Trust Transparency Center (TTC) has served as an incubator and umbrella organization for a number of single ingredient associations including the Global Prebiotic Association, the Global Curcumin Association and the CoQ10 Association. The company has now announced a new initiative that will make shedding light on the issues that the above organizations have dealt with easier for additional categories of ingredients.
‘Political’ issues
TTC CEO Len Monheit characterized some of the problems that had cropped in earlier efforts as ‘political,’ amounting to disagreements among members about things like quality parameters and the overall direction of the organization. The lessons learned will be applied to the new effort, he said.
“There are some big categories out there that are growing and there is the opportunity for exploitation and confusion,” Monheit told NutraIngredients-USA. “There can be issues like the attribution of science that can really confound and confuse these categories.”
Monheit said new efforts organized under the so-called Ingredient Transparency Center (ITC) umbrella will be driven by the interests of prospective members, rather than trying to shoehorn companies with potentially divergent interests into an existing framework.
“For each new category we will have a discussion about the issues that will and will not be addressed and through that we’ll find the right work plan,” Monheit said.
Monheit noted that TTC has developed expertise over the past years working in categories such as astaxanthin, vitamin K2 and glucosamine as well as the ingredients mentioned above. That experience will help define roadmaps for addressing developing issues for categories such as collagen, mushroom ingredients, and the science and IP of CBD. He said that the past few years, TTC has been collecting consumer and other insights across a breadth of categories giving it a unique data set and perspective representing a significant proportion of the growth potential of the global health and nutritional products marketplace.
Finding hidden common ground
Monheit added that in some cases providing an open forum for issues within a category can give companies that are fighting for market share the chance to discover common ground they couldn’t recognize they had within the heat of competition. As long as the ‘political’ pitfalls are successfully avoided, that is.
“In curcumin, for example, we stayed we have stayed away from the conversation about bioavailability. But the players do have alignment on natural vs synthetic curcuminoids issue,” he said.
“In the prebiotic space we successfully establish a definition of what a prebiotic is,” Monheit added.