Saying NO to some revenue creating opportunities will help minimize business continuity risk long-term in today’s market! Huh? Isn’t a company’s main goal to maximize shareholder returns, and it would be tough maximizing returns if you are turning down revenue, right? Seems counterintuitive…unless you understand that not all revenue is created equal. When you can master sales velocity, you really have something that is valuable long-term to shareholders…and the best way to do that is by controlling your distribution to focus on partnerships that enhance your company’s goals.

Who doesn’t enjoy a trick, shortcut, or innovative method for accomplishing familiar tasks more easily and efficiently, right? While these type of “life hacks” are heralded throughout society, it’s fraternal twin, known as biohacking, feels like a strange cultlike mix of amateur DIY medicine and things you’d read in futuristic sci-fi novels. Maybe there’s now a “perception is reality” problem happening now, and it’s time for a much needed biohacking rebrand to “best self” for it to be a commercially valuable movement to the CPG industry.

The first significant business to serve an uncontested market has an advantage over competitors coming into the space at a later stage, right? If you’ve read the famous business book Blue Ocean Strategy, it essentially focuses on the first-mover advantage and how it allows you to build brand ubiquity and loyalty before everyone else. While there are many strategy games (or consumer marketplaces) where the player who goes first has a greater likelihood of winning than their opponent…the supplement industry is no longer an example of one!

The fourth-largest beverage brand in the U.S. market just launched an energy drink, which is cool, but shouldn’t industry professionals be more interested in what the Gatorade Fast Twitch product innovation means to PepsiCo’s entire sports nutrition portfolio strategy?

Maybe it’s the mere 300ish miles between their respective company headquarters. Or maybe that both own a leading global sports nutrition brand that does north of $500 million annually in mostly the protein powder category. Or that each company has a vertically-integrated business model. Regardless, it’s natural to see that Glanbia versus The Hut Group (THG) is turning into the sports nutrition “battle of the ages.” If we had this battle handicapped by the Las Vegas sportsbooks, Glanbia would be the huge betting favorite heading into this year’s “All Valley Karate” championship. But as anyone knows the classic 80s movie storyline, Glanbia shouldn’t underestimate the Crane Kick from The Hut Group.

Isotonic beverages, sports drinks, hydration products…whatever you call them, blurring lines and new positionings are creating a fascinating CPG category. The hydration CPG category isn’t so much about invention today as it is about innovation. Invention is creating a totally new thing. Gatorade was something totally new. Today, if you want to create something that has a lasting impact on the CPG world, it needs to be combo of “new” yet “familiar.” Do something too closely related to the market leader and people won’t take notice but do something too novel and they’re confused. In the CPG industry, most successful products do not arrive out of nowhere; they’re remixes of existing ones.

As in-person trade shows come roaring back harder than Mike Tyson hitting you with an uppercut, it’s the perfect time to talk about how you can make an impact at these events without spending 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars exhibiting…

Supplement brands should be thinking about licensing opportunities more strategically. Common sense, right? Yet, many recent brand licensing deals felt more defensive than offensive business strategies. Innovation to parity isn’t going to cut it in this next phase…

Knowledge about the relationship between the gut microbiome and overall health is moving at a rapid clip. An obvious gut reaction to that is by today’s consumers looking for more foods, beverages, and supplements that support gut health. Something else that seems extremely obvious to me is that there will be this sort of flywheel effect in the coming years and decades with new gut health research emerging, which drives additional consumer demand, that feeds more categorical innovation and product development. That increased market size feeds the additional research, and we start back up again bigger and bigger. We are in the early stages of a Gut Health Revolution, is your CPG brand ready to take advantage of it?

What do I see in my crystal ball this year for the Top 5 Supplement Industry Trends in 2023? Gut Performance (purchasing Gut Health Ingredients for athletic performance), Load Up on Only What You Need (Affordability and Value-Orientated Consumer Behavior), Big Brick Poppin' (Large Retail channels winning the share of dollar sales and contribution to growth), Flex Your Brain (proactive consumption for a high achieving life), and Supplementing with Purpose (Rise of purpose-drive sports nutrition brands).

What do I see in my crystal ball this year for the Top 5 Functional Food and Beverage Trends: 3 Rs Effect (Reshoring, Regenerative Agriculture, and Recycled), Algae (Inside & Surrounding the Product), Confidentially Functional Effect (Affordability & Private Label), Mental Health (from Management to Escapism), and Old to New Technology...It's All Disruptive (Precision Fermentation & AI).

I recently had the opportunity to visit the 1st Phorm headquarters in St. Louis, MO. I've probably visited a few hundred corporate offices/facilities over the last decade of J. Schall Consulting, but none of them gave me a feeling like this one. It had an energy that was distinct, unique, and inspiringly different! 1st Phorm is successful by any traditional capitalistic metric. More importantly though, 1st Phorm is also wildly successful by a non-traditional capitalistic metric. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.” At its best, capitalism is beautiful and can be the biggest positive change agent for humanity. Any company can say they have a mission, but only authentically mission-driven companies can show actual proof. The most powerful proof will come from its customers and employees. 1st Phorm has changed countless customer lives...that's super evident even with the quickest glance at social media, but what was really cool about yesterday was that I got to see the other side. Even with the highest of expectations of walking in those doors, I was blown away...

Did you know three-fourths of American adults consume caffeine daily? Whether it’s drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, turning to an energy drink midday to stay sharp at work, or mixing up a pre-workout powder before hitting the gym, caffeinated products have become an integral part of daily life. It’s that proliferation of caffeine-containing products and them being well-entrenched into the lives of most Americans that's causing the “energy everything” movement…

The cold, flu, and immunity supplement market skyrocketed in 2020, but should the pullback in 2021 and 2022 be worrisome or is the future bright for the category? The “COVID-19 Effect” undoubtedly pulled forward the demand for products a few years (which has now normalized), but this period more importantly changed consumer perception around immune health. That shift from only supporting your immune health seasonally to now making it a year-round pursuit is a big deal. Maybe the legacy immune ingredients with high consumer awareness or played out formulation approaches won’t see massive sales surges again in the near-term future and that’s OK. But it’s the massive wave of attention placed on immune health and investment put towards innovation that will open new opportunities…that’s exciting to think about and I predict it will provide strong categorical market growth.

In today’s business world, it’s hard to come up with an original thought. Once you acknowledge that, you start seeing things through a remix-filled point of view. The secret behind current innovations at CPG brands like Quest Nutrition and Snickers are that they’re rooted in remixing the past…their own past, well before most of its fans today knew about the original product offerings.

Rituals have the power to make life better. They can lead to habit creation, repeat purchases, and heightened involvement, making brand rituals a powerful strategy in any CPG entrepreneurs’ toolkit. Well-designed and popular brand-specific rituals are virtually impossible for competitors to imitate, no matter how similar or even superior their own products may be.

The supplement industry continues to change faster than Garfield can eat a tray of lasagna. Much of that can be attributed to new technologies and shifts in consumption habits. These massive disruptions dramatically accelerated ecommerce migration, which is creating both new opportunities and predicaments for supplement brands. This article will cover a handful of significant ecommerce trends that supplement brands must watch out for heading into 2023…

In a “choose your own adventure shopping” world, consumer speak with their actions (and wallets). By 2025, the Nutrition Business Journal predicts that categorical sales will be evenly distributed across e-commerce, mass, and natural/specialty retail. Whether it’s Wal-Mazon or another large retailer, it’s apparent that recent merchandising strategies shows us they want more than entry-level buyers…they want the whole category. The question remains, will being a “Wal-Mazon brand” still have some level of negative (yet always misplaced) connotation in the next 3, 5, 10 years?

Sleep matters A LOT. It’s essential to every process in the body, affecting our physical and mental functioning the next day, our ability to fight disease and develop immunity, and our metabolism and chronic disease risk. Because of that…sleep is truly an interdisciplinary aspect of our health. Yet, if I was tasked to describe in one word the current state of sleep in America, I would use lackluster.

If you mention proprietary blends (aka prop blends) in the supplement industry social media groups, you tend to get a visceral reaction. In any other CPG category, a “prop blend” is considered a highly valuable trade secret. Do you know what goes into a can of Coca-Cola? How about that Oreo cookie? And the list goes on…Those formulas are a main part of what makes them $1B CPG brands. Which side is right? Is the supplement category unique? Should “prop blends” still be around today or not in the supplement industry?