Obstacles and opportunities through smart strategy and collaboration
A white space for collaboration exists between the public and private sector, which needs to come together in the interest of wider population health and disease prevention. Personalised nutrition stakeholders see strategic collaboration as an opportunity to join expertise, cut costs and improve mainstream consumers’ access to personalised nutrition.
Stripf sees a need to join the dots across the ecosystem, as well as standardisation for things like health scores. He adds there is also an opportunity to collaborate across the technology spectrum to build integrated solutions that provide complete product transparency, including provenance and reducing carbon footprint.
Having led the largest public-private research collaboration in personalised nutrition, TNO and Wageningen University’s PNH consortium, Clabbers has experienced the successes and difficulties of cooperation first-hand. To him, the future of personalised nutrition lies with companies that can work together synergistically and build smart business models. “The greatest innovation probably lies in companies combining their strengths. For an individual consumer, the dynamic field of nutrition and health is way too complicated to oversee,” says Clabbers. “The idea that every consumer is able to make the best selection of suppliers for their personal needs is unachievable. People will need and find help to do this. This means that companies need to be very clear on their strengths and which partners they need to complement these strengths,” he adds. There is a certain challenge that lies in initiating, testing and growing the ecosystems of complementary companies that need to emerge in the new marketplace. There are currently very few private or public entities succeeding through such partnerships.
When considering strategic collaborations, Jones says science must still be at the fore; therefore, having strong scientific, multidisciplinary committees comprised of nutritionists, medical doctors, and dietary ingredient experts, amongst others, is very important. He says: “Consumers seek reassurance that what they are buying into has the approval of experts, and the solutions are secure, seamless, straightforward and safe, while providing effective support in helping them achieve their health goals.”
Similarly, Abrahams says that in order to improve credibility and trust of personalised nutrition solutions, companies need to spend as much educating consumers and practitioners as marketing their products if they want to have a long ‘shelf life.’ She suggests achieving this by partnering with companies with wide reach, building relationships with trusted stakeholders, and conducting research on differentiation of product. While the uptake of telehealth has increased to open the door to expert advice and care, the uptake of digital health solutions for self-management is still lagging—meaning there is a gap in terms of the type of solutions on the market.
Personalised nutrition has a history of challenges grounded in affordability, definition, accessibility and repeat purchasing to generate healthy business cycles. Alongside challenges remaining around communicating value and benefits to consumers, Iotti says the regulatory landscape is not well thought out for personalised nutrition. “That said, regulation is not impeding or delaying personalised nutrition anywhere in the world—it is simply making consulting firms very happy,” he says.
Adding onto the topic of regulation, Clabbers says promises of health benefits and regulating claims remain a key challenge. “Ultimately, personalised nutrition is about consumer empowerment and thus about knowing what the individual effect is on you as a person,” he says. “In that light, promises of the health effect are only relevant if they are taken from a group of people that are very close to an individual. General nutrition and health claims that say something about a product and not about a measurable individual or peer-group effect are becoming less and less valuable in my view.”
Abrahams returns to the importance of scientific substantiation. She sees a risk of some companies running ahead of science and overpromising on what can be claimed without due diligence and demonstrated scientific rigour. “In the absence of strict regulation, we need a better way to separate the evidence from evangelism and make it easier for consumers to distinguish between the two,” she says. Favouring the term ‘scientific wellness,’ originally coined by Arivale CEO, Dr Leroy Hood, Abrahams feels this reference makes the important distinction between wellness solutions that are nice-to-have from those based on scientific evidence to achieve, optimise or maintain health. Research from Deloitte shows that consumers are more likely to share their data with their healthcare provider (71%) than with a tech company (18%), meaning if personalised is ever to go mainstream or have a meaningful impact on health outcomes, there is a need for business models and partnerships that build trust in the solutions that are being developed for both consumers and healthcare professionals to recommend.
Unsurprisingly, experts continue to navigate the challenge of data and privacy—from databases used for machine learning to the willingness of consumers to share their data. Approved collection, storage and use of sensitive health data is strongly regulated and compliance may not be as straightforward for some. Smart companies will be designing their consumer offerings with privacy in mind and will use that to convince consumers to participate, says Clabbers. Jones perceives technology advancing at a faster rate than regulatory bodies, and the industry needs to maintain high level and up-to-date data security in order to ensure that their solutions can live up to any policy changes.
Additionally, Stripf lists unstructured data, lack of standardisation, cultural inertia, and outdated legacy technology platforms as additional challenges facing the sector. “Keeping up with the latest technology and security developments is key for future success, and this includes new wearables that offer the consumer an increasing portfolio of biometric data, as well as at-home testing kits that are becoming increasingly accessible for consumers,” says Jones.
One of the first barriers to overcome is personalised nutrition’s tendency toward tech-savvy consumers—the ‘worried well’ so to speak. Many offerings on the market are focused around DNA testing, disease prevention, improving athletic performance and becoming ‘the best version of you,’ says Clabbers. This is not necessarily appealing for many mass market consumers who simply want to have peace of mind about their better food and health choices. He adds: “Personalised nutrition is about behavioural change and consumer empowerment. However, it’s often positioned as a tech-smart quick-fix. Firstly, this does not appeal to people and, secondly, does not deliver on its promise in the end because people find it harder than expected to change and maintain their behaviour.”
The previously outlined challenges have slowed personalised nutrition’s mainstream awareness. When defining action points for the industry, Iotti sees three areas for companies to build their strategy around:
1. Improved consumer understanding of personalised nutrition benefits: While COVID-19 has certainly spurred on an interested in customised health, it’s up to consumer-facing brands to do the heavy lifting of clearly explaining benefits to consumers.
2. Enhanced communication with consumers: The sector assumes an intelligent audience that is science-centric rather than positioning itself as consumer-centric; some companies do not have models in place to support frequent feedback.
3. Positioning personalised nutrition to make mainstream news: This will likely happen through ‘influencer’ exposure and endorsement, by athletes, for example, who can drive relatable awareness.
There is a certain challenge that exists in trying to drive personalised nutrition mainstream—it’s the opposite of how the industry is established. “Incumbent companies have developed solutions based on creating mass quantities of the same product to minimise costs,” says Jones, “whereas the personalised nutrition industry is working to provide unique solutions for a smaller subset of individuals.” This requires less outsourced production, and more local production. Many consumers are willing to pay more for personalised solutions developed just for them, and this can help drive the change of the production line, he adds.
While Abrahams previously highlighted the huge need for digital literacy amongst consumers and practitioners in order to ensure that the right solutions can be matched to the right user, she identifies affordability as a main obstacle to mainstream. She says we need to think beyond mainstream and more broadly about the impact on population health. “There is no real use in great solutions that optimise the health of those who are already healthy,” she says. “We need to invest in solutions that solve real-world problems, and for this we need investors who think differently and want to make an impact.” For instance, considering again the disproportionate deaths in ethnic groups with co-morbidities due to COVID, according to a recent Rock Health report, digital health solutions with black founders received less than 1% of $3 billion in funding (for black female founders, this is even worse). This means that there are serious funding access issues that need to be addressed first if personalised nutrition wants to run mainstream.
