Speaking during a webinar hosted by the International Alliance of Dietary and Food Supplement Associations (IADSA) last week, experts in food safety, market research, regulation and nutrition discussed how existing approaches to risk assessment and management can keep pace with market developments and be applied consistently across jurisdictions.
“The food supplements and functional food sector is evolving rapidly, and food safety needs to evolve with it,” said Maura Di Martino, food safety specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, whose opening presentation examined the sector’s emerging food-safety risks, differing regulatory approaches and priorities for supporting safe innovation.
From horizon scanning to food safety priorities
The FAO started to focus on supplements and functional foods after its food safety horizon-scanning work repeatedly detect signals of growing demand across regions and information sources, alongside changes in products and the regulatory landscape.
Di Martino noted that increasing demand for supplements is not driven by s single factor but rather a combination of broader societal trends, including an aging population, more sedentary lifestyle and growing health consciousness. These trends interact with other influences on individual choice like media coverage, advice from health care professionals, health claims and cultural beliefs.
“As a result, the market is not only growing but also becoming more diverse with a wider range of products, ingredients and formulation, so for competent authorities, this is important from a food safety perspective, as products may fall under a very different regulatory context,” she said.
Di Martino presented the FAO’s 2025 report on food safety in personalized nutrition as a science-based, shared reference for these competent authorities, particularly in countries where regulatory and technical capacity is still developing.
In this report, the agency identified five areas of concern: interactions with medicines; adulteration and contamination, including undeclared pharmaceuticals, heavy metals and mycotoxins; excessive intake; the altered behavior of concentrated or extracted ingredients; and the growing use of ingredients without a history of safe use.
“Safety is not a property of a product category; it depends on how a product is sourced, manufactured and used,” Di Martino said, adding that health claims can influence how consumers understand and use products, with potential implications for food safety.
“When claims are clear and supported by evidence, they can help consumers make informed choices, but where the link between a claim and evidence is less clear or where a claim could be understood as a promise to treat a condition, consumers may assume a product carries no risk and use it maybe in place of prescribed medication or delay seeking treatment.”
The FAO also cautions that traditional use does not automatically establish the safety of a modern preparation and highlights the value of combining respect for traditional knowledge with scientific evidence and clear regulatory approaches that support safe innovation.
“Today, many supplements use natural ingredients that have been part of traditional practices for centuries, and this connection between traditional knowledge and modern science can offer opportunities; however, modern processing methods, such as extraction, concentration or standardization, can change the properties of an ingredient,” Di Martino said.
FAO’s report calls for stronger capacity building, research on safe intake levels and novel and traditional ingredients, international standards, consumer education, cross-border collaboration and closer engagement among manufacturers, researchers and policymakers.
Trust in supplements, information sources shifting
Presenting consumer insights from Europe, Latin America and Asia, Sara Davidson, research director at market research firm Ipsos, revisited the factors that have informed how consumers engage with supplements across different markets.
“I think we’re all aware that access to healthcare is becoming increasingly challenging for some groups—long waiting times, and the rising cost of care is really placing consumers under some pressure in some cases” she said. “At the same time, though, we’re seeing a real shift towards health empowerment, and arguably, access to health information has never been greater. Now, that ranges from traditional sources like public health authorities, but also newer sources like social media, podcasts and the like.”
Ipsos data shows that between 75% and 99% of those surveyed reported taking supplements in the previous 12 months.
Across markets, the leading motivations were maintaining overall health, supporting the immune system and boosting energy. Between 85% and 94% of consumers said they followed label instructions, while confidence in supplement safety and quality ranged from 72% in South Korea and Europe to 93% in the Philippines. Trust in brands was also high, ranging from 69% in Europe to 96% in Indonesia.
“It’s really unusual to see industries or professions gaining this high level of trust,” Davison said.
The research also showed that that the route to purchase is changing. General internet searches now rival doctors, pharmacists and other health professionals as trusted information sources in some markets.
Ipsos found that 22% to 72% of consumers had bought a supplement following a social media influencer’s recommendation, while 34% to 59% had done so based on a chatbot recommendation.
