At this year’s SupplySide Global natural ingredients tradeshow in Las Vegas, women’s health commanded attention across education sessions and supplier booths as companies increasingly position themselves to address the needs of a market valued at over $60 billion and growing.
“I feel like we need to stop talking about women’s health as a trend,” said Jennifer Greer, ND, Med, during a panel discussion about supporting women’s health across every life stage. “That’s sort of what people have been saying at the last couple of trade shows that I’ve attended: ‘Oh, women’s health is trending.’ It’s not a trend. This is our life.”
The supplement industry is parsing that lifetime into distinct stages and exploring how ingredients, from botanicals to biotics, can support women through hormonal transitions. The conversation is also broadening beyond estrogen to recognize how external life stressors like career demands and community care, can influence everything from sleep and cardiovascular health to mental well-being and energy levels throughout cycles, stages and milestones.
The categories and ingredients moving the market
According to Nutrition Business Journal (NBJ) insights, women’s health needs are becoming important drivers of growth across subcategories including hair, skin and nails, sexual health, menopause, general health and pre- and post-natal health.
Traditional vitamins, minerals and botanicals continue to anchor the category, while innovation is expanding into biotics, adaptogens and specialty bioactives. Among the botanicals gaining particular traction is shatavari, the “Queen of Herbs,” which featured prominently across supplier booths.
The ingredient evolution is supported by emerging science linking women’s health to the gut microbiome, metabolic health, stress, sleep, sexual wellness and healthy aging.
“Women’s health is experiencing this movement right now where we’re getting really into targeted health solutions, and women are wanting some solutions that are a little bit more specific to certain symptoms than just a women’s multi,” said Erika Craft, data and insights manager at NBJ.
Within that movement, NBJ projects that the U.S. menopause supplement category will reach close to $819 million in sales by the end of 2026, with channel growth of 10% outpacing a U.S. supplement industry projected to grow at 7.1%.
That market momentum reflects a much broader shift in how menopause is understood and discussed. Once largely confined to medical settings and women’s magazines, the topic began shedding its taboos nearly a decade ago and now features in mainstream media, the workplace, celebrity culture, consumer markets and even in an Executive Order signed by President Trump on Oct. 19 advancing women’s health to improve outcomes in all phases of life ahead of the mid-term elections.
On Oct. 27, the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Dietary Supplements hosted the first installment of a dedicated webinar series focused on why the menopause transition is now an important public health and research issue.
The shift is also shaping how companies think about and develop menopause-related products.
During a “Menopause by design: Building better women’s health solutions” education session, IFF Health Sciences outlined an “intentional, multi-pathway approach” targeting women’s life stages. The design-innovation process connects biology and other contributing factors to address clusters of symptoms, from difficulty concentrating and sleeplessness to low energy and unusual vaginal discharge.
“Ultimately, these things, they travel together, and they have a broader impact on your quality of life every day,” said Shelby Linville, MBA, associate director of North America commercial marketing at IFF.
“The problem is that in our industry, we have defined menopause, we have defined these macro categories, and we often lead with these categories that mean something to us, but not necessarily to human beings, to women. So, there’s an opportunity to lead with the experiences that women are feeling and really connect with them and help foster a relationship of trust and dependability when we’re making products for women and menopause specifically.”
Among the other women-specific experiences and life-stages identified by the supplement industry are menstruation and PMS, fertility, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), prenatal nutrition, postpartum recovery and, increasingly, perimenopause as its own scalable category.
The science and innovation supporting the moving market
Across education sessions and supplier booths, companies showcased the science connecting their standardized ingredients to specific symptoms and outcomes.
For nutritional biochemist and industry consultant Anthony Almada, that science starts with the standardization of the extract itself. Presenting pre-print research on the Safr’Inside-branded saffron extract from French ingredient supplier Activ’Inside, he likened two products labeled as saffron to wines made by different winemakers from the same grape variety: Their profiles can differ dramatically. Sourcing, harvesting, extraction, analytical methods, packaging and storage all influence the concentration of key compounds and their subsequent biological effects.
Almada shared study findings showing that daily supplementation with 30 mg of Safr’Inside for 12 weeks improved overall menopausal symptoms, mood disturbances and night sweats in healthy perimenopausal Pakistani women. Effects emerged around six weeks, with cortisol regulation and gut-brain axis activity tied to the extract’s chemical profile identified as potential mechanisms. Active’Inside also recently published pre-print results from a trial evaluating the SafrInside’s effects on PMS symptoms.
The discussion then turned to when menopause-related changes begin. Almada referenced a recently published paper in Nature Medicine by researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, who framed menopause as an abrupt, body-wide physiological cliff rather than a slow, gradual transition. Accelerating changes in sex hormone levels preceded those shifts, pointing to a potential window for preventive care almost a decade before menopause.
