Huel achieves 92% mobile adoption and best-in-class user experience with Navan
Results
+69
NPS
92%
mobile adoption
90%
CSAT
Region
EMEA: Europe, Middle East, and Africa, NORAM: North America
Headquarters
Tring, UK
Industry
Food
Products Used
- Navan Business Travel
- Navan Expense
- Navan Travel Payments
Global nutrition company Huel is one of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses. Now a scale-up focused on sustainable growth, Huel — which employs approximately 350 people across the UK, U.S., and Germany — is dedicated to implementing efficient systems, processes, and controls.
Travel is essential to Huel’s operations, connecting centralised UK teams with growing international markets whilst supporting rapid expansion and acquisition integration. As the business scaled globally, the need for a modern travel and expense solution became clear — one that would prioritise employee experience above all else.
Before Navan
In 2019, Huel was managing travel through a traditional travel agency that couldn't keep pace with the company’s rapid international expansion. The limitations were significant. Restricted inventory — especially to frequently travelled destinations — meant employees often couldn’t find what they needed at reasonable prices.
“The traditional agency model just wasn’t built for how we work,” says Mohammed Ali, Finance Transformation & AI Manager at Huel. “Inventory was limited, especially for the destinations we travelled to most frequently. Employees often couldn’t find what they needed at reasonable prices, so they’d book elsewhere — which meant we lost visibility and control.”
Travel payments were managed through corporate cards, but reconciliation was entirely manual. “At month end, we would have to get the spend on the corporate card, upload it into our ERP system, and try to analyse what that spend was — flights, hotels, taxis, trains. That analysis took a long time every month,” says Kushal Malde, Head of Financial Control at Huel. The process took 6 hours and made accuracy challenging.
“
We wanted something intuitive and quick for our people. They shouldn’t have to spend much time in the system — book travel, submit expenses, and get back to their real work. That was our number one priority.
Mohammed Ali
Finance Transformation & AI Manager
Why Huel chose Navan
As Huel evaluated modern solutions, one criterion stood above all others: user experience.
“We wanted something intuitive and quick for our people,” says Mohammed. “They shouldn’t have to spend much time in the system — book travel, submit expenses, and get back to their real work. That was our number one priority.”
Navan stood out for its consumer-grade interface and mobile-first design. The platform promised to eliminate busywork whilst providing the control and visibility needed at scale.
Sustainability was another key consideration. "Sustainability is core to who we are, so having visibility into our travel carbon footprint was a must-have," says Kushal.
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Navan Travel Payments gave us real- time visibility into every booking and transaction. It made reporting simpler and removed friction from our reconciliation process.
Mohammed Ali
Finance Transformation & AI Manager
The Navan effect
Travel: immediate adoption through effortless experience
Huel implemented Navan Travel in October 2019, and employee enthusiasm was immediate. The intuitive interface, comprehensive inventory, and mobile-first experience meant users actually wanted to book through the platform.
“The difference in user experience was significant,” says Mohammed. “Adoption was strong from the start because the platform was simply better.”
Navan Travel Payments: eliminating manual work
Shortly after Mohammed joined Huel, the team implemented Navan Travel Payments and transformed what had been a time-consuming process. “Navan Travel Payments gave us real- time visibility into every booking and transaction,” he says. “It made reporting simpler and removed friction from our reconciliation process.”
Navan helped Huel slash 6 hours from this process each month, improve accuracy, and, for the first time, achieve true departmental accountability. “We never had the benefit of seeing our spending breakdown by department,” says Kushal, “and accountability was very hard to track. Now we can see straight away which departments are spending, and we know who to ask for context.”
Expense: 28 days from signing to launch
In March 2025, just 28 days after signing, Huel launched Navan Expense. The rapid implementation reflected both Navan’s streamlined onboarding process and Huel’s focus on quickly getting employees to use the solution.
“Navan Expense only took about a month to implement,” says Kushal, “including the transition from our previous expense platform, along with integrations and customisation of the rules we wanted. It was a really fast turnaround time.” The rollout strategy included a hard cutoff date, clear communication that began three weeks prior, comprehensive training from Navan’s team, and immediate migration of all users.
“We rolled out really quickly, and I think that was way better than trying to roll out individual features over time,” Kushal says. “People are always going to have feedback, so it doesn’t really matter if you do it quickly or slowly. Quicker is better because people can get used to the new system faster, and we can hear feedback and make changes sooner.”.
Seconds, not hours: the new expense experience
For employees, the transformation has been dramatic. Submitting an expense now takes only seconds — employees simply snap a photo, and AI handles the rest. Receipts are automatically scanned, coded, and matched to policy.
“We’ve gone from processing expenses every two weeks with significant manual effort to having everything flow automatically,” says Mohammed. “The time savings for both employees and finance is enormous.” The finance team now saves approximately a day’s worth of work each month on expense and credit card reconciliation alone.
The mobile experience has been central to this success. “Other platforms require taking a picture, saving it, then uploading it to a desktop, which can take up to 10 minutes,” says Kushal. “With Navan, it’s maybe 30 seconds. People who have a lot of expenses are saving hours every year.”
92% mobile adoption: the ultimate validation
With 92% mobile adoption — Huel’s workforce has fully embraced the platform. The 90% CSAT score and NPS of +69 confirm what the adoption rates already showed: employees genuinely value the experience.
“We want to make sure we show that we are quite flexible in how we spend, and that our employees can travel freely,” says Mohammed. “The user experience is the most important thing.”
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We’ve built a travel and expense programme that scales with us, supports our people brilliantly, and gives finance the control and insight we need. Navan has been the right partner at every stage of our growth.
Mohammed Ali
Finance Transformation & AI Manager
Looking to the future
As Huel continues its rapid growth, Navan provides the scalable foundation needed to support expansion whilst maintaining the employee-first experience that drove the initial adoption.
“We need to make sure the business can continue to operate and help us grow, while meeting the requirements around financial control,” says Kushal. “We want to make sure we can work flexibly and still have those levels of control in place.”
The team is focused on making better use of Navan's travel dashboards and analytics to drive more proactive, in-month analysis. "As we learn more about the data, we can start using it better. We want to get to more real-time analysis rather than just month-end," says Kushal. "As a global business, maintaining travel flexibility is important, but we want to ensure we're travelling mindfully and efficiently to minimise our carbon footprint."
Mohammed adds: “We’re looking at how we can use Navan’s analytics even more strategically — identifying travel patterns to negotiate better rates, securing enhanced partnerships with preferred suppliers, and continuing to optimise our programme as we grow.”
The partnership reflects shared values of innovation, user experience, and rapid growth. “We’ve built a travel and expense programme that scales with us, supports our people brilliantly, and gives finance the control and insight we need,” says Mohammed. “Navan has been the right partner at every stage of our growth.”