Functional Food Ingredients Emerging To Compete With OTC Drugs

Some ailments “are going to be more pervasive” with people living longer and consumers will look more toward functional foods to address them, says Mintel analyst Nirvana Chapman. The shift partly reflects rising health care costs and consumers’ efforts to save money through preventive care and less costly treatments.

Increasing demand for solutions to age-related ailments and for natural products is pushing consumers to functional foods, which could threaten OTC drug sales in some categories, market researchers predict.

“Foods targeting specific ailments we see overtaking or at least competing with a lot of over-the-counter medications where possible” in the next three to five years, Nirvana Chapman, a global food science analyst at Mintel, said Sept. 19 at the U.S. Pharmacopeia’s Science and Standards Symposium in Boston.

As “people are living longer, some of the ailments that come with older people are going to be more pervasive … and they will look more toward functional foods in order to ease some of these” health problems, Chapman said.

The shift partly reflects the rising cost of health care and consumers’ attempts to save money through preventive care and less costly treatments.

For example, Chapman noted a recent Mintel survey found three-quarters of respondents who use vitamins and supplements said they took them to boost health in general. In addition, half of the supplement users said they took them to ward off illness.

The shift also reflects consumers’ increasing wariness of “products they inject” and unnatural chemicals or ingredients, which is driving them to look for “cures and preventive measures in their diets rather than going immediately to pharma,” she said.

Consumers see functional foods as a way to add health benefits and “keep labels as clean as possible,” she added.

Aging consumers also want functional foods not just to prevent or delay disease but as a way to attain aspirations, said Janet Collins, president-elect of the Institute of Food Technologists, the following day at the conference.

“Those of us who are aging want to be more active than we were and for a longer period of time. We want to be in our 80s and still running,” Collins said.

“So we want foods to do for us what we need to be that person,” she added.

Categories that directly address aging baby boomers’ top concerns will benefit the most from this emerging trend, including cognition, digestive health and anti-aging, Chapman said.

Cognitive Health Needs

Neurodegenerative disease rates are expected to increase, Chapman said, afflicting people who “might be of sound body but they are forgetting things or their memory is just not what it used to be.” While people know how to maintain their physical health longer, “we don’t know a lot about the mind right now.”

As a result, the global cognitive health market will grow rapidly, she said.

A third of U.S. consumers who take vitamin and mineral supplements say they do so to improve their brain health, according to Mintel research.

Popular ingredients in this area that Chapman expects will gain ground in the next few years include magnesium and citicoline. She noted the magnesium ingredient Magtein, created by Magceutics Inc. and distributed by AIDP Inc., and Kyowa Hakko USA’s Cognizin citicoline are well-positioned for growth. Both ingredients have strong clinical evidence for claims that they help support mental energy, focus, attention and recall, she said.

The strength of this science could threaten more established mental health ingredients such as fish oil, green tea, grape and berry juices, ginkgo biloba and ginseng, which do not have as specific science to support claims, she noted, adding, however, that their sales still will proliferate.

Large firms’ interest in cognitive health also bodes well for the category, she said. Nestle Health Science SA recently acquired Accera Inc., which makes the prescription medical food Axona for Alzheimer’s disease patients, and [Abbott Nutrition]has teamed with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to research cognitive health (Also see "In Brief" - Pink Sheet, 30 Jul, 2012.).

Digestive Health Holds Promise

Digestive health also is positioned to boom, with three out of four people in the U.S. recently surveyed by Mintel acknowledging a healthy digestive system is “very important,” but only 48% rating their digestive health as “really good,” Chapman said.

This difference is driving consumer interest in fiber, a familiar and easy-to-add functional ingredient, Collins said.

Chapman agreed, noting that products with ancient grains or whole grains already appeal widely to consumers, and that “invisible fibers” are emerging as a hot ingredient.

Invisible fibers – such as inulin, maltodextrin, polydextrose, methyl cellulose and resistant starch – that can boost the fiber grams of a functional food or supplement in the nutrition or supplement facts box, without impacting the taste or having the gritty, tough texture associated with bran-based fibers, will be particularly appealing to consumers, Chapman said.

Consumer interest in fiber increases with age, said Susan Viamari, editor of SymphonyIRI Group’s Times & Trends. During a webinar Sept. 25 she noted that 35% of baby boomers aged 48 to 56 years eat whole grains most days compared to 41% of boomers aged 57 to 66 years and 44% of seniors 67 to 87 years.

Probiotics are another popular digestive health ingredient that Chapman expects to grow despite the European Food Safety Authority’s refusal to approve digestive health claims associated with probiotics (Also see "EU Health Claims Review Limits Language, Raises Costs For Firms" - Pink Sheet, 11 Jan, 2010.). She and Collins say high consumer demand for probiotics and synbiotcs suggests they are well aware of their benefits and will continue to buy them for this reason.

Fountain Of Youth

Having a healthy body is not enough for aging consumers – they also want to look good. Chapman said consumers are willing to pay more for functional foods and cosmeceuticals that help them achieve this goal.

In oral health, she expects the burgeoning focus on sugar alcohols like mannitol, xylitol and erythritol will explode soon with EFSA’s recent approval of oral health benefit claims for the ingredients in many applications. Another emerging oral health ingredient – charcoal – is moving out of Asia, where it has been traditionally used, and is slowly influencing Europe and eventually will reach the U.S.

Likewise, the use of plant-based stem cells will evolve beyond apple and grape in skin care products to include raspberries, argan oil, green tea and alpine rose, she predicts.

Collins pointed out bone health, immunity, eyesight and blood pressure also likely are growth categories for functional foods.

Market Challenges

While gaining popularity, functional foods must overcome several hurdles that hinder sales.

For one, manufacturers will need to overcome consumers’ lingering skepticism about functional food claims, Chapman said.

Consumers want clear statements about what an ingredient or functional food will do for them and how often and how much they need to consume to attain the benefit, Chapman said.

Consumers do not want “science-based” claims, Collins maintained. She said consumers assume claims are science-based and products would not be available if they did not work or were not safe, so this type of marketing could pique previously unacknowledged concerns rather than assuage them.

Consumers are skeptical of products with vanity benefits, like weight-loss and physical appearance, but that is frequently outweighed by their hope the products will work, Chapman added. But marketing for vanity products should acknowledge that miracle products do not exist but that lifestyle choices – combined with a product – could help consumers more easily attain their goals.

Adequately addressing efficacy concerns will help manufacturers overcome another barrier to sale – cost.

Currently about 40% of consumers feel functional health and nutrition products are worth the expense, Collins said. But that means the majority do not feel justified spending the money.

“But,” she said, “we think that people are still going to look for ways to manage ailments as they age and that they will become more open to these things” as they become more familiar and recognizable.

Advertising effectively to baby boomers and seniors is another challenge.

Food manufacturers that steer clear of “silver marketing” will capture a larger share of functional food sales from baby boomers, Chapman said.

“Target [boomers] in a unique way and not in a way that says, ‘You are old. Take this,’” Chapman said.

She noted successful functional foods targeting seniors now look like products most consumers would use. They have bright colors and abstract images of women exercising or in cocktail dresses, rather than previously popular images, like gray-haired people walking while wearing windbreakers, or smiling over tea in china cups.

“They don’t look like they are specifically targeting seniors and that is because seniors don’t think of themselves as seniors for the most part. They have taken care of themselves thus far, and they plan to in the future,” Chapman concluded.