So I’ve been using huel for a couple years until I lost my job. I started getting government assistance, and Huel dosen’t accept EBT.
What bothers me so much, is that soylent is essentially the same exact product as Huel; A meal in a shake/bar, but soylent can be purchased with EBT and Huel cannot.
Every time i reach out to Huel to ask why, they say the same thing “we’re a ready to eat meal therefore it isn’t EBT eligible” which is wrong.
It feels like Huel simply doesn’t want to take the extra investigative steps to open their market up to poor people.
I’m posting this in hopes it forces their hand into reaching out through the appropriate avenues to make this food EBT eligible.
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Hey there Justin! Welcome back to the forum - Great to see you again.
After a quick search of their site, I don’t believe Soylent accepts EBT/SNAP either at this time, unfortunately. See here: https://faq.soylent.com/en-US/what-are-my-payment-options-141541
Please know we do wish we were able to accept EBT/SNAP benefits and we have investigated this to see if we could. The reason it is not possible for us to accept EBT/SNAP benefits at this time is due to the fact that Huel as an online retailer falls into the ineligible category.
We’ll be sure to monitor if anything changes to the eligibility criteria that puts us into the eligible category to accept SNAP benefits too. With that being said - Do you have any further information on this to show something different to the above?
Let me know and I’ll be sure to look into this if so!
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As a Huel customer I wouldn’t go as far as to say Huel is responsible for being ineligible to purchase for EBT/SNAP customers.
I would argue that it probably has more to do with the government department’s classification of what they determine is eligible for EBT/SNAP.
This is actually very unfortunate and I wish you the best in figuring this out.
Matter of fact I would argue as well that Huel Essentials was introduced as a product to support lower-income customers.
What I recommend you do is to get in contact with the department that handles EBT/SNAP and ask about Huel and inquire about their eligibility as a product that can be purchased through EBT/SNAP
Good luck getting that figured out. I agree with you that Soylent and Huel clearly belong in the same category of food products and they should be eligible for food stamps. However, to say that they are essentially the same is not totally accurate. Soylent is mostly maltodextrin, soy protein, and canola oil. Huel is primarily, oats, pea protein, and a couple of different oils, including coconut (I might be mistaken about some of this, I didn’t check). So they are made up of different basic ingredients. (I like both btw, for different reasons.)