How leading supplement brands plan to win market share as the category balloons in size

The supplement category was worth around $57 billion last year, according to Future Market Insights, and it’s projected to reach $239 billion by 2028, according to Research and Markets.

Vitamin therapy was first used in Western medicine in the early 1900s to treat issues like rickets or scurvy, which were caused by deficiencies in calcium and vitamin C, respectively. Commercialized vitamins were inspired by Traditional Chinese Medicine and hit the market in the 1930s. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that vitamins gained mass popularity, according to the National Library of Medicine. 

However, experts believe that it was the global Covid-19 pandemic that caused the largest sea change. ‘Health is wealth’ became a core value across demographics and, today, more than 75% of Americans take at least one supplement per day, according to Mintel. What’s more, a third of supplement users have increased their supplement intake since the pandemic and half of millennials are using supplements more often than they did before the pandemic. 

The beauty industry has joined in with an expansion of the “Inside outside” product trend, which includes targeting issues like hair health with a corresponding topical and ingestible combination, often sold bundled.

Last year, Unilever acquired a majority stake in Nutrafol, a hair-health-focused supplement brand available in Sephora. And earlier this month, L’Oréal backed a Swiss biotech company called Timeline with a proprietary molecule said to increase cell longevity through ingestibles.

Celebrities have also lined up to enter the space. Kate Hudson’s InBloom range of vitamin-packed drink mixes is available at Whole Foods; Jennifer Lopez sells a beauty multivitamin as part of her JLo Beauty line; Steve Harvey’s L’Evate You offers green drink mixes to boost energy; and, as of this week, designer Stella McCartney announced her foray into the space with a new multivitamin targeted toward skin health. 

Of course, the Kardashian-Jenners, who led the way in the space promoting biotin hair gummies on social media nearly a decade ago, have now earned a growing market share. To wit: Kourney Kardashian’s Lemme gummies, tinctures and pills just landed in Target stores. 

Q1 is the most important selling season of the year for the wellness industry, and as more brands enter the space, those leading in innovation and safety are doubling down on their points of difference. They say providing this information has become increasingly important as customers become more educated about America’s loose regulations and the growing public concern over purity and transparency. 

To learn about the issues facing top supplement brands today, as well as where the industry could be headed in the next year, Glossy talked with industry leaders to discuss the strategies that have proven the most effective in this expanding category. Leading with data, focusing on education and preparing for inevitable new regulation were the top topics discussed, as described below. 

Data should help lead product development

Paying attention to new ingredient curiosity among consumers is crucial, so brands like Hum Nutrition have let their customers lead part of their product development strategy. 

“We select the concerns [our community] would like us to formulate for,” Walter Faulstroh, CEO and co-founder of Hum Nutrition, told Glossy. The company gathers this information through an on-site quiz and monitors analytics on its blog and social media. 

“It has helped us sharpen our R&D process and be ahead of the game a little bit,” he said. “For example, we saw very early on that berberine was trending [online] as an ingredient, so glucose level management is definitely a hot topic. Berberine had a big moment [online], and we were one of the first brands to speak about that ingredient on our blog and we saw a real appetite from our audience. We couldn’t find a clean version of berberine in the market, so we decided to launch it, and it’s one of our best sellers now.” 

Hum Nutrition launched in 2012 and is privately held. It employs more than 100 people and has taken on four rounds of funding, according to PitchBook. Hum is sold DTC and in Sephora, Target and Nordstrom, among other retailers.

Having captivating educational content is a non-negotiable

Brand marketing has usurped growth marketing across industries thanks to growing customer acquisition costs, leading many brands to lean deeper into creating educational, SEO-optimized digital content. Seven-year-old Ritual, an industry leader that surpassed $100 million in sales in 2021, is leaning deeper into educating potential customers about its unique offerings. 

Lindsay Dahl, chief impact officer at Ritual, told Glossy that the brand uses a variety of analytics to see what content is being consumed on its blog, which covers primers on vitamin types and sustainability explainers, among other topics. “We’re constantly looking at what kind of content is resonating with people,” she said. “For example, we did this guide on how to shop the supplements aisle. It’s so funny because that type of content for other industries is kind of played out, but in our industry, it’s not.” Ritual has also seen success in discussing misconceptions around synthetic versus natural ingredients, sourcing and a supplement’s carbon footprint, to name examples. “That myth-busting type of content really educates consumers,” she said. 

