During the recent Probiota Americas event in Vancouver, presentations and panel discussions explored the trends reshaping the microbiome industry and the factors driving a more competitive, selective marketplace.
A consistent theme was that the category is entering a new phase of maturity—one in which commercial success depends less on broad enthusiasm and more on the ability to demonstrate measurable value.
In this “prove-it” era, brands can no longer rely on the appeal of gut health alone to capture consumer attention. Scientific evidence, precision-driven approaches and credible substantiation are becoming table stakes, while clear messaging and meaningful consumer relevance are emerging as the factors that will distinguish the what’s next.
From bench to influencer: Clear claims and communication needed
Nick Gibson, product insight lead at consumer intelligence firm Nielsen IQ, delivered the opening talk, providing a view into the North American market where economic pressure continues to reshape consumer behavior. He made the case that clear labeling, trusted evidence and accessible education may be as important as the ingredients themselves to communicate value.
In Canada, sales and attribute data show that interest in health and wellness and its subset of gut health and microbiome-related products is strong but that many consumers still face barriers such as cost, confusion, lack of trust and limited guidance.
While food remains the dominant vehicle for gut-health support, microbiome-related claims and ingredients have seen limited growth across packaged food and beverage categories. An exception is products with on-pack prebiotic claims, which are growing about 30% year over year, with momentum accelerating in recent months.
In the more developed U.S. microbiome market, products positioned around prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics, alongside adjacent fiber and brain health categories, are showing stronger sales signals.
Here, products carrying prebiotic claims represent a sizable and expanding market opportunity, with NielsenIQ tracking roughly $8.3 billion in U.S. sales and reporting growth across categories including coffee, broth and energy beverages.
According to Gibson, prebiotic-containing coffee products alone have reached about $50 million in sales and are growing at roughly 500%. Energy beverages with prebiotic claims have surpassed $500 million in sales and are growing at nearly 70%.
Although postbiotic-labeled products remain a much smaller category, generating about $52 million in U.S. sales, they are experiencing rapid growth, driven in part by their stability and compatibility with a wider range of product formats.
“As these products continue to proliferate, it’s going to be increasingly important to have that evidence-based approach, which I know the great experts in this room will be able to speak to; taking that evidence and translating it into simple, clear communication on the shelf, on the pack, online and elsewhere to make it easy for consumers to understand what your value brings to the table,” he said.
Meanwhile, Asia is becoming a global growth engine and critical benchmark for probiotics and supplements, according to a presentation by Peter McMath, chief growth officer at WPIC Marketing + Technologies. The firm is dedicated to helping brands successfully enter and expand in the Asian markets through e-commerce.
Supplements within those markets now account for more than 42% of consumption growth, making the region—and China in particular—a bellwether for the future of the category.
“When we look at China, to set the stage within the nutraceutical and health supplement industry, this is a market that’s doing north of $17 billion annually,” McMath said. “It grew at 14% from calendar year ‘24 to ‘25, and it’s now the second-largest market after the United States.”
He described the country as a “consumption powerhouse, citing its more than 1.3 billion consumers and $3 trillion in annual online spending. While online penetration in markets such as the United States and Canada sits at about 18% of consumer spend, he said China’s figure is 51%, making e-commerce central to consumer behavior.
In this market, e-commerce and social commerce ecosystems like Tmall, JD.com and Douyin are shaping consumer discovery and purchase behavior, and influencers, livestreaming, short-form video and AI-powered content are becoming central to building awareness and driving supplement sales.
“Marketplaces are increasingly behaving like social media platforms, while social media platforms are becoming marketplaces,” McMath said. “The reality is all of these ecosystems and all of these big online channels are becoming more and more the same, and so it’s important for brands to understand the benefits as well as the headwinds within these marketplaces.”
China’s platform landscape also differs from many Western markets. Global entertainment platforms including Apple TV, Netflix and HBO are not available, but mobile-first short-form video platforms have become mainstream entertainment channels.
Douyin has evolved into a major revenue channel, reaching about one billion monthly active users and generating more than 70% of its revenue through influencers and livestreaming. It is expected to process more than $570 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) this year, compared with an estimated $33 billion for TikTok Shop globally and approximately $13 billion for TikTok Shop in the United States.
McMath added that Douyin allows foreign brands to sell foreign-labeled products directly to Chinese consumers without requiring Blue Hat product registration.
Cross-border e-commerce now represents 54% of the $2.5 billion health supplements market being transacted through the channel, with sales growing 18% year over year. Within probiotics, WPIC estimated the cross-border market at nearly $500 million in 2025. Foreign, non-Chinese-owned brands account for the vast majority of those sales.
“It’s really never been easier to launch a brand in China to get that first sale, but really what matters is can we get the second and the third sale—and so measuring and starting to think about retention and repeat and having a product that delivers on its promise is now one of the most critical things for brands to understand and to be able to win within Asia,” he said.
What consumers want next: Identifying gaps, formats and occasions
The Innovation in Action portion of the program explored potential whitespaces in a biotics market driven by gut health but no longer defined by a single digestive health question. More specific need states including women’s wellness, prenatal and postnatal support, sleep, mood, joint mobility, sports nutrition and weight journey support are beginning to attract share.
According to Afif Ghanoum, founder of AI-powered market insights firm CPG Radar, who looked at the evolution of the probiotic category, demand is expanding faster than the shelf and the next phase of growth will be dependent on specificity, substantiation and condition-based positioning.
“The audience is ready, the science is the unlock, and the categories with the most headroom are the ones where strain-level differentiation matters most,” he said.
CPG Radar analyzed more than 10 million customer ratings and conversations, 230,000 probiotic-related marketing claims and over 7,200 products across 20 categories. It then evaluated the data against SKU share, claim prevalence, sales share and consumer demand, accounting for the greater market impact of higher-selling products.
“When you look for the gaps between those, that’s where the real opportunity emerges,” he said. “While gut health is still the engine, the way consumers are analyzing the category is really starting to change.”
He pointed to three signals that suggest the category is ready for “a quality upgrade for the next generation of gut health products”: claim stacking without clinical anchors, repeated use of the same top strains and growing consumer scrutiny of whether products are supported by human clinical evidence.
On average, he said, a probiotic gut health product makes more than 21 marketing claims, many without clear clinical substantiation. What’s more, the top five strains appear in more than 25% of products, creating a sense of sameness for consumers, who are starting to call out individual strains like Akkermansia, B. longum and L. reuteri and associating them with specific benefit areas.
That trend creates both opportunity and risk, Ghanoum noted, warning that consumer perception can run ahead of the science.
The opportunity, he said, lies in branded ingredients that can support clinically substantiated claims, explain a specific mechanism of action and position products around clear conditions rather than broad wellness language.
Discussing what product developers and ingredient companies must do to meet these demand gaps in a maturing market, Jacqueline Jacques, co-founder and president of Thrive Advisory Group, reinforced the same core shift towards more specific, substantiated, consumer-relevant benefits but focused more on the practical requirements for turning biotic ingredients into successful products.
These span format innovations that fit daily rituals, stability and viability in popular formats like gummies and liquids, cost-in-use, sensory appeal and benefits consumers can understand or feel to promote repeat-purchase behavior.
“If you are looking to be successful as a biotic ingredient, this is where the disruption is happening, and this is where the growth is happening, and it’s where the billion-dollar exits are happening,” Jacques said.
She also warned that many ingredient companies continue to focus on selling to incumbent brands, even though much of the category growth is coming from insurgent companies, whose innovation is later acquired by the larger players—see Unilever’s recent acquisition of green gummy brand Grüns.
Prebiotic soda illustrates the convergence of many of these maturing microbiome market forces. “Better-for-you soda” poster child Olipop for one is positioning its product as both a beverage innovation and a potential public health play, using the familiar soda format to deliver higher fiber and lower sugar.
Doug Bolster, vice president of scientific and medical affairs at Olipop, discussed the company’s strategy to use soda as a familiar vehicle for changing consumer behavior through flavor and nutritional profile in a category with significant household penetration.
Launched to market in early 2019, Olipop capitalized on the early consumer interest in the microbiome by reframing soda as something to upgrade rather than eliminate. It offers a simple, accessible message: Replace traditional sugar-laden soda with a prebiotic alternative that helps feed beneficial gut bacteria the fiber they need to thrive.
The company’s modern soda positioning is bolstered by a dedicated research program exploring the microbiome and glycemic effects of its proprietary OliSmart blend of intentionally diverse sources of fibers and botanical extracts. It views this investment in formulation science and product-based clinical research as critical to building consumer trust through evidence-based functional benefits.
“Our ability to impact human health at scale is real,” Bolster said. “For every gram of fiber that we add and every gram of sugar that we take out, we’re moving closer towards that mission.”
