During a session at Probiota Americas, Aubrey Levitt, co-founder & CEO, Postbiotics Plus Research, explored all aspects of this emerging category, touching on what we know, and highlighting what we don’t.
“Complex products can have a beneficial effect and we may not know exactly what the synergy of some of these components that are creating this effect is and we may not be able to isolate how that's happening,” said Levitt. “When you take something, there's a complex set of reactions happening in your body… and to boil it down to one mechanism of action is pretty overly simplistic.”
While experts continue to study postbiotics, Levitt said consumers are beginning to latch onto the category—even if there isn’t a solid understanding. She said perhaps postbiotics can take a page from the probiotics playbook.
“Even with probiotics, if you looked back at like 2013, people didn't know what a probiotic was—but it was a $36 billion industry or something like that—but they understood that it was doing something for their digestive health and I think we have to take the same approach with postbiotics.”
Levitt added that while we may not always know how or why, this gives the category freedom to explore.
“When we opened this door to this whole ecosystem that exists inside us, we realized that there's all these interactions taking place that we know nothing about and we're starting to learn piece-by-piece about some of these interactions. But that shouldn't stop us from growing a category–and it’s part of the excitement of growing this category."
