Huel

Combining and expanding my initial ideas with feedback I received from Eleni, I wanted to direct my focus onto a company that is relevant to the market I am looking to contribute to - a brand that is health and environmentally conscious, contemporary in their attitudes and with a small area available for addition and / or improvement...

Throughout my research, I discovered a brand that seems to be popular, yet one I hadnt actually heard of before...their style and branding is quite literally black and white, very simple, very modern, very minimalistic and with helvetica as the font of their logo. Researching into every page available on the Huel website, I read a lot of facts and information that made this brand more than relevant to what I have been aiming to implement myself.

- 'Human + Fuel = Huel' is nutritionally complete food - Every Huel meal contains a balance of all 26 essential vitamins and minerals, proteins, essential fats, cars, fibre and phytonutrients, in a single product.'

- 'Founded by Julian Hearn in 2015, with a mission - 'To make nutritionally complete, convenient, affordable food, with minimal impact on animals and the environment'.

- 'Huel is made from plant based sustainable ingredients, such as oats, peas, rice, flaxseed, coconut and sunflower'.

- Huel have 4 ranges to their products; Powder ; Bars ; Ready-to-drink ; Hot & Savoury (this seems like a perfect opportunity to design my own range of chocolate bars to fit into their product collection by adding a sweet range!)

Products - The powders, drinks and hot options are 'nutritionally complete' meal supplements

Powder;

- A range of different flavoured powders to be mixed with water

Ready to drink;

- Pre-made mixed flavour drinks to act as a replacement for lunchtime meals Hot & Savoury;

- Convenient packets of rice, quinoa, vegetables, herbs and spices mixed in a small bag to be heated up within 5 minutes

Bars;

- Nutritional bars to consume as a snack

Why Huel? - 'We aim to prevent people resorting to junk food'. - ' 30% of food is wasted, it is mainly from animal products and there is currently too much packaging waste' - 'We prioritise nutrition, low waste, convenience, cost efficiency and minimising environmental impact'.

- 'Use little packaging and are plant based so have a low carbon footprint'.

- 'Low sugar, zero animal products, no nuts, soy or palm oil'.

So now recognising that Huel is a more than appropriate brand where focusing on its aims, morals, motives and ingredients, I needed to analyse their branding scheme and how I could potentially incorporate and adapt my own design style, to work with theirs...

The images below showcase what I saw when browsing the Huel website - their monochrome colour scheme is more than evident. I find more recently than ever that it is a common technique and attitude to approach an appearance in a very minimal and clean way - and 9 times out of 10 I love it! As can be seen below, Huel have a very little amount of colour, imagery and illustrations on both their website and their products...

Even aside from the food products and onto their 'accessories', Huel have applied the monochrome appearance across their whole brand. It is almost exact to our black and white UAL logo!

Moving away from their website and onto Instagram, (of course) the first cookie-based ad to come up was a Huel sponsored advert, which again was still very black and white, with some added grey! Their Instagram page continued the same appearance, and as mentioned before, I always appreciate the minimalistic approach. However I do certainly feel that the scheme lacks too much colour, I cant help but feel its very clinical! As mentioned on a previous blog post where analysing the different luxury chocolate bars available in different supermarkets, the solely black and white packaging on the Montezumas dark chocolate, did not invite me to pick it up and want to eat it - so i know this is something I will steer away from...

From here I aim to cease the opportunity to add to the Huel brand by creating a sweet section / range of chocolate bars, to correspond with their values and enhance their product diversity. I aim to compliment the existing brand appearance with a series of relevant, colourful illustrations to show and exaggerate the beneficial ingredients of the new vegan chocolate range!