Can personalized nutrition companies reach consumers in the middle?

Personalized nutrition companies may need to be more specific about their offerings to reach consumers in the middle.
Personalized nutrition companies may need to be more specific about their offerings to reach consumers in the middle. (ATHVisions / Getty Images)

In the personalized nutrition space, companies either target high-end consumers or cater to the mass market. Customers who fall somewhere in between are often left out of the conversation.

Personalized nutrition experts underscored this point during part II of the recent “Failures, F*ups and the Future of Personalized Nutrition” webinar hosted by Qina, a platform that helps companies create next generation personalized solutions.

Joshua Anthony, founder and CEO at personalized nutrition consultancy Nlumn, said that there is a rationale for reaching more people in the middle consumer range instead of targeting buyers shopping the lowest price.

“We found in our own research that you can certainly go too expensive, but if you go too low, people may not see the value in it,” he said.

That has not stopped companies from reaching the mass market, many of which utilize influencers to sell products on social media platforms. Qina’s founder and CEO Mariette Abrahams said this kind of social media outreach no longer has the same appeal among consumers and does not lead to more sales.

“We are seeing that social media has kind of reached a saturation point, the influencer model is reaching a saturation,” Abrahams said. “Health care professionals are still the trusted resource, and there’s more and more of a trend toward listening and acting upon the advice of health care professionals.”

The age of monitoring

To reach consumers in the middle market, personalized nutrition companies need to be more specific about their offerings, Anthony said.

They can no longer profit on meal plan guidance, general wellness and metabolic health advice, which already proliferates the internet. Instead, personalized nutrition businesses should focus on trends such as GLP-1 use, explained.

“It’s about losing weight and keeping muscle or losing weight and avoiding side effects,” Anthony said about weight loss drug use. “[Companies] could be speaking to two very different consumers. One might be trying to deal with the near-term side effects of GLP-1 agonists. This is an immediate need that is a different area to solve than the long-term risk of losing muscle mass that would come with weight loss on GLP-1 agonists.”

Understanding consumers short-term and long-term needs is important as one in 10 people will use GLP-1s by 2030, Anthony added. Some of that demographic will also have type 2 diabetes.

The experts said there will be more continuous monitoring and measuring coming, especially regarding glucose levels as tracked by personalized nutrition products.

“I think the monitoring has the potential to be game-changing,” said Nard Clabbers, founder of NCNC Nutrition Consultancy, who moderated the webinar. “But if you over focus on glucose, are you under focusing on other areas that may be important to health?”

Case studies: DayTwo and Care/of

Two examples may provide insight into why personalized nutrition companies have difficulty keeping midrange users.

Launched in 2015, Israel-based B2B company DayTwo received $85 million to explore people’s microbiome composition and then tailor nutritional recommendations based on that information.

The results were uploaded to an app. The app created a score to guide the food and recipe recommendations for improved gut health.

“Their recommendations were to improve the microbiome diversity but also to help improve a user’s glycemic response, but I think there were a lot of issues with it,” Abrahams said. “No. 1 was that a lot of the science was not replicated in any other population. The other thing was that [the app] kind of went against the health care professional recommendations.”

Abrahams also argued that the microbiome changes constantly, whereas the results users received from DayTwo were relatively static.

“It was literally one test, one app, and that was it,” she said.

DayTwo ceased operations in 2024.

The company’s shuttering raised questions about its ability to target middle market consumers who seek more continuous information about personalization. The same can be said for Care/of, a personalized nutrition company that sold supplements in pill packs. German multinational Bayer purchased it in 2020 for $225 million but shut the company down last year, as NutraIngredients-USA first reported.

“Supplements are easy for people to take, but it may be harder or less likely that they’re going to feel or experience the benefits,” Anthony said. “So could that engagement have been greater if [Care/of] was able to provide feedback or to provide coaching or other lifestyle context to support their users?”

Care/of also began to put its supplements into functional categories, such as men’s health, women’s health and digestive health. When consumers saw those products next to other companies’ offerings on a store shelf, they may have been willing to switch to cheaper brands, according to Anthony.

Despite closing Care/of, Bayer is not moving away from personalized nutrition. The company has an in-house precision health nutrition initiative, and in September it established Age Factor, a program that helps people with their healthy aging journeys.

When it comes to supplements, Abrahams said the middle is not served well with personalization.

“There needs to be an endpoint,” she said. “Am I taking the supplements so that I can eventually eat better? What is the goal?”