Got the email this morning that Berry and Vanilla RTD are back in stock - hurray! Per the email, I then tried to add a box of Berry back to my existing sub (which was reduced to 1x box Chocolate during the stock issues), but after adding the Berry using the + button and clicking Update Order, it would take me back to the Subscriptions page without actually adding the Berry. Tried a couple of times and refreshed the page a bunch with no effect on the problem.
I was able to create a new subscription with 1x Berry and 1x Chocolate just fine so I did that and then completely cancelled my old sub, but someone may want to go poke the hamster that powers the website to see why heâs acting grumpy.
Maybe someone forgot to turn Mr. Hamsterâs light on this morningđ¤ Thanks for the shout, @JSchlackman! Iâll definitely dive into our subscription management platform to see if I stumble upon any similar issues.
Happy to see youâre excited about the return of Berry and Vanilla Ready-to-Drinkđ Have a wonderful day and let me know if I can help out any further!
No subscriptions ever â I always one-off buy â but if you have a subscription, why would you need to be notified that RTD was back in stock? Wouldnât your subscription just automatically be filled and shipped?
Actually, no - existing subs simply had the out-of-stock items removed from the subscription rather than put on hold, and the email asked us to go in and re-add them. The reason given in the email was:
We understand that now might not be the right time for you to kick-start your subscription again. This way you can pick and choose exactly what you would like and when you need it.
I guess it was to avoid complaints from people who had made other food arrangements in the meantime and then got billed for Huel anyway.
Ah, thatâs interesting. Maybe thatâs why I never get any of the Huel email folks talk about here sometimes â Iâm not on a subscription plan.
It was troubling that Huel was telling us theyâd be out of RTD for two months â mid-December to mid-February â I donât understand how that happens. I didnât see any big Black Friday deals from Huel that would suck stock, but then again, maybe I didnât get the email.
If you run a food replacement company, and you run out of replacement food, I think thatâs a trust problem for people who rely on you and pay you to eat. I wonder if there is there no logistics program that can help predict, and avoid, being out of stock for so long?
Well, itâs probably not a problem that the company Huel wanted to have. I could speculate they had some kind of ingredients supply problem. One of the companies that sends them the oats or the brown rice protein was having issues and, boom, everything down-line got put on hold. Or, letâs say, there was a quality control issue with one of the ingredients, and maybe Huel couldnât use their supplierâs food for safety issues.
I work in hospital pharmacy and we have been plagued with more and more backorders in the last 5 years than the first 15 years of my career combined. The hurricane Maria knocked out power to facilities that had supplied half of this countryâs normal saline piggybacks. We were out of normal saline for a period of time. Yes. FDA and board of pharmacy started cracking down on distribution of opiates, applying arbitrary selling limits, and so our main buying group couldnât get things like Fentanyl or morphine or dilaudid for our patients. We ran out of fentanyl one weekend for our intubated ICU patients. One of the local compounding pharmacies got cited on a technicality for something and, bam, we lost our supply of Versed and Fentanyl drips for a month and had to scramble to get replacements. Our own hospital has a batch of compounded Precedex sitting in temporary holding until we get the extended shelf life testing approved by the microbiology lab.
Stuff like this happens a lot. And there are lots of steps in the chain that gets food to our door. From planting the grain seeds, to growing the oats, to harvesting, storing, grinding/milling, mixing, packaging, quality testing, getting the Huel bag to FedEx, waiting for FedEx to deliver, waiting some more for FedEx to deliver, then having FedEx not deliver because you werenât home, etc. There are a lot of steps that have to happen before you can chew your clumpy Huel 3.0 and get tachycardia from itâs massive 3 mg dose of caffeine from the kombucha (kidding, guys). Lots of opportunities to have a monkey wrench get thrown in there.
100% agree. These things happen. Thatâs why transparency and proactiveness is important.
I shouldnât have to come here begging for information on when RTD Berry and Vanilla will be back in stock. Huel should take the lead, anticipate, and notify us without being prodded â especially when it comes to providing what we eat.
Six days ago, I got a PR notice from Julian bragging about 100 million Huel meals served â all while Iâm sitting here, out of Berry RTD, for the last 6 weeks.
I get your pharmaceutical reference. I take BP meds that are often out of stock and my pharmacy has to work with my MD to split one med, into two, to get me what I need to control a critical system â and that, too, appears to be a lack of proper logistical planning â for life itself.
Good point. Almost every single time our buyer gets notice of a supply issue, managers are notified and then this information is disseminated to appropriate people. We proactively send emails to doctors explaining the situation, expected outage, and suggested alternatives. Our pharmacists are often given options to suggest or we look up options. We donât just say to the provider, âOh you want fentanyl. Uh, nope, we ainât got none. See ya.â
Yes! My Duane Reade pharmacist is terrific. Heâll call my MD and say, âLetâs split this one med into two, so we donât have to wait two weeks to fill it.â
If my pharmacist wasnât on my side, Iâm not sure my MD would ever notice there was a pipeline delay delivery issue.
I donât like, with my insurance, having to pay for two meds instead of one, but I hate waiting more than I hate paying a little bit more.
EDITED TO ADD:
Hereâs what I would love to see, moving forward, proactively from Huel concerning out of stock RTD product:
âHey! Weâre sorry to report Berry and Vanilla RTD will be out of stock until ___________; and this happened because _______________ and weâre doing _______________ to make sure youâll never have to want for any of our RTD flavors again â of course, as long as you have the money to pay. We always want you re-Huellling!â
Yeah, a simple email to subscribers or statement on the RTD ordering page would go a long way to keep people from guessing. I mean, the moderators on these forum have already had to reply several times to people. Might as well spend that energy just adding a simple statement to the ordering web page. Amazon often times puts estimated back-in-stock dates for stocked-out products.
I suppose Huel would not add âand in the mean time you can try ordering some RTD Soylent to tide you overâ in that statement.
Yes! Add something right on the order page. Nobody can get angry if the information is right there.
Soylent! Yikes! Theyâre in total disarray. I donât think theyâre going to make it. They sent 2 Strawberry boxes straight off, then didnât send the Mint Chocolate even though they had the money. Message after message was ignored. Finally, this week, they sent the final two boxes. What a rage they create! Total disregard for their customers. Iâll never order from them again. Some folks ordered in October and were charged, and still donât have product!
I found OWYN RTD in the meantime â Chai flavor â itâs good enough to get me through the missing Huel RTD tremors.
Hmm. Sad and interesting, but itâs good we know the RTD re-Huel stock is gone â suggesting Chocolate was, perhaps, not as successful an RTD flavor as Berry and Vanilla since it was available so long while the other flavors were out â so we canât place an order for something that isnât there; unlike Soylent, who will take your order on anything, even if they donât have stock, charge you, and then wait two months to ship it to you with zero communication about order status, except to say on the web your order has been âexpedited.â
I ordered six Huel RTD boxes. Two were delivered today. RTD Berry. Expires June 2020. I hope tomorrow brings the remainder of the day.
