Launched in 2019, Nourished provides personalized gummy supplements, produced with 3D printers, based on online questionnaire results. It can produce more than 5,000 combinations of layers, with up to ten ingredients per stack.
The business expanded beyond online personalized gummy stacks last year and launched into stores across the UK, Europe, Japan and India, with SKUs including three different collagen gummies which use egg shell membrane collagen.
Snover is particularly excited about the potential of the newly launched Collagen+ Gut product, which includes ‘tribiotics’ — pre, pro, and postbiotics — plus vitamins C and D3.
“Usually, probiotics would struggle to survive the gummy manufacturing process. Our gummy production never warms the product to over 75 degrees, meaning we can provide live probiotics.
“I think this is a super exciting product, not just for the average consumer concerned about gut health, but also for the growing number of people taking GLP-1 agonists.
“Many of these users face gut issues and lose elasticity and fullness in their skin. This product can offer support in both these areas.”
AI for research crawling
Discussing how AI advancements have helped the business, Snover explained that she and her team had to manually reads through 10,000 clinical trials when they first launched, in order to tag them and develop an algorithm to create recommendations for customers.
“As you can imagine, that took a very long time. It took longer to do the algorithm than it did to make the 3D printer!
“Now that we have free access to AI agents and low cost access to proficient natural language models, we have automated systems in place to constantly read the databases of research, assess it based on the strict criteria we have set, and then assess for ingredients and dosage levels in order to create curated suggestions for our team to check.”
She added that there could be a good opportunity for AI to help with regulatory compliance across territories.
“Each European country has a different set of rules and some want us to register every single combination of gummy, which is ridiculous considering the numbers we’d be talking about.
“The team and I were joking that we should use an AI agent to submit all six billion combinations for us.”
Gummy dosages under the spotlight
After high profile personal trainer influencer James Smith recently exposed a number of creatine gummy brands for their low dosages, Snover said she was pleased that the ‘cowboys’ were being called out.
“I agree there are some gummies on the market that are rubbish and I support the idea that taking gummies that are full of sugar is counter-productive.
“After seeing James Smith testing for levels in gummies I’m praying he tests my products because what we do takes more time and care, while the bad stuff on the market just adds criticism and damages consumer trust in the industry as a whole.”
She added that her business utilizes “extremely robust encapsulation of each ingredient” and an “extremely rapid” drying of gels to allow the layering of ingredients without antagonistic interaction.
“Vitamins, minerals, botanicals, adaptogens, amino acids, proteins, literally anything can be added to the stack and we can validate for potency and evaluate the life of the product to ensure potency across its two year shelf life,” she said.
“We have over 10,000 third party validations to prove the encapsulation is robust and there’s no interaction between the layers.”
Agility with in-house manufacturing
Snover explained one of the best benefits of running her own manufacturing facility with these personalized 3D printers is the ability to innovate and create new products with very little risk.
Yet this was the element of the business that had investors most concerned in the beginning.
“Getting series A funding was one of the biggest challenges we’ve experienced since 2019. I had a lot of pushback from investors at the start say ‘why are you building your own manufacturing, no startup does that’.
“I’m so happy I did that because despite all the changes and Covid, we have always weathered the storm and been able to pivot and be agile.”
Trending ashwagandha, astaxanthin, lycopein and biotics
Regarding the trends she has noted through the ‘create your own stack’ element of the online service, Snover said some of the ingredients that consumers are most likely to add to their stack are ashwagandha, astaxanthin, lycopein, and biotics.
“The trends are pretty similar across the USA, UK and Japan which is quite surprising. People are becoming more aware of eye health, they are stressed, want better sleep, want more energy, and would like to slim down.”