“They described the change in hormones, follicle-stimulating hormone, estradiol and one that is rarely measured, and most women don’t know, anti-mullerian hormone, which is another indicator of ovarian reserve— that those begin 12 to 15 years before the final menstrual period, and symptoms or changes in the kidney function, liver function, blood limits and bone density began to decline before the final menstrual period,” Almada explained.
The session, “Women’s wellness matures: Frontiers in solutions for perimenopause, menopause and postmenopause,” also featured Kratika Gupta, chief strategy and marketing officer at OmniActive, and Joel Evans, MD, OB/GYN, senior medical consultant to Kaneka Nutrients.
Gupta traced the eight-step innovation process behind OmniActive’s new Fenavari, from identifying women’s multi-symptom needs and selecting and standardizing relevant ingredients to translating healthcare practitioner trust into consumer confidence. The result is a synergistic fenugreek-shatavari combination developed as a foundational single-ingredient, multi-benefit solution. Gupta described it as clinically shown to improve seven key concerns across perimenopause and menopause.
“The challenge that we took on was to not leave one ingredient out but instead try to get the best out of both,” she said. “Cracking that was the real innovation, frankly. You cannot have isolated solutions for isolated concerns because you’re not talking isolated concerns.”
Evans focused on cellular energy, discussing the role of Kaneka’s Ubiquinol ingredient in counteracting oxidative stress and impaired mitochondrial energy production as estrogen levels decline through the menopause transition. Kaneka links these changes to familiar symptoms such as brain fog and fatigue, as well as declines in skeletal muscle integrity and cognitive function and more serious cardiovascular risks that disproportionately affect women later in life.
“When we lose estrogen in perimenopause and menopause, we are losing one of the main antioxidants at the cellular level, and that isn’t good,” Evans said.
“The oxidant-antioxidant balance changes, and so we don’t have healthy mitochondria and healthy cells and the LDL protection anymore. That’s one of the reasons that we see, number one, menopausal symptoms, but number two, the health issues that all of a sudden crop up in women once they hit menopause, like heart disease, because LDL now becomes oxidized and forms plaque. Ubiquinol makes up for that loss of estrogen antioxidant protection.”
Moving beyond hormonal balance, connecting with the consumer
Presenters and panelists also highlighted the importance of communicating ingredient science accurately and appropriately to the market, ensuring that claims are not overstated or misrepresented and that consumer expectations can be met.
“We need to be very, very mindful of not making false overarching promises,” said Meghan Taylor, director of science and innovation at supplement brand MaryRuth’s, who joined Greer for the Kerry-sponsored panel discussion on supporting women’s health at every life stage.
“We need to be realistic to what we are actually offering…I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more specificity within women’s health, particularly, the luteal phase, the follicular phase, and just welcoming that as an industry and understanding that we are complex creatures that require complex solutions.”
While “hormonal balance” has become a catch claim in the category, Taylor pushed back on the concept of balance, suggesting “hormonal regulation” may be more appropriate in a world where women are actually feeling hormonally flat.
The broader life-stage approach gives suppliers an opportunity to position their portfolios around practical solutions that address the tangible health concerns women experience throughout their lives, particularly during times when they might not feel like themselves.
Woman-owned and -led ingredient supplier Artemis International, for one, used this year’s show to introduce The Artemis Woman, a branded collection of its existing berry and botanical ingredients designed to address women’s evolving health needs throughout life. Rather than focusing on just menopause or hormonal changes, the collection spans heart, gut, immune, hormonal, metabolic, and bone and joint health.
“Women’s health has been a popular area driving significant product development and innovation,” said Melanie Bush, vice president of science and research at Artemis. “We brought together a range of existing ingredients under one brand, The Artemis Woman, to make it easier to identify the different health categories they support.”
Kerry is also positioning its ingredient portfolio to focus on women’s most relevant adulthood health needs including cognitive, digestive, vascular, vaginal and metabolic health.
“When we look at women as a broad category, we focus so much on the hormones that we don’t really look at the rest of the body,” said Amy Smith, senior director of medical affairs for Kerry Proactive Health in North America. “When we run clinical studies, we are looking at hormone levels, but there’s so much more to the way that your body responds and receives those hormones as chemical messengers. We really need to pay attention to the whole system.”
Recognizing the interconnectedness of women’s health also presents an opportunity for brands to educate consumers and establish credibility in a growing market. Building that trust can translate into long-term customer relationships, Greer noted.
“Once you have built trust with your end user consumer, that leads to repeat buyers, and that’s what we’re all looking for in a business, so don’t be afraid to educate just for the sake of education because that is going to build something even deeper and greater,” she said.
Beyond providing women with practical solutions for their own health needs, the category may also serve as a gateway for greater household supplement consumption, given women’s influence over their families’ health decisions.
