Science sells: Ingredients are at the base of the nutrition industry’s pyramid, and it is ingredient companies that do most of the hard and mostly thankless work of discovering, identifying, sourcing, testing, proving, protecting and getting regulatory approval for the substances that make it all possible. Since finished goods marketers rely almost exclusively on claims substantiated by individual ingredients rather than doing clinical testing of their final compositions, the tough job of establishing clinical proof of benefit is on the shoulders of the ingredient providers. This year saw science-based support for ingredient efficacy and bioavailability prominently featured and a well-timed announcement that Brightseed’s artificial intelligence-assisted discovery program was selected as 2024’s Innovation of the Year by Time magazine.

GLP is #1: GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro are changing the health of millions and significantly softening demand for vitamin, mineral and supplement weight management products. In the face of suffering from loss of sales for natural weight management approaches, the industry is pivoting to GLP-1 adjacent and supporting categories with a burst of new product innovation. There were plenty to choose from, most offering multistep theories for improving gut GLP-1 levels or nutrition approaches for boosting gut GLP-1 levels transiently (it is important to note that prescription GLP-1 agonist drugs work in the brain for a week while GLP-1 in the gut lasts only minutes to hours). With almost half (48% according to research conducted by Market Performance Group) of U.S. adults curious about using GLP-1 drugs and something like 6% of adults already on them, expect this trend to continue.

Brain boom: From gamers to nootropics, from beverages to pills and powders, and from sleep and stress to mood, focus and energy, it’s all about the brain. Ingredient providers have been busily creating and validating ingredients with clinical evidence for boosting the “feel it” benefits of a healthy cranium. With a population that is aging overall and no great pharmaceutical options for most of the indication areas, brain-related products seem destined to boom, and the nutrition industry is jumping into a large set of unmet needs for better brain health.

Peptides aplenty: Bioactive peptides act as “master switches” to turn on (mostly) desirable biological pathways in the body that can result in tangible “feel-it” benefits like less stress, stronger muscles, better sleep and improved blood sugar control. Self-injection of experimental peptide cocktails has been all the rage in the biohacker community for years, and orally stable (and probably much safer) bioactive peptides are now one of the most exciting new entries into the nutrition space. Companies like ING2 and Nuritas are leading with peptides that have clinical proof of efficacy. I attended Nuritas’ 90-minute educational seminar on peptides and met with ING2’s scientists and came away convinced that I need to add some of these to my already-tall supplement stack.

Special delivery: Delivery systems can bring many desirable enhancements to an ingredient, improving (or masking) taste, extending shelf life and stability, enabling inclusion into forms like beverages or gummies, and especially increasing potency, bioavailability and efficacy. This is probably the most exciting area of innovation in the ingredients world, with companies like Specnova (TruLiposomes) and Nulixir (NuSomes) leading the way in quality and evidence. The show was flush with advances in delivery systems — ranging from emulsions to coatings to microencapsulations to liposomes to solid-state nanovesicles — that can be tuned to deliver their payload to specific sites within the digestive tract. These technologies promise to unlock the health benefits of new and current materials, enable effective dosages of hard-to-absorb bioactives, and make new formulations possible that were previously impossible due to stability, smell, taste or efficacy limitations.

Botanicals bonanza: Botanicals have always been a staple in the formulator’s toolbox. Driven by ingredient suppliers’ innovations, the category is seeing a groundswell of new extracts and combinations that have clinical support sufficient to make new claims. Access to bioavailability-enhancing delivery systems (see previous section) has further broadened the options for natural and effective botanical ingredients. For example, there were at least a dozen enhanced products for curcumin alone. New technologies such as Ayana Bio’s cell culture cultivation (which allows the most bioactive components of botanicals to be grown in a lab directly instead of growing the plants in soil and then inefficiently extracting them) promise to stabilize supply and enhance consistency and quality for some of the world’s most effective botanical compounds.

Mushroom maturity: The mushroom boom is entering a new phase, where the best companies are going beyond generic availability (“we have lots of species”) to bring proof of efficacy for their specific strains. This is exactly how the probiotics market evolved, from generic to specific with proof of efficacy. For example, mushroom leader M2 Ingredients hosted a full hourlong education seminar on the science of mushrooms, which provided their scientists a chance to showcase their clinical research program and its positive results. A small handful of other mushroom companies including Paul Stamets’ Host Defense are also funding clinical research to prove efficacy and to differentiate their offering from commodity mushrooms.

Checking into detox: Perhaps in part because of the Las Vegas venue, liver health and detoxification ingredients were prominent at this year’s show. Milk thistle extract, a traditional botanical antioxidant with limited evidence, broccoli seed extracts with substantial evidence and everything in between including “glutathione boosters,” were all on display. With alcoholic beverage consumption generally trending down, this higher-profile interest in liver health was somewhat surprising and must be driven by something else: rising pollution rates, recognition of the role of detoxification for health and longevity, or (again) Vegas.

Working for women: A multiyear focus on meeting the large unmet needs for women’s health by the nutrition industry has yielded a flurry of ingredient and finished goods innovations. Pretty much every strategic CPG player in the nutrition space lists women’s health as a product development or acquisition priority, up there with gut health, brain health, active living and the catch-all healthy aging (to round out the big five), and ingredients for women were prominently on display in every aisle.

Enjoyable forms: Consumers want a side of fun with their effective nutrition supplements, and the manufacturing segment is delivering gummies, lozenges, soft chews, liquids, powders that blend or fizz, and basically anything besides another dreaded pill (apparently, a joyless form). As an experienced product developer, I can tell you it is much more difficult to make an enjoyable form actually enjoyable because almost everything that is good for you tastes terrible to start with and people have wide-ranging opinions on what tastes good, what texture is appealing, and how things should look and smell. This does not stop innovative manufacturers from rising to the occasion, and consumer desire for a candy-like experience drives discovery of new masking, flavor enhancing and stability breakthroughs at the ingredient level.