearn runs the brand. Two orders is day-one volume. It is not a first-day revenue story.