A recent social media success for Hum was a campaign around its Flatter Me digestive enzyme. The content included Bill Nye-like experiments titled “Flatter Me versus food,” where viewers can see how Flatter Me breaks down food in a bowl in just a few hours. “We were thinking, ‘OK, how can we demonstrate that this product works? How can we showcase it breaking down the food?” Faulstroh said.

A “Flatter me versus Thanksgiving” video collected more than 300,000 views, when most of the brand’s TikToks get under 1,000 views. “Flatter me versus pumpkin pie” received over a million views this fall. Today, Flatter Me is the brand’s top seller. 

“Follower count doesn’t matter. Having a Gen Z person running [your TikTok] does,” Faulstroh said. 

For Perelel, a brand launched in 2020 with a focus on nutritional support for all stages of a woman’s reproductive journey, building trust started with a rigorous amount of content. The aim was to teach consumers about its scientific process, doctor-stacked panel and other points of difference. “[Our customer began to] trust us because of the doctors that are involved in the formulation and all the content that comes with it,” said Alex Taylor, co-founder and co-CEO of Perelel Health. 

Perelel secured $4.7 million in seed funding from Unilever Ventures and others last year. 

Sustainability is becoming table-stakes

“We get a lot of important and interesting questions around packaging,” said Ritual’s Dahl. ”At first, people don’t understand why our multivitamin bottles are made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic [instead of glass]. Understanding why that is a lower carbon option [requires] telling those stories around the complexities that go into our packaging selection.”

In 2021, Hum implemented a program to swap all of its virgin plastic packaging for ocean-bound plastic and found it a win-win. “There wasn’t a big cost difference, it was just a question of working with the right supply chain partners,” Hum’s Faulstroh told Glossy. “We’re talking about pennies [per bottle].”

Hum began swapping virgin plastic for recycled plastic in 2021 and keeps a tally of its efforts on its website. As of this week, its running counter of ocean-bound plastic bottles that it’s diverted from becoming pollution exceeds 24 million.

Use of plastic is a growing concern among consumers that Hum is looking to get ahead of. For example, in a report published in December 2022 in the Journal of Cleaner Production, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, “The use of recycled plastic is stated to have positively affected purchase decisions of 86% of consumers [studied].”

Purity is a fast-growing consumer value

Thanks in part to a growing number of investigations and lawsuits, conscious consumers are becoming increasingly educated about the issues plaguing the supplement industry, such as contamination and inaccurate labeling. 

“Transparency is king, especially in an industry where there’s a high level of skepticism,” Ritual’s Dahl told Glossy. 

For example, in 2015, the New York State Attorney General’s office tested supplements from Walmart, Walgreens, Target and GNC and found that four out of five contained none of the herbs listed on the bottle. Instead, many included a mix of rice, garlic and house plants.

More recently, lawsuits around inaccurate labeling of ingredient levels have sparked consumer outrage. Last year, a line of kid’s melatonin supplements called Zarbee’s was sued after an independent lab allegedly found more than 200x the amount of melatonin supposed to be in a bottle. Procter & Gamble is in a similar suit for its Vicks Pure Zzzs Nightly Sleep, which is alleged to have included 150x the amount of melatonin on the package.

As customers become more savvy shoppers, transparency and purity will become even more important, which experts say requires third-party, randomized testing for true consumer trust.

“Of course we can say we hold ourselves accountable, but [brands] need that outside verification to keep everyone in check,” HUM’s Faulstroh told Glossy. “I’m really proud to have all products certified by the Clean Label Project.” 

Brands including Ritual, MaryRuth’s, Puori, Goli and dozens others have also gained certification from Clean Label Project. The non-profit company purchases products already in the market, as a consumer would, before testing them with a third-party accredited lab. This ensures a randomness that better ensures broad safety and applies a checks-and-balances-like system into the supply chain, said Jackie Bowen, executive director of Clean Label Project. 

