Kerry highlights proactive health products for sustainable nutrition

This included plenibiotic, a rice-based postbiotic which provides dual gut-skin benefits, the company's first postbiotic offering.

“The postbiotic allows us to be to make claims around both skin health, which is an absolutely emerging and very, very large segment within nutraceuticals, and to play in digestion,” Dow said. “The benefit of being a postbiotic is that it's stable, and it's stable across a range of different end-use markets, whether it's pet food, whether it's food and beverage or supplement. We really look at this as being an access point into two conditions that really matter.”

Dow also addressed new science and clinical programs emerging around innate immunity, which he explained is immunity that everyone should all be born with, but in most people around the world, it’s compromised because of a lack of diversity in diet. By taking Wellmune, Kerry’s proprietary baker’s yeast beta glucan, “we're able to boost immunity that prevents the onset of a lot of health conditions that can come from essentially having a compromised immunity set,” Dow added.

For cognitive health, which is now top of mind and one of the leading supplement categories, Kerry showcased its Sensoril ashwagandha extract.

“There's been a lot of effort that's been put behind ashwagandha or even some probiotics that have clinical efficacy to be able to treat conditions that at one point were only treatable through medicine,” he said. “Ashwagandha has absolutely been a part of what's allowed cognitive health to become a very relevant platform. What we offer is a very unique take on ashwagandha, where we're using both a leaf and the root extract, which allows us to be able to be quite different from most ashwagandha players out there.”

Dow added that Kerry is not positioning Sensoril as an ashwagandha-based product but as providing clear health benefits in focus, in stress, and coming soon, relief from menopausal stress. All these applications have been clinically trialed, he said.

Other topics addressed included how Kerry ProActive Health is leveraging parent company Kerry Group's taste capabilities for popular supplement formats and how its products can prime the gut for and address symptoms of ubiquitous GLP-1 agonists use and the comorbidities of obesity.