Retailers Talk Challenges, Opportunities for Dietary Supplements in 2016

Dickens may have had the French Revolution in mind when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But he just as easily could’ve been describing the state of play for 21st-century dietary-supplement retailers. For despite posting current value growth of 5%, per a recent Euromonitor International report, the supplement sector-and the retailers who undergird it-face challenges, whether from regulation, fickle consumers, or an increasingly complex and fragmented marketplace.

Just ask Robert Craven, CEO, MegaFood (Manchester, NH). His company hosted its first ZingMojo summit in September, gathering retailers and thought leaders in the natural and health-and-wellness (H&W) communities for the express purpose of hashing out these and other issues, including “mass slippage,” online competition, price pressures, and transparency. And if the summit confirmed anything, Craven says, it’s that the accelerating pace of technological change creates an “incredible force that no one’s experienced before, but that’s affecting every retailer, and not just natural ones.”

One manifestation of this force is what Craven calls the “ubiquitous shopper.” This nascent species “wants to buy whatever they want, wherever they are and with whatever tools are available,” he says. The upshot is that as the tools of technology increase shopping’s ubiquity-“I can tell my watch to order something for me now,” Craven notes-supplement retailers will face an existential question: “How do we compete in this environment?”

They could take a cue from other retail sectors by emphasizing category management, doubling down on e-commerce, or making hay out of the data that accrue every time a consumer makes a purchase. But the natural and H&W communities being “very right-brain,” as Craven characterizes them, they may not…er, take naturally to such left-brain thinking. “They didn’t get into this business to make money or analyze data,” he notes. “They got into it to improve lives.”

And they can keep doing just that, even as they wrestle with the challenges that attend operating in an uncharted shopping ecosystem. For navigating today’s H&W landscape needn’t require ditching the mission that brought retailers here in the first place. “It’s not about doing a pendulum swing from the right brain to the left,” Craven insists. “It’s about adding to those passions as a way to understand the retailer’s differentiation, and then really ringing that bell to play to that strength.”

The flipside of every challenge is an opportunity, so we asked H&W retailing experts what the top challenges-and opportunities-they see facing the community today. Read on.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO VIEW SLIDESHOWPhoto © Shutterstock.com/Blend Images