Beyond Huel
Beyond Huel: Why Health & Wellness Is Reshaping the Consumer Market
Danone’s £860 million acquisition of Huel is about far more than one successful brand. It reflects a wider shift in how consumers are thinking about nutrition, convenience and the role everyday products can play in their health.
Danone’s £860 million acquisition of Huel is one of the clearest indications yet of how far the health and wellness market has evolved. What began as a category dominated by specialist supplements, sports nutrition and relatively niche health products is increasingly influencing mainstream food and drink, attracting major investment and changing the way established consumer businesses think about future growth.
The acquisition received clearance from the Competition and Markets Authority in August 2026, bringing Huel into a global Danone portfolio that already has considerable strength in health-led nutrition. Huel itself has travelled a remarkable distance from the powdered meal replacement brand launched just over a decade ago. The business has expanded into ready-to-drink products, meals, bars and daily nutrition, generated £254 million in revenue in its tenth financial year and now has products available in more than 17,000 UK stores.
Those figures are impressive, but the significance of the deal extends beyond the growth of one brand. Huel has developed during a period in which consumers’ relationships with food, health and nutrition have been changing considerably. Protein has moved firmly into the mainstream, functional drinks have become a serious growth market, gut health has entered everyday consumer language and shoppers are increasingly looking for products that offer a recognisable benefit beyond simply satisfying hunger or thirst.
For consumer businesses, this is creating a much larger and increasingly competitive health and wellness economy.
Health and wellness is moving into everyday consumption.
One of the most important changes in the category is where health and wellness products now sit in consumers’ lives. Functional nutrition is becoming less dependent on consumers making a specific decision to purchase a ‘health product’. Instead, functionality is increasingly being built into products and occasions that already form part of everyday routines.
The growth of functional drinks demonstrates this particularly well. NielsenIQ data reported by Food Manufacture valued the UK functional drinks market at £100 million, while the functional juice shot category has achieved a 47% compound annual growth rate over the past three years. Around 130 million shots were purchased in the latest year measured, with household penetration increasing by 48% year on year.
Perhaps more revealing is the change in consumer intent. The proportion of consumers actively seeking functional benefits when buying drinks has reportedly risen from 13% in 2024 to 24% in 2026. This is no longer simply a small group of highly health-conscious shoppers looking for specialist products. A much broader section of the market is beginning to expect everyday food and drink to do something additional for them.
That can mean supporting gut health, providing additional protein or fibre, supplying vitamins and minerals, supporting energy or offering a more convenient way to achieve nutritional goals. The result is a marketplace in which the boundaries between traditional food and drink, sports nutrition, supplements and wellness products are becoming increasingly difficult to define.
A consumer might now buy a prebiotic soft drink instead of a conventional fizzy drink, pick up a ginger or turmeric shot with breakfast, choose a high-protein yoghurt as a snack or use a nutritionally complete ready-to-drink product when there is no time for a conventional meal. None of these behaviours requires the consumer to think of themselves as part of a specialist ‘wellness’ audience.
That shift is important because it dramatically increases the potential size of the market.
Protein has escaped the gym.
Protein is perhaps the best example of how quickly a specialist nutritional proposition can become mainstream. For years, the category was closely associated with gyms, bodybuilding and tubs of protein powder. Today, protein is appearing across supermarket shelves in yoghurts, cereals, snacks, drinks, ready meals and products that would never previously have been marketed on their nutritional composition.
The audience has broadened at the same time. Consumers may be interested in protein because they exercise, but increasingly it is also being associated with satiety, maintaining muscle mass, healthy ageing and general nutrition. Brands have responded by making protein easier to consume and by placing it into familiar formats rather than expecting customers to adopt specialist routines.
The scale of demand is now having consequences further up the supply chain. Strong global appetite for high-protein products has contributed to pressure on whey availability and increases in European whey protein prices during 2026. What was once a relatively contained sports-nutrition trend is increasingly influencing ingredient markets and product strategies across the wider food and beverage industry.
There is an important lesson here for the broader wellness market. Consumers do not necessarily need entirely new product categories. In many cases, the biggest commercial opportunities emerge when a functional benefit can be incorporated into an existing habit in a convenient and credible way.
The biggest commercial opportunities may emerge when health benefits fit naturally into behaviours consumers already have.
Convenience may be as important as health.
Huel’s development also illustrates another factor behind the growth of the sector: convenience. The modern health and wellness consumer is not necessarily looking to spend more time thinking about nutrition. Often, they want products that make achieving their goals easier.
This is one reason ready-to-drink formats, nutrition shots, functional snacks and convenient meal solutions have become so important. They reduce the effort required to make a perceived healthier choice. Instead of asking consumers to completely change their behaviour, successful products can fit into behaviours that already exist.
