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Rituals pledges €20M for youth mental health, Publicis Health redefines brand roles, GLiTCH bets on stealth health, and kratom claims face Italian scrutiny.
Rituals just made one of Europe's largest brand-led mental health commitments — and GLiTCH is quietly smuggling protein into candy. Here's what both moves mean for wellness marketers.
In this episode:
The Health Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for marketers and founders in supplements, functional food and consumer health, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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The daily briefing for professionals in health, nutrition, and wellness marketing. Every episode covers an ingredient of the day, the latest science and regulatory updates from EFSA and beyond, and the brand and market moves shaping the nutraceutical industry. Hosted by Klara and Marco — evidence-based, no hype, no bro-science. Built for formulators, brand managers, regulatory affairs teams, and anyone building in the health and nutrition space.
Marco: Four strong stories lined up for you today.
Klara: Rituals is putting €20 million behind youth mental health — and it raises real questions about where purpose-led marketing is heading.
Marco: Then we're looking at a fundamental shift in health marketing — from informing consumers to actually guiding them.
Klara: A candy brand hiding its protein credentials on purpose.
Marco: And kratom's anti-ageing claims get a hard look from Italian regulators.
Klara: Let's get into it.
Marco: Rituals is putting €20 million behind youth mental health — and it's a move the whole European wellness sector should be watching.
Marco: Rituals is a Dutch lifestyle and wellness brand best known for its bath, body, and home products. It already runs a programme called '10% Profit for Impact', where a portion of company profits goes directly to social causes. This latest commitment scales that up significantly.
Marco: Between 2026 and 2028, Rituals will direct €20 million specifically towards young people's mental wellbeing. The funding will flow through specialist partnerships and dedicated programmes. By most measures, this is one of the largest brand-led mental health investments from a European wellness company to date.
Marco: From a commercial standpoint, this is a statement of brand architecture, not just philanthropy. Mental wellbeing has become one of the most competitive positioning territories in European wellness. Rituals is essentially building a moat — a credible, funded, long-term social impact narrative that smaller competitors simply cannot replicate overnight.
Klara: I think the ambition is real, but I want to see the substance behind it. "Youth mental wellbeing programmes" covers a very wide range of interventions — some evidence-based, some much less so. The quality of the partnerships matters enormously. Spending €20 million on poorly designed programmes achieves little beyond good press.
Marco: That's a fair challenge, but I'd argue the scale itself shifts expectations across the category. When a brand of Rituals' size commits publicly at this level, it pressures competitors to show up with something credible too — not just a campaign.
Klara: Agreed on the ripple effect. The bar for what counts as a genuine social commitment in wellness just got raised considerably.
Marco: Now let's move on to our next story.
Klara: Health marketing is undergoing a fundamental shift — from telling consumers what to think, to helping them figure out what to do.
Klara: For years, the default playbook in wellness marketing was awareness. Build a strong claim, repeat it loudly, capture attention. But the health information environment has changed dramatically. Consumers now research conditions, ingredients, and brands extensively before they ever reach a checkout — online, through social platforms, through peer communities. By the time someone picks up a supplement in Boots or scrolls past a product on Amazon, they've already formed opinions from dozens of sources.
Klara: Publicis Health, one of the largest health-focused marketing agencies globally, has published an analysis arguing that this shift is structural, not cyclical. They describe a new role for health brands: navigation. Not broadcasting benefits, but helping consumers make sense of genuinely complex choices. The implication is that content strategy, CRM — that's customer relationship management, the systems brands use to communicate with existing customers — and even retail touchpoints need to be redesigned as decision-support tools rather than broadcast channels.
Klara: From a science standpoint, I find this encouraging. The biggest harm in wellness marketing isn't usually outright lies — it's oversimplification. When brands become honest guides rather than just claim-makers, there's more space for nuance, for evidence, for accuracy.
