Obstacles to further growth in gut health supplementation include—to pick up on the terminology—the very unpredictable nature of this microbiome. “The challenge here is that you may have variability in the product, but also in the microbiome,” says Len Monheit, executive director at the GPA. There may be great variation, he admits, between what a ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ microbiome looks like, and in the concept of ‘dysbiosis.’ Yet research continues to move towards greater specificity, he says. “It is still achievable and desirable to design the programme […] to be specific enough both in impact on the microbiota at species and strain levels, and to ultimately connect this with a health benefit—and measurement to support it.” The overlap between foods and supplements in digestive health is an interesting one. In the Mintel research from 2021, of the 657 non-consumers of any type of VMS, one third explained that they preferred to source their vitamins and minerals from food and drink. This may be of particular relevance to the digestive health sub-category. The larger numbers now working from home could contribute to a greater reliance on fermented and other home-produced food and drink products, Mintel speculates, potentially at the expense of VMS consumption. If so, this could be more widely indicative of the pressures on digestive health products in developed markets. At Prenexus, supplier of the PreneXOS brand of xylooligosaccharide (XOS), CEO Michael Bush paints a picture of a changing landscape when it comes to nutrition in this space. “We see consumers who are concerned with gut health using a variety of probiotic and prebiotic supplements and fortified foods, in addition to naturally-fermented and high-in-prebiotic foods,” he says.
We see consumers who are concerned with gut health using a variety of probiotic and prebiotic supplements and fortified foods, in addition to naturally-fermented and high-in-prebiotic foods.
“There is a shift from supplements to fortified foods, as consumers do prefer to consume their functional ingredients through food products, rather than through daily consumption of pills,” Bush adds. As well as supplements, he expects to see food, drink and petfood launches using the company’s ingredient, which is derived from the sugarcane plant. In fact, while consumer-prepared foods and beverages are a social media phenomenon, few in the industry see them as an existential threat. At California-based ingredients supplier AIDP, business development director Samantha Ford emphasises “the convenience factor.”
“That’s top-of-mind for a lot of consumers,” she says. The real growth, she believes, is in branded foods formulated and fortified with gut-healthy nutrition. “The trailblazers in this space are doing really cool things, adding functional ingredients such as prebiotics to a drink, but talking about the way it makes you feel,” says Ford. “It’s very creative.”
Delivering functional ingredients via fermentation
But options for delivering supplements are also expanding. “Delivery formats should be weighted just as highly as nutrients when innovating in this space,” says Stef Vanquickenborne, VP capsules and health ingredients R&D. In particular, the DRcaps system from Capsugel can optimise challenging ingredients such as probiotics, she says. “They deliver contents at the right time, at the ideal location. This allows for better product performance and user experience—critical factors for repeat purchase.” A further development, also from Capsugel, has been DUOCAP capsule-in-capsule technology. “This can be used for immediate release or combined release; for example, solubilised prebiotics in the outer capsule and probiotics in the inner capsule,” she says. “The prebiotic releases immediately and the probiotic releases later.”