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Huel Food Safety and Quality Controls

Here at Huel, excellent nutrition and health are key, so we have listed some of the information that confirms this commitment to health and safety throughout all aspects of Huel.

Quality Ingredients

For information on how our ingredients are produced please see our article How Do We Make Huel?.

All ingredient suppliers must go through a rigorous screening process before we approve the ingredients for use. This process includes:

  • Specifications: we specify the standards that we expect our ingredients to meet and suppliers must sign up to these standards prior to use

  • Supplier assessment questionnaires: we ask suppliers about their processes and how they operate and will only agree to work with the supplier once we are completely satisfied with the information provided

  • Audits: we regularly visit our suppliers to make sure that they are meeting the standards that we expect

  • Accreditations: we ask that all our suppliers meet industry-recognised food standards

  • Testing: we carry out independent testing of our ingredients

  • Incoming goods checks: all ingredients are inspected prior to use in our products

Quality Production

We work with a number of co-packers to produce Huel products, and it’s important to us that our suppliers are able to meet the highest production standards so that Hueligans are delivered their products in perfect condition. All of our suppliers work to the highest food-industry-recognised standards and are BRC accredited; for more information on BRC see here. In order to gain accreditation to these standards, suppliers are independently audited annually to ensure that their production standards meet the necessary requirements. We ensure our suppliers have met these standards before we agree to produce any Huel products at any of the production sites.

In addition to this, we have our own internal quality team who work with our suppliers and we set our own product-specific processing standards that make sure Huel products are processed in a way that ensures their quality. We visit and audit all our sites frequently. All products have specific product-quality requirements and are assessed against these requirements throughout production. If we feel that any product does not meet these requirements, the product will not leave our supplier’s facility. Our quality team also taste all of our products weekly at the Huel head office to double-check products are meeting our quality requirements.

Pesticides

Whilst there are valid criticisms relating to the use of certain pesticides in the past, we at Huel agree with the responsible use of certain pesticides. As such, we take measures to check how and which pesticides are being used and if any residual presence can be found in Huel:

  • We visit our ingredient suppliers to see how our ingredients are grown and processed. We look at what pesticides they are using and how they control their use.

  • We check the levels of pesticides in all ingredients before we use them in any product.

  • We annually test all finished products for the presence of over 470 different pesticides. These are tested to extremely low levels, often to the limits of current testing methods.

Heavy Metals

The heavy metals include arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury. The long-term ingestion of heavy metals has been shown to have harmful effects. As heavy metals are naturally found in the environment (e.g. in water, soil and the air) they can accumulate in foods. However, the levels of contamination may also be increased through human activities such as farming, ingredient and processing, and storage.

Numerous studies have been undertaken to identify safe consumption levels, and at Huel we work to recommended levels as outlined by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) where available; see here.

We periodically test products to identify heavy metal levels and to measure them against the recommended intake levels. We also visit our suppliers so that we can understand where our ingredients come from as part of our procurement procedure.

Gluten-Free

Huel Black Edition, Ready-to-drink and Bars are gluten-free. Regular Huel Powder v3.1 is not gluten-free, so are not suitable for coeliacs. However, we offer gluten-free versions of Huel Powder v3.1 that are made with gluten-free oats which means people who have coeliac disease or other gluten-related sensitivities are able to consume Huel Powder v3.1. All gluten-free products are batch tested to ensure they are gluten-free which is classified as less than 20ppm.

Allergens

All Huel Products are 100% vegan. We thoroughly assess our ingredients and the processes we use to make Huel Products and whenever we identify potential routes of allergen contamination we will first take steps to eliminate the possibility of any contamination of our product. However, where it is not possible to remove the risk we will clearly highlight any allergens that might be present on our product packaging in line with current UK and EU food safety guidelines. Please see our product pages and/or product packaging for product specific allergen advice.

When we assess allergen risk we work to the EU recognised allergens as follows:

  • Celery

  • Cereals containing gluten – including wheat (such as spelt and Khorasan), rye, barley and oats*

  • Crustaceans – such as prawns, crabs and lobsters

  • Eggs

  • Fish

  • Lupin

  • Milk

  • Molluscs – such as mussels and oysters

  • Mustard

  • Tree nuts – including almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios and macadamia nuts

  • Peanuts

  • Sesame seeds

  • Soybeans

  • Sulphur dioxide and sulphites (if they are at a concentration of more than ten parts per million)

However, we recognise that individuals can have allergies to any protein in any ingredient therefore if you have a specific allergy that is outside of the remit above, please contact us directly and we will do our best to guide you on which products are suitable.

*While oats themselves are gluten-free they often contain traces of wheat, rye and barley and are therefore not registered as gluten-free. While not all of our products are gluten-free we offer gluten-free versions all of which use oats that have been grown and processed in a gluten-free environment.