Where are consumers shopping for dietary supplements in 2020?
A look at the trends and complexities shaping-or reshaping-dietary supplement retail.
As any health-and-wellness watcher knows, nothing about selling dietary supplements is simple-and it never was.
Just ask Robert (Bob) Sanders, executive vice president, home and healthcare practice leader, for market researcher IRI (Chicago).
“In the past, the supplement retail framework was always more complex than for, say, traditional OTC drugs,” he recalls. As recently as five to 10 years back, shoppers could choose from specialty stores like GNC and The Vitamin Shoppe; natural-food outlets; grocery, drug, and mass merchandisers; club stores; big boxes; convenience; and other brick-and-mortar channels-or they could go the “nontraditional” route with multilevel marketing (MLM), catalog and phone orders, and even sales in some enlightened doctors’ offices.
While they can still turn to all those options, today’s retailing landscape looks significantly flatter. (Thank you, ecommerce.) But in no way does that mean that our job of selling supplements is any less dynamic, intricate, or, in some cases, hard to wrap our heads around. In fact, with cannabis dispensaries itching to make their presence felt, we may be in for further complexity ahead.
Yet those veteran industry watchers aren’t letting things faze them. As Sanders says, “There is substantial upside for supplements in the U.S. in the near-term.”
Photo © AdobeStock.com/Tanapat Prompa
