Huel Lawsuit: Heavy Metals Claims, Cases, and Company Response

The Huel lawsuit is actually a set of at least five federal class actions filed in the United States beginning in October 2025, all alleging that Huel’s Black Edition meal-replacement powder contains undisclosed and potentially dangerous levels of lead and cadmium. No class has been certified, no settlement has been reached, and Huel denies the product is unsafe. Buyers do not need to take any action right now.

What Triggered the Lawsuits

On October 14, 2025, Consumer Reports published results from testing it conducted on 23 protein powders and ready-to-drink shakes bought anonymously from retailers in New York. Samples were measured for protein, lead, cadmium, and arsenic across multiple lots over a three-month period starting in late 2024.¹

Huel’s Black Edition Chocolate powder was among the worst performers. A single serving contained 6.3 micrograms of lead and 9.2 micrograms of cadmium, according to the report. The lead figure works out to roughly 1,290 percent of the daily “level of concern” Consumer Reports used, which matches California’s Proposition 65 safe-harbor threshold of 0.5 micrograms per day. The cadmium reading was more than double what the organization identified as potentially harmful for daily consumption.¹

The first lawsuit landed the next day.

What the Lawsuits Allege

The lead complaint, filed October 15, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York by California resident Derrick Riley, seeks to represent all U.S. consumers who purchased Black Edition Powder for personal or household use. Riley says he bought the product “dozens of times” and would not have done so had the heavy metal content been disclosed.²

The core allegation across the heavy-metals cases is the same: Huel marketed Black Edition Powder as a “high-protein complete meal” safe for daily use while concealing the presence of what the Riley complaint calls “known neurotoxins.” Riley says the product is “worth far less — or nothing at all” because of the contamination.³

The Riley complaint brings six causes of action, including:

Deceptive acts and false advertising under New York General Business Law §§ 349 and 350
Unjust enrichment
Violations of California’s Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law (Business and Professions Code §§ 17200 and 17500)
Violations of the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act

Riley seeks actual, compensatory, statutory, and punitive damages, restitution and disgorgement of profits, an injunction against the challenged marketing, and certification of a nationwide class with a California subclass.³

The Five Cases and Where They Stand

By early 2026, at least five separate class actions were pending in four federal districts:⁴

Riley v. Huel Inc., E.D.N.Y., Case No. 1:25-cv-05783
Tal et al. v. Huel Inc., E.D.N.Y., Case No. 1:25-cv-06508
Gouldbourne v. Huel Inc., S.D.N.Y., Case No. 1:25-cv-08921
Settecasi v. Huel Inc., S.D. Fla., Case No. 0:25-62507
Sarayli et al. v. Huel Ltd., N.D. Cal., Case No. 5:25-08878

In December 2025, plaintiff Sylvia Settecasi asked the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to consolidate the cases in the Eastern District of New York.⁵ Huel opposed the motion. On April 2, 2026, the Panel denied consolidation, finding that five cases before four judges did not warrant a formal MDL. The Panel suggested informal coordination such as shared depositions and discovery stipulations.⁴

The lead case, now captioned In re Huel Heavy Metal Litigation before Judge Ann M. Donnelly in the Eastern District of New York, is at the motion-to-dismiss stage. A pre-motion conference on Huel’s anticipated dismissal motion was scheduled for May 19, 2026. An earlier attempt to appoint interim class counsel was denied without prejudice in January 2026 while the MDL question was pending. No ruling on a motion to dismiss has been reported in the available records.⁶

One of the five actions, Sarayli, is not about heavy metals. It challenges Huel’s front-of-package protein claim on the theory that the Nutrition Facts panel lacks a required Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score. That labeling question is separate from the heavy-metals litigation, though it was grouped with the other cases during MDL proceedings.⁷

How Huel Is Responding

Huel says the product is safe. A company marketing director told reporters Black Edition is “completely safe” and meets all UK and EU food safety standards, which the company describes as maintaining higher thresholds for daily lead exposure than California’s Proposition 65.²

The company also disputes the underlying numbers. Huel says its internal testing shows 1.5 to 2.2 micrograms of lead per serving, not the 6.3 micrograms Consumer Reports reported. It describes the Prop 65 threshold as a warning-label figure set 1,000 times below levels linked to human harm, and points out that a typical meal of ordinary food can contain around 5 micrograms of lead while average adults consume 20 to 80 micrograms daily from food and water.⁸

Huel’s defense attorney, David Kwasniewski of BraunHagey & Borden LLP, has called the cases “nuisance suits” brought by “professional litigants,” naming the plaintiffs’ firms Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman, Seeger Weiss, and Levi & Korsinsky, and saying they “don’t make anything but litigation.”⁹

The Fight Over Which Standard Applies

Much of the case turns on which safety threshold a court should treat as meaningful. The plaintiffs and Consumer Reports use California’s Proposition 65 figure of 0.5 micrograms of lead per day. Huel and industry groups point to looser benchmarks:

California Proposition 65: 0.5 µg/day for lead
U.S. Pharmacopeia: 10 µg/day for lead in dietary supplements
FDA interim reference level: 8.8 µg/day for women of childbearing age; 2.2 µg/day for children
NSF International: 10 µg/day for lead

The Council for Responsible Nutrition and the Natural Products Association have criticized the use of the Prop 65 figure, arguing trace heavy metals occur naturally in food and that modern testing detects levels that pose no meaningful risk.¹⁰ A 2020 study in Toxicology Reports concluded that typical intake of heavy metals from protein supplements did not produce a hazard index above 1, the threshold for non-carcinogenic risk.¹¹

Complicating the debate: the FDA does not set binding pre-market limits on lead or cadmium in protein powders or dietary supplements. The agency can act against products it deems adulterated or misbranded, but there is no enforceable federal ceiling. Consumer Reports has called on the FDA to establish one.¹²

What Consumers Should Do Now

Nothing is required. No class has been certified, there is no settlement, and there is no claims form. If a class is eventually certified, members typically receive notice automatically, usually by email or mail based on retailer records.²

Keeping proof of purchase, such as order confirmations or receipts for Black Edition Powder, is a reasonable precaution in the meantime. The next real inflection point in the litigation will be the court’s ruling on Huel’s motion to dismiss, which will test whether the plaintiffs’ theory, built on the Prop 65 threshold rather than federal benchmarks, can survive the pleading stage.

The litigation is also proceeding against the backdrop of a corporate transaction: in March 2026 Danone agreed to acquire Huel for approximately $1.15 billion.¹³ How that deal interacts with the pending cases has not been publicly addressed.

1
Consumer Reports. Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead
2
ClassAction.org. Huel Lawsuit Alleges High-Protein Complete Meal Powder Contains Dangerous Levels of Heavy Metals
3
ClassAction.org. Riley v. Huel Inc., Complaint
4
FindLaw. In Re: Huel, Inc., Heavy Metal Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3177
5
AboutLawsuits.com. Centralization Sought in Huel Lawsuits Over Heavy Metals in Protein Powder
6
Docket Alarm. Riley v. Huel Inc., Docket
7
Truth in Advertising. Sarayli v. Huel, Complaint
8
Huel. Heavy Metals in Protein Powders
9
Law.com. Professional Litigants and Nuisance Suits: Huel Hints at Defenses in Toxic Metal Class Actions
10
Nutritional Outlook. Industry Responds to Consumer Reports Article on Heavy Metal Contamination in Protein Powders
11
National Center for Biotechnology Information. Heavy Metals in Protein Supplements
12
NPR. Protein Powder Lead Consumer Reports
13
Morningstar. Danone to Buy Nutrition Company Huel for Around $1.2 Billion