Marco: Commercially, this is where the smart money already is. The brands pulling clear distance in European wellness — think functional food players, personalised nutrition services — are building ecosystems of content and tools, not just running campaigns. Navigation creates retention. Retention creates lifetime value.
Klara: The counterpoint I'd raise is execution. Brands that position as trusted guides but then steer consumers toward their own products regardless of fit aren't navigating — they're just selling with extra steps.
Marco: That's the line every marketer in this space needs to hold honestly. Let's move to our next story.
Marco: A US functional candy brand called GLiTCH is making a deliberate bet that hiding your health credentials might be smarter than shouting about them.
Marco: The protein snack category is one of the fastest-growing segments in food and wellness globally. But it's also become visually and verbally exhausting — every pack screams macros, clinical language, and functional claims. GLiTCH is asking whether that approach has hit its ceiling.
Marco: The brand leads with candy aesthetics and bold flavours. Protein content is almost an afterthought in the marketing. Founder Cameron Gawley's argument is direct: consumers are tired of supplements dressed up as snacks. They want snacks that happen to carry a benefit. GLiTCH targets the emotional, sensory side of the purchase decision — the craving — rather than the rational health motivation.
Marco: Commercially, this is a sharp read of where the mainstream consumer actually is. The buyers already sold on protein optimisation found their brands years ago. The next growth pool is people who want to eat better without feeling like they're taking medicine. Stealth health — smuggling nutrition into something that genuinely tastes like a treat — has real runway in European grocery and impulse channels.
Klara: My concern is on the regulatory side. In the EU, you can't make unauthorised health claims — that's under EC 1924/2006, the regulation governing what brands can and cannot say about health benefits on pack or in marketing. But if you *deprioritise* your health credentials in marketing, you potentially sidestep that scrutiny. That's convenient for the brand, but it doesn't help consumers understand what they're actually buying.
Marco: That's a real tension. Though I'd argue transparency can still live in the ingredient panel even when it's absent from the front of pack.
Klara: It can — but most shoppers never flip the pack over.
Marco: Which is exactly what makes GLiTCH worth watching as a live experiment. Now let's move to our final story for today.
Klara: Kratom is a plant-derived substance that's quietly spreading through European wellness and supplement circles — and the warning signs are serious.
Klara: Kratom comes from a Southeast Asian tree. Its leaves contain psychoactive compounds — meaning they act on the brain and nervous system. It's been around in traditional use for centuries, but it's now showing up in Western markets dressed in anti-ageing and mood-enhancement language.
Klara: Italian food safety publication Il Fatto Alimentare has published a detailed scrutiny of exactly this trend. The piece flags that kratom is being actively marketed for anti-ageing and wellbeing benefits despite there being no credible clinical evidence to support those claims. More seriously, documented risks include dependency, liver toxicity, and potentially dangerous interactions with common medications. The publication is calling for stricter regulatory attention in Italy and across the EU, where kratom currently sits in a grey zone — it's not clearly authorised under EU novel food rules, which require safety assessments before a new food ingredient can legally be sold, but it's not uniformly banned either.
Klara: That regulatory gap is the problem. Ambiguity is not safety. Substances with this risk profile should not be drifting into the supplement aisle under wellness language while regulators are still working out their position.
Marco: From a market perspective, this is a category-wide credibility problem, not just a kratom problem. When borderline substances get marketed with serious wellness claims and then publicly exposed as dangerous, consumers don't always distinguish. The fallout touches legitimate supplement brands too.
Klara: That's the part the broader industry should take seriously. Trade bodies and responsible brands have a real interest in pushing regulators to close this kind of gap quickly — because every kratom headline makes the whole nutraceutical sector look like it needs supervision.
Marco: The brands with solid evidence behind them should be the loudest voices calling for exactly that.
Marco: Today's throughline is clear — the brands winning in European wellness are the ones brave enough to lead with identity before ingredients.
Klara: And if your identity makes claims, make sure the evidence exists to back them up — because regulators are watching, and so are consumers.