Over the past 9 months of consuming various flavors and editions of Huel, my partner and I settled on Black Edition Vanilla (v1.0) as our absolute favorite. Yes, it has a stronger “vanilla frosting” flavor profile, but it’s an enjoyable flavor – Who doesn’t like frosting?
We then received the email announcing the 1.1 version would be delivered in our next order, and was excited to try it. Like with software updates, you hope for improvements, but sadly this new version has “bugs”, and wish we could “downgrade”.
From the first sip, something is off. It has an odd rubber or plastic taste and smell, like it has absorbed something chemical or unnatural in the mix. It’s very off-putting, even for me, being more flavor tolerant than my partner. I thought to myself, maybe it is just getting used to the new flavoring. But no, the 2nd day we had the same reaction.
Unfortunately, to make it tolerable we had to add more ingredients to cover up the offending taste, such as half a banana, peanut butter powder, splenda, and touch of vanilla extract – All of which increases the overall cost of consumption, not to mention prep time.
It’s clear the goal for Vanilla 1.1 was to make it a more mild flavor overall. However this has backfired by either not being strong enough to cover up an odd flavor that was hiding in there all this time, or the new flavoring has introduced this odd taste. Either way, I suggest Huel rethink things, and tweak it again.
Here’s hoping it’s just a bad batch, because our favorite Huel flavor is now much worse than our least favorite of all the flavors we’ve tried.