Contrary to what one may assume, testing is not prohibitively expensive: Bowen told Glossy that labs charge about $120 to test a bottle of vitamins for lead, for example. It entails heating the product to the temperature of the sun until everything disintegrates except any heavy metal contaminants. 

Heavy metals, which include lead, arsenic and mercury, among others, are naturally found in the earth’s crust. But, because of mining, fracking and other industrial processes, they often contaminate the soil and water, and find their way into plants harvested for vitamins. This causes contaminated products, as well. 

So why isn’t the testing process more common? “Once you have certain information, you’re obligated to do something about it,” Bowen said. She believes that brands would rather not know about contamination than be forced to revamp an entire supply chain after gaining undesired test results.

Clean Label Project also does broad category testing. “When we test a category, we use IRI or Nielsen data to figure out which products make up 80% of the overall retail sales in America [and we focus on testing those],” Bowen said. “What we typically see is the ‘Pareto principle,’ where 80% of the contaminant load comes from 20% of the industry.” 

Bowen said that a value-focused MSRP correlates less than one may assume with contamination. Instead, certain vitamin types, like fish oil, mined minerals, herbs and hemp, are more inherently contaminated, no matter the cost of the bottle to a consumer.

Preparedness for inevitable regulatory changes is crucial

Currently, the supplement market is regulated by the FDA, primarily through the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. It treats supplements like food, so manufacturers don’t have to prove efficacy or safety before going to market. Meanwhile, the FTC regulates claims made by brands and retailers.

“We are at a potential tipping point for a new frontier of safety and regulation in dietary supplements,” Bowen said. “The entire dietary supplement industry should sit up and take notice of what is happening within prenatal vitamins.”

That is, there’s a cultural shift toward brands that can prove efficacy and purity for an increasingly discerning generation of women. Quickly growing brands, like Ritual, Perelel and Hum, carry out third-party testing to ensure safety, which some of the industry is either unwilling or unable to copy. For example, in a report released earlier this month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the group that provides auditing, evaluative and investigative services for Congress, researchers found that half of the prenatal supplements tested were positive for heavy metals lead or cadmium. It also found that “11 of 12 prenatal supplements had at least one nutrient above or below the levels noted on label.”

Bowen believes that the framework for substantial regulation on supplements was created with the recent controversy around baby formula and food. After numerous investigations by the media and a congressional investigation in 2021, Americans became aware of ubiquitous lead contamination in popular baby food brands like Gerber, Beech-Nut, Earth’s Best Organic and many others. 

As happens with many industries, California legislation has outpaced the FDA. In 2023, California pushed the goalpost further with AB988, a new law requiring all baby food manufacturers that sell into California to test representative samples for toxic ingredients like heavy metals on a monthly basis

This, as one might expect, led to hyper-awareness of the safety of prenatal vitamins. In 2023, the FDA released new recommended limits for heavy metals as part of a campaign to raise awareness of contamination testing, called “Closer to Zero.” 

The Federal Trade Commission has also stepped in with a new compliance guidance in December of 2022. “The FTC is going to ramp up, and we want that,” said Victoria Thain Gioia, founder and co-CEO of Perelel Health. “[We hope] they will cut back on the outrageous claims that companies can say and force [marketers] to be more buttoned up on telling the truth of what’s in your product.”

Bowen believes change will start on the West Coast. “The state of California is going to ultimately set federal policy by just being that much more nimble and being able to implement what it is that consumers have wanted for years,” Bowen said. She said this will be the framework for how the next wave of regulation reaches the American marketplace and dramatically shifts the market share in the favor of early adopters.

As part of its 2024 legislative proposal, the FDA has requested enhanced authority to regulate foods made for infants and young children, including testing requirements for contaminants, as well as supplements for all ages. 

Ritual, which is based on total transparency in sourcing and purity, a first for the industry, also launched a campaign in 2023 to lobby Congress for more regulation. 

“There’s a lot of opportunity for bipartisan movements on supplement reform. Now that there’s been an explosion of the industry and the FDA is now asking for more oversight, you have companies like Ritual asking for more oversight,” Dahl told Glossy. “This is the perfect recipe for the beginning of change.”