Boosting women's appeal
While gut health is not an area of exclusive concern to women, it can be argued that, along with probiotics in gut-related and other functional benefits, this is an area to which that they attach particular importance. Brand-owners and start-ups certainly see the strong potential of its appeal to women.
Like Marinho de Lemos, Aline de Santa Izabel is a Brazilian-heritage entrepreneur also, coincidentally, based in Stockholm, Sweden. Together, they exemplify some of the new attitudes and priorities around digestive health and probiotics.
While the former is about to launch her Källa range variants For Relief (digestive health), For Immune Health (immune health) and For Repair (targeting “chronic, low-level stress on the gut”), de Santa Izabel is working to establish her own synbiotics and gut-health business called Yogut. This aims to set consumers up with functional ingredients, including bacteria, and kitchen equipment for making their own fermented foods.
Although her starter range addresses conditions and concerns which are not gender-specific, Marinho de Lemos is from the outset targeting women as the brand’s core audience—and, typically, as the ‘supplement gatekeepers’ for the wider family. “Moving forward, though, our ambition is to strengthen the appeal of our range—and take it closer—to the women’s market. We’ll cement our position in relation to areas such as menopause.”
For her part, de Santa Izabel identifies some other types of benefit this might involve. “I think increasing numbers of women understand that the benefits of probiotics go beyond gut health, and include, for example, vaginal and urinary health,” she says.
New and emerging relations with regard to probiotics, many of them still not fully understood, include the gut-brain axis, Marinho de Lemos points out. Once again, of course, any benefits would not be specific to women.
The hurdles that the EU’s NHCR erected to claims under the banner of ‘probiotics’, among others, were heavily criticised by industry in the early days of the legislation. But with the passage of time, it may well have proved a boon to a new generation of brand-owners seeking to add value to supplements utilising specific bacteria and often communicating with more knowledgeable consumers.
As de Santa Izabel puts it: “More consumers are becoming increasingly savvy about the count of a particular bacteria and the strain.”
She adds: “It’s important to have regulation in place to prevent false claims and to ensure that products are grounded in science.” Only a few years ago, such words would have been more likely to originate inside the walls of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) than a nutrition industry start-up.