Regular Girl finds new opportunities in women’s health with a dual-action formula for female gut and urinary tract health

Photo from Regular Girl

When Regular Girl first came to market in 2016, the company gained attention for personalizing digestive health for women. Its pink-themed synbiotic supplements, including stick packs, were not only eye-catching, playful, and convenient; they made constipation, diarrhea, gas, and bloating open topics of conversation. With success established for its original products, Regular Girl is now expanding its horizon and turning attention to another prevalent women’s health concern: urinary tract health. This spring, the company introduced a brand new product called Regular Girl Wellness, this time targeting not only digestive health but also urinary tract health.

Like the original Regular Girl supplement, the new Regular Girl Wellness supplement features Taiyo International’s (Minneapolis) Sunfiber prebiotic soluble fiber, derived from guar bean, as well as a healthy dose of active probiotics. Specifically, Regular Girl Wellness contains 3 g of Taiyo’s Sunfiber and three billion CFU of Lactobacillus acidophilus. (Taiyo celebrated a newly published study last fall in Nutrients confirming Sunfiber’s prebiotic efficacy.¹)

Regular Girl Wellness also contains the SunCran brand of organic cranberry juice powder. Studies have shown that the proanthocyanidins (PACs) in SunCran help keep E. coli bacteria from adhering to the urinary tract.

Regular Girl Wellness lets women address two leading health concerns simultaneously in one supplement. Gut health and urinary tract health go hand in hand, said Taiyo’s functional ingredient technology expert Derek Timm, PhD, RDN, in a press release about the new Regular Girl Wellness: “Gut bacteria are a common source of urinary tract issues, which makes it extra important to have a good gut microbiome. This exclusive dual-action formula uniquely promotes urinary tract and GI health. I don’t think anyone has addressed urinary tract health this way before.”

Nutritional Outlook spoke to Regular Girl’s marketing director, Molly Lawson, about how the brand has helped change the landscape of the female digestive health market-and now potentially the urinary tract market with Regular Girl Wellness.

Lawson explained why Regular Girl saw an opportunity to address urinary tract health from its digestive health perch. “Urinary tract wellness is a major concern for our consumers, but many products only focus on the urinary tract portion of the equation,” she says. “We have uniquely positioned our product to promote urinary tract wellness by improving both gut bacteria, which are a common source of nasty bugs that cause urinary tract issues, as well as bacteria in the bladder. Overall, Regular Girl and Regular Girl Wellness provide comprehensive solutions for two common issues females experience on a regular basis.”

Market research shows the digestive health market continuing to grow. Last fall at the Council for Responsible Nutrition's annual conference, market researcher IRI reported 6% growth in the digestive health supplements market. Lawson says it’s gratifying to see the growing interest in gut health-and in synbiotics and regularity specifically, topics Regular Girl has helped promote.

“Regularity will always be a core piece of the big digestive health category, which is expanding beyond traditional fiber supplements and probiotics,” says Lawson. “And while interest in prebiotics is growing, synbiotic products are growing at a much higher rate. We feel strongly that prebiotics should be taken along with probiotics. We also feel that it isn’t necessary to have all of the carriers, fillers, and flow agents along with probiotics. For our Regular Girl synbiotic, we simply offer an all-natural, clean-label prebiotic fiber (Sunfiber from Taiyo) and probiotics. Nothing else. We are obviously happy to see the growth in this category since we have been educating consumers and health care professionals on the benefits of synbiotics since 2016.”

Interest continues to grow in the market Regular Girl helped create. “Not many products in the digestive health space directly target women and speak to their specific needs, which are major reasons for the success of Regular Girl,” says Lawson. “Also, the majority of products in the digestive health space have a medicinal look and feel to them and, as a result, many consumers treat their fiber like taking their medicine. Regular Girl addresses serious digestive issues while at the same time having fun with the messaging. We have found this approach to be easier for the consumer to understand, accept and share. Regular Girl strives to make digestive health a less taboo topic and enable people to talk about it more freely with their partners, children, and friends. Overall, we want our consumers to enjoy taking Regular Girl and interacting with the product and the brand.”

References:

1. Yasukawa Z et al. “Effect of repeated consumption of partially hydrolyzed guar gum on fecal characteristics and gut microbiota: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, and parallel-group clinical trial.” Nutrients. Published online September 10, 2019.