| | | | | What consumers don't know about gut health could be a challenge for brands | For years, we have assumed that consumers are growing more sophisticated about gut health and supplements like prebiotics and probiotics, but consumer research in NBJ’s new Gut Health Report suggests “sophisticated” might not be the right word.
A better word might be “accepting,” as in consumers accepting that gut health offers a broad array of benefits far outside the digestive tract. But what a survey included in the report seems to be telling us is that they don’t know a lot about how the ingredients are supplying those benefits.
This is true across all supplement categories, to some extent. People don’t need to know exactly what vitamin D does or how it does it to know that vitamin D is good for you. Gut health seems more complex than vitamins, however, or at least more unfamiliar. Maybe “accepting” is all that can be expected for gut health.
Putting aside the mechanisms of action, the acceptance has clearly deepened. The “gut-brain axis” hardly needs to be explained, and consumers are seeing the worth in the gut-skin axis as well. The fact that the survey garnered more responses from people hoping to optimize their health via their guts than were seeking to solve a digestive condition tells us how strong that acceptance has become. Immunity still ranking as a primary reason for the gut health optimizers to seek supplements is especially encouraging. Immunity drove probiotic sales during the pandemic, and the appeal has proven to have legs.
The idea of consumer sophistication, however, seems less steady. To gauge how familiar consumers are with gut health products, we included the fictitious “phobiotics” among such actual ingredients as probiotics, prebiotics and postbiotics. We learned that more respondents were somewhat or very familiar with “phobiotics” than said the same of synbiotics, which are combinations of prebiotics and probiotics. The familiarity was nearly the same for “phobiotics” as it was for digestive bitters.
The results reveal how much more education is needed to build the sophistication that could drive more gut health sales. Acceptance is doing well for the industry—well enough to build a market NBJ estimates at $4.2 billion in 2024—but a bigger market may hinge on consumers who know enough to engage beyond accepting the marketing messages. |
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| Rick Polito | | As Nutrition Business Journal's editor-in-chief, Rick Polito writes about the trends, deals and developments in the natural nutrition industry, looking for the little companies coming up and the big money coming in. An award-winning journalist, Polito knows that facts and figures never give the complete context and that the story of this industry has always been about people. |
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