Research presented by Lumina Intelligence earlier this year found that 76% of consumers were interested in functional ingredients, with the same proportion already buying food containing an additional benefit such as protein, fibre, vitamins or minerals.
The size of that audience suggests that functionality is becoming a mainstream product attribute rather than something confined to specialist health brands.
The GLP-1 effect could create another shift.
Another development likely to influence the next phase of the market is the rapid growth of GLP-1 weight-management medications. Their long-term impact on the food and beverage sector is still developing, but they introduce a potentially important change in consumer behaviour: some people are consuming considerably less food while still needing appropriate levels of protein, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients.
That creates a different nutritional challenge from the traditional diet market. If overall consumption falls, the nutritional quality of what is consumed can become increasingly important.
This could strengthen demand for products that offer higher levels of useful nutrition within relatively convenient or smaller formats. Protein-rich products, fortified foods, functional beverages and nutritionally complete solutions could all have a role.
For an industry that spent decades competing around ‘low fat’, ‘low calorie’ and ‘sugar free’, this represents an interesting change in emphasis. The next stage of health-led innovation may be as concerned with what products contain as what has been removed from them.
A growing market also becomes a more demanding one.
The opportunities are substantial, but growth inevitably makes the category more competitive. A successful product can quickly attract alternatives from challenger businesses, established FMCG groups and supermarket own-label ranges. Consumers are also becoming more knowledgeable about ingredients and increasingly exposed to discussions around nutrition through social media, podcasts and online health content.
As a result, simply putting a fashionable ingredient into a product is unlikely to be enough to create a sustainable proposition. Brands have to demonstrate why the product deserves to exist, communicate its benefits clearly and ensure that the claims being made can withstand greater consumer and regulatory scrutiny.
There is also the commercial challenge of moving beyond an initial audience. A product can generate significant excitement through D2C, social media or a highly engaged community, but national retail distribution introduces a different set of pressures. Forecasting becomes more complex, margins have to withstand wholesale economics, promotional strategy becomes important and supply chains need to support much larger and less predictable volumes.
This is often the point at which an exciting challenger brand has to become a more sophisticated consumer business without losing the qualities that made it successful.
Huel provides an interesting example. Its D2C origins helped it build a direct relationship with customers and develop a distinctive brand, but physical retail has become an increasingly important part of its growth. Its products are now present in thousands of stores, taking the business into a very different operational environment from the one in which it started.
Growth changes the teams behind the brands.
As health and wellness businesses move into retail, expand internationally and broaden their product portfolios, the skills required inside the business change with them. Growth increasingly depends on specialist expertise working alongside the entrepreneurial thinking that enabled the brand to scale in the first place.
Commercial & Sales
Grocery, retail, wholesale and international expertise becomes increasingly important as brands move beyond their original channels.
E-commerce & Digital
Teams need to move from pure acquisition towards stronger retention, profitability and increasingly sophisticated customer journeys.
Finance
Growth creates greater need for commercial analysis, planning, forecasting and margin discipline.
Supply Chain & Operations
More SKUs, greater volumes and international expansion create materially more complex operational requirements.
Brand & Marketing
Health-led propositions need marketers who can make science and functionality accessible without losing brand personality.
Product & Innovation
The strongest teams distinguish genuine consumer need from short-term trends and turn it into commercially scalable products.
What the Huel deal tells us about the future of health and wellness.
Danone’s acquisition of Huel is unlikely to be the last major transaction prompted by the changing health and wellness market. As categories mature and challenger businesses establish meaningful scale, they become increasingly attractive to larger groups looking for growth, innovation and access to different consumer audiences.
However, M&A is only one part of the story. The more significant development is the extent to which health and wellness principles are becoming embedded throughout the wider consumer market.
Protein is no longer only sports nutrition. Gut health is no longer confined to supplements. Functional beverages are competing with conventional drinks. Convenient nutrition is creating new consumption occasions, while established food categories are increasingly being reformulated and repositioned around additional benefits.
The businesses that emerge as long-term winners will need more than a product that happens to align with the latest wellness trend. They will need credible propositions, resilient supply chains, effective retail and digital strategies, commercial discipline and teams capable of managing the transition from challenger brand to scaled consumer business.
That is what makes the Huel story particularly interesting. The £860 million valuation may capture the headlines, but the business behind it demonstrates what can happen when a health-led proposition moves beyond its original niche and becomes part of mainstream consumer behaviour.
For the growing number of brands competing across functional food, drinks, supplements and wellness, that journey is becoming increasingly relevant. The health and wellness opportunity is getting bigger, but it is also becoming more sophisticated. As investment, innovation and competition increase, the ability to build the right team at the right stage of growth could prove every bit as important as developing the product itself.
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