The rise of beverages
“The biggest change that we’re seeing right now is the move towards food and beverage formats,” said Dicker, who added that he saw a lot of companies touting that their ingredients are beverage-friendly.
“That’s where consumers are headed,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of research recently, and we’ve shown that if you’re under 35, you prefer your supplements in food and beverage format. You over-index actually significantly, and if you’re older than that, you actually prefer them in traditional pill and powder formats and supplement formats. And so, because those are already well established, those aren’t going away.”
Another novel delivery format on display in Las Vegas were jellies, particularly for ingredients like collagen, Dicker noted.
Peptides
Peptides are one of the word du jour. Although it is important to draw a distinction between food-derived or nutritional versus the more controversial injectable forms, the term is resonating with consumers.
“Anytime someone can say that this is a peptide, they are saying it’s a peptide, and there’s good and bad versions of that,” Dicker said. “But people hear peptides are good for you. It varies so wildly that we’d have to talk about an individual one, but look for the continued use of the word wherever applicable going forward.”
Healthy longevity, metabolic health, and more
In terms of the primary health positionings being promoted on the show floor, Dicker highlighted longevity, men’s and women’s health, and metabolic health.
“There’s a lot more focus on men’s health,” he said. “Testosterone is something we’ve talked about all year. And longevity. Muscle health is [also] big, and metabolic health.”
Energy was another notable addition to the conversation, as the category has seen an evolution over the past few years with high and low caffeine claims alongside additional ingredients like ketones and paraxanthine (a caffeine metabolite).
“People seem to be trying to position away from energy to calm energy, focus energy—so, adding one more word to energy to really differentiate themselves,” Dicker said.
What was missing?
Dicker also discussed what was conspicuously absent, or at least at least less present than in year’s past. Top of that list were mushrooms and adaptogens.
“I think, in the past couple years, we saw a lot more functional mushrooms,” Dicker said. “Not to say that they’re not here, but the quantity and the variations of them to me has been less. Similarly adaptogens, and then when we come to health focus, there’s always the collagen push for joint health, and I still expect that in the near future we’ll see a push more for anti-inflammatory.”
Watch the video for the full interview.