In the evolving market, Davidson highlighted the consistency across countries as most striking: Consumers use supplements for broadly similar reasons, trust is high, and people are actively navigating an increasingly diverse information environment.
“Ultimately, wherever we look in the world, it does seem that supplements are an important part of the way consumers choose to manage and support their own health,” she said.
No single regulatory model
At the heart of any effective framework is a clear, durable definition of a food supplement that reflects the market it is intended to regulate, according to Simon Pettman, executive director at IADSA, who focused his presentation on practical regulatory architecture.
Such a definition should establish a product’s purpose, composition, physiological or nutritional effect, dosage form and intended use of a food supplement and reflects the market it is intended to regulate,
“It has to be robust enough to be long term to give this regulatory legal stability so it doesn’t have to be reopened on a periodic basis,” Pettman said.
From there, authorities must decide how to assess safety, set conditions of use, assure quality, regulate labeling and claims, manage market entry and conduct post-market surveillance. Countries answer those questions differently depending on their legal structures, institutional culture, resources and strategic priorities.
Here, systems generally rely on dedicated supplement rules, a mixture of category-specific and horizontal food law or predominantly horizontal provisions.
The overall goal, Pettman noted, should be to design nationally while “thinking globally,” using Codex Alimentarius standards, regional convergence, neighboring markets, scientific developments and trade considerations as reference points.
“Coherence with the international framework can help create a common understanding across jurisdictions,” he said. “It can reduce regulatory differences and barriers. It can support cooperation and information exchange and help improve predictability for regulators and also businesses, and lastly and very importantly, it’s to strengthen consumer protection.”
Broadly, countries address the same fundamental regulatory elements, although they may interpret them slightly differently and incorporate them into their national frameworks in different ways.
IADSA: Questions for building the framework
- How do we know it’s safe? →What safety evidence and assessment approaches are used?
- How much can it contain? →How are maximum levels or other conditions of use established?
- How do we ensure quality? →Manufacturing standards, GMP
- What information should consumers receive? → Supplement-specific labeling and other relevant requirements
- What can be communicated about benefits? → Claims, substantiation and permitted approaches
- How does it enter the market? →Notification or other authorization approaches
- How is it overseen once on the market? → Post-market surveillance control and enforcement
During a panel discussion that followed, regulatory and nutrition experts from Brazil, Turkey and Southeast Asia offered different routes to coherence, sharing practical experiences and lessons learned in building effective regulatory systems—ultimately framing dialogue as regulatory infrastructure.
Tiago Lanius Rauber of Brazil’s health regulatory agency Anvisa said the country’s 2018 reform replaced several categories with a single food supplement framework. The change was intended to reduce inconsistency, strengthen consumer protection and provide clearer conditions for innovation through general product requirements, positive ingredient lists, pre-market assessment where needed, notification and post-market oversight.
Digital promotion remains a major challenge, however, particularly where marketplace listings or influencer content make broader, unauthorized claims than a company’s official materials.
“This makes it harder to identify the responsible party and act before the message reaches a large audience,” Rauber said.
Turkey’s experience showed the value of sustained scientific dialogue. Nutrition expert Gülden Pekcan described supplements as having once occupied a “grey zone between food and medicine.” In the mid-2000s, a national scientific working group brought together nutrition scientists, toxicologists, public health experts, government and non-governmental organizations to develop the country’s approach, including work on maximum levels, age groups and botanicals. Some 20 meetings followed.
“National scientific committees are very important because really we learned from each other,” Pekcan said, describing the process as a “training school” that helped participants move toward common positions.
At the regional level, BH Lim, an expert in health supplement regulation in Southeast Asia, discussed the efforts that went into harmonizing an agreement on health supplements across ASEAN’s 10 member states.
Because each began with different systems, traditions and levels of experience, regulators focused on shared core principles and built toward convergence, with industry contributing practical information on manufacturing, quality and the real-world effects of proposed requirements.
“Industry is not there to make decisions,” Lim said. “Those decisions are for the ASEAN member states and their regulators, but that is a real dialogue.”
His central lesson was to combine ambition with realism: “Start with clear principles, be practical and realistic about what can be achieved and build from there.”
