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AG1 launches at Holland & Barrett, Ipsy extends into supplements, Infinite Roots lands at Rewe, and new gut research targets fatty liver disease.
AG1 is testing whether DTC credibility survives the high street. Meanwhile, Ipsy is betting subscription curation can fix supplement overload — two channel shifts every wellness marketer needs to understand.
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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Also from Marco & Klara: The FMCG Marketing Daily · The Digital Commerce Daily
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: There's a lot to get into today.
Klara: AG1 is making its move into Holland & Barrett — and we're asking whether a DTC darling can really win on the high street.
Marco: Then we're looking at subscription boxes as a fix for wellness overload, a German mycoprotein brand landing at Rewe, and new research on reversing fatty liver through the gut.
Klara: Let's go.
Marco: AG1 is making its first serious move onto the UK high street, landing a partnership with Holland & Barrett.
Marco: For context, AG1 has built its entire reputation online. Creator endorsements, podcast sponsorships, a loyal DTC subscriber base. It's a brand people discover through screens, not shelves.
Marco: But CEO Tim Harrington is betting that booming consumer interest in health has created a real opening in physical retail. The product — a daily greens and nutrient powder — costs around £3 per serving. That's premium territory for a supplement sitting next to own-label multivitamins.
Marco: Commercially, this is a fascinating move. Holland & Barrett gives AG1 immediate access to millions of health-conscious shoppers who may never have clicked an influencer link. But shelf space is ruthless. There's no algorithm pushing you to the right person. No creator explaining why £3 a day is worth it. Just a tub, a price tag, and about three seconds of consumer attention.
Klara: And that's where I'd want to see their packaging do serious work. AG1 makes a lot of broad wellness claims. Under EU and UK rules — specifically the health claims regulation — you cