Consumer industries are converging around a holistic, purpose-driven understanding of wellbeing that blurs the distinction between the consumer health and food and beverage (F&B) sectors. Major players are well-placed to serve physical wellbeing needs but struggle with emotional and social aspects, which are increasingly important to consumers. This Viewpoint sets out an approach to improving R&D performance in wellbeing, from fundamental science to new product commercialization.
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are evolving their approach to wellbeing — expanding beyond physical health to embrace emotional and social dimensions (see Figure 1). F&B and consumer health businesses are converging in product categories such as dietary supplements, nutraceuticals, and functional foods as a way to prevent disease and support physical health through various life stages. This holistic approach involves moving beyond clever marketing to focus on fundamental science and technology applications that deliver genuine emotional and social benefits.
As consumer awareness of the importance of food and nutrition expands, a category of consumer products aimed at improving physical wellness has emerged. Many of these target specific life stages (e.g., healthy aging or infant nutrition) or lifestyle choices (e.g., sports beverages). Figure 2 shows the market size of items like functional foods and supplements and their projected growth.
Companies offering healthier product portfolios see higher profit margins than those focused on conventional options. Food companies with healthier food portfolios generate profit margins of around 15.2%; those with less healthy portfolios operate at around 13.4%. Unsurprisingly, many large F&B companies are buying health-oriented brands (e.g., Mars’s purchase of KIND and PepsiCo’s purchase of poppi).
Thus far, most of the scientific understanding around feeling better and being better has focused on physical wellbeing. Emotional and social wellbeing (see Figure 3) remain largely overlooked in the CPG sector, often limited to superficial marketing gestures. Foundational understanding of emotional wellbeing — such as mood regulation and stress management — is minimal, typically confined to simplistic herbal solutions like chamomile tea for sleep. Meanwhile, scientific engagement with social wellbeing — encompassing community, relationships, and loneliness — is virtually absent.
One reason is the difficulty in determining the demonstrable impact that food, beverage, and consumer products like supplements might have on emotional and social wellbeing. For instance, there is a relatively straight line between isotonic drinks and improved hydration (and athletic performance), but what products, with what ingredients, might noticeably improve the mood of a stressed-out mom or anxious business executive?
Consumer awareness reinforces this focus: products that provide fast relief for a short- or medium-term issue tend to be successful (e.g., pain and allergy relief, dry skin improvement). (The over-the-counter segment is predicted to grow at 7.92% until 2030, outcompeting most other consumer segments.) Consumers find less appeal in products that promise a long-term benefit (beyond the occasional dietary supplement), and many patients don’t even finish a course of prescription drugs, let alone continue taking a supplement they are skeptical about.
Traditional “hard health” players such as Haleon and Reckitt and “physically focused” snacking players like Hershey and Mondelēz are converging from their separated positions into the holistic wellbeing space where businesses like Danone, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble are already present, in part due to legacy product portfolios (see Figure 4). Figure 5 describes specific examples of products from companies that are moving into the holistic health space.
Similarly, industries like sports/fitness and entertainment are moving into the social and emotional wellbeing space. Companies like Peloton differentiate their physical wellbeing offer by focusing on community. Nike uses its fitness apps to build social communities, specifically tying emotional wellbeing to physical movement. Whoop, which manufactures fitness wearables, promotes holistic health through its platform featuring personalized coaching tips and community leaderboards.
Traditional F&B companies and healthcare businesses that focus more on cures than prevention will continue to face disruption from a congested marketplace of overlapping businesses striving to help people become healthier.
Arthur D. Little (ADL) created a roadmap for businesses wishing to successfully compete in this space. Companies must first deliver some quick wins, then build future capabilities and ways of working, and finally plan for the future with targeted investments (see Figure 6).
Companies that want to build a successful research platform and deliver breakthrough wellbeing products must decide which benefits they want to deliver. For example, Danone restructured its R&D function around consumer health and wellness states, including mental wellbeing and brain health. Other companies are looking at health states through the lens of life stages (e.g., perimenopause and menopause). For example, Unilever Ventures invested in Phenology, a start-up focused on personalized menopause care (nutrition, skincare, and supplements).
Proving efficacy is a major challenge with wellbeing products. This is particularly true for emotional and social wellbeing: regulatory complexity presents a significant hurdle when validating claims. Large healthcare companies are proficient in the curative medicines space, but there remains a gap in regulatory and clinical understanding around wider social and emotional wellbeing.
This creates opportunities for scientific and regulatory affairs teams to work hand in hand with product development and nutrition functions to demonstrate tangible benefits. Many F&B companies (and the ingredients businesses that support them) are expanding the technical capabilities of their regulatory teams. Some are building clinical trial capabilities; others are developing or investing in digitally underpinned foresight and compliance tools to help determine what information can be declared from a regulatory perspective. Consumer healthcare businesses already have these capabilities but may need to (slightly) relax some corporate/pharmaceutical guardrails to take advantage of opportunities in the social and mental wellbeing spaces.
Enable rapid reformulation & prototyping
Businesses must accelerate their ability to understand and use new ingredients. They must also expand their knowledge of the benefits they bring to health and wellbeing and be able to address regulatory and formulation challenges. This should be combined with rapid reformulation to dramatically speed up new product development. For example, Tate & Lyle created an automated laboratory for ingredient experimentation (ALFIE [Automated Laboratory for Ingredient Experimentation]) in Singapore to better quantify the attributes of its products and help its customers’ R&D teams more efficiently integrate them into formulations. Companies developing supplements (primarily consumer healthcare businesses) may find this an easier task because their regulatory regimes are more aligned with rapid innovation.
Success depends on increasingly cross-functional R&D teams that include, for example, expert nutritionists, behavioral scientists, and data scientists. These should be structured as dedicated innovation hubs focused on science-backed wellbeing solutions (e.g., Mars’s AI-powered nutrition research). The team’s ability to transfer science to the business is critical. Getting product developers, brand marketing teams, and business units to accept a new science strategy is key for execution (e.g., be realistic about the product pipeline and don’t go too far too quickly).
Cognitive science plays an increased role in the development of wellbeing products, helping companies design solutions that improve focus, memory, and brain health. Part of building this capability is onboarding team members with backgrounds in neuroscience, behavioral economics, and/or cultural anthropology. (For more on the role of behavioral science in product development, see ADL’s Prism article “Shiny Happy People.”)
Across the wellbeing industry, a scientific understanding of the connection between nutrition and mood (via the gut microbiome) is solidifying. Research shows that certain nutrients and probiotics influence mood, cognitive function, and stress levels. Gut-brain axis research, which explores how microbiome health impacts cognitive function and emotional wellbeing, opens new doors for product innovation.
Scientific validation remains a challenge, with a need for robust biomarker development and controlled clinical trials to establish efficacy across emotional and social wellbeing solutions. Increased understanding of biomarkers (objective measures of what is happening in an organism at a given moment) allows companies to make validated health claims and launch regulated products based on well-understood metrics.
Wearables and digital tracking tools continue to add functionality and act as critical enablers across healthcare, helping consumers monitor biomarkers like blood glucose, microbiome health, and metabolism to optimize their diets. These initiatives reflect broader industry movements toward integrating nutrition and health outcomes more tightly with product development strategies.
Researchers are discovering ways to use wearables to track mental health and stress biomarkers (e.g., heart rate variability), offering real-time feedback and tailored interventions, especially when combined with physical health biomarkers. Most consumer companies (including manufacturers of over-the-counter [OTC] products and F&B companies) don’t have the wherewithal to do this alone. Partnering with companies to enhance access to these types of technologies (including the necessary digital interfaces) allows for more holistic offerings across wellbeing categories.
Despite an increased emphasis on holistic health by F&B and consumer health companies, social wellbeing remains an underdeveloped category. Social wellbeing has a profound impact on mental and physical wellness — about half of all US adults experience perceived isolation or loneliness.
Addressing social wellbeing through scientific means is a challenge. Most companies currently focus on brand marketing exercises and social design (community platforms or group-based digital ecosystem). This is in part due to the difficulty of objectively measuring social wellbeing, unlike emotional wellbeing, which is seeing a growing amount of science around biomarkers (e.g., cortisol) and interventions involving the gut-brain or neuronutrition.
Brands can capitalize on social wellbeing, but their science teams must gain a better understanding of the factors driving it, and their regulatory teams must place guardrails around the wellbeing space to ensure scientific validity when making claims.
To capitalize on the next wave of consumer-health innovation, businesses must reevaluate their structures, strategies, and brand positioning. A genuine commitment to new R&D programs is required, but they can be suitably de-risked and sensibly implemented:
By Phil Webster, Nicola Young, Simon Guyomard-Norman
cloud technology
Citring inició su actividad a finales de 2017 y fue impulsada por Lan...
