Last week’s top headlines included the US federal court banning 19 fake online Urolithin A sellers, an EU novel food approval for Eggnovo’s eggshell membrane ingredient, and a report from Growth Asia outlining TCI’s strategy for developing functional probiotics.
Federal court bans 19 fake online Urolithin A sellers, awards Timeline $5.3M
The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts has granted default judgments against 19 online sellers found to have marketed and sold nutritional supplements falsely advertised as containing Urolithin A.
The order, entered July 15 by Judge Myong J. Joun in Amazentis SA et al. v. The Partnerships and Unincorporated Associations Identified on Schedule “A” permanently enjoins 19 defaulting defendants from manufacturing, marketing, distributing or selling Urolithin A products.
The court also ordered the defendants to pay Timeline damages ranging from $500 to more than $2.7 million each, based on the scale of their sales of fraudulent products. For several defendants, the court tripled the awards as enhanced damages, bringing the total award to more than $5.3 million. Timeline previously entered into stipulated judgments with those defendants that did appear in the case.
Eggnovo’s eggshell membrane ingredient receives Novel Food approval
The European Commission has approved Eggnovo’s enzymatically produced eggshell membrane (ESM) hydrolysate as a novel food for use in food supplements across the EU.
The approval takes effect on July 23, 2026, and from then, companies in Europe can use the ingredient in food supplements for the general adult population at levels up to 500 mg per day.
Eggnovo applied for approval in 2022, and after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reviewed the ingredient’s safety, it concluded that the ingredient is safe for healthy adults, excluding pregnant and breastfeeding women.
The company also receives five years of protection for its proprietary scientific data, meaning it has exclusive rights to use the approved research supporting this ingredient until July 23, 2031, unless another company gains approval using its own independent data.
The EU has also changed the ingredient name from “egg membrane collagen peptides” to “egg membrane hydrolysate (enzymatically produced)” because the ingredient contains other proteins and compounds, not just collagen.
Maria Marchueta, marketing manager at Eggnovo, told NutraIngredients that the updated name better reflects the true nature of the ingredient.
“While collagen is one of its naturally occurring components, the ingredient is much more than collagen peptides,: Marchueta said. “It is an enzymatically produced hydrolysate of eggshell membrane, containing a complex matrix of proteins and bioactive compounds.
“We believe this terminology provides a more accurate description of the ingredient.”
Paradigm shift: Next frontier of probiotics lies in traceability and functionality – TCI
Taiwanese company TCI says the next frontier of probiotics is not drawing more correlations between the gut and other organs, but tracing what travels between and building a more complete evidence chain.
At NutraIngredients’ recent Growth Asia Summit 2026, Lucas Chang, R&D Manager (Human Microbiome) at TCI, emphasized that advanced probiotic delivery must evolve from resolving a logistics issue to addressing biological challenges.
“For a long time, probiotic delivery had a very clear engineering logic — protect the microbe from harsh conditions, keep it viable through transit, and release it into the intestine. Success was often defined by one event: survival and arrival,” Chang said.
“But arrival is only the beginning. What happens next depends on context, ecosystem, and function.”
He argued the real advance in gut-axis science is not drawing another arrow; it is being able to trace biology.
He added: “We want a strain that not just arrives alive, but one that does a specific job after arrival. And this changes the order of product design.
“Instead of asking ‘which strain should I add?’, start with the health outcome and functions you want to change. Trace the biology backwards, define the microbial job, then build the probiotic strain, function and delivery around it. Delivery gets the cell to the gut, and function gives it a reason to be there.”
