← External Forces: Demographic, Consumer & Market (all topics)
Health & wellness consumption
What it is
Consumer shift toward products positioned on health - low sugar, high protein, fortified, natural, organic, sugar-free - and toward preventive healthcare, fitness and supplements
It is reinforced by rising lifestyle disease prevalence and by younger consumers reading labels
Impact on industries
- Health positioning commands a price premium in categories where the underlying product is otherwise commoditised
- Creates entirely new categories - protein snacks, nutraceuticals, sugar-free variants, preventive diagnostics - rather than only shifting share
- Claim substantiation requirements have tightened, so marketing latitude is narrower than the commercial opportunity suggests
- It works against sugar, refined carbohydrate, tobacco and alcohol volumes, which are large established categories
- Consumer definitions of healthy shift quickly, so reformulation is continuous rather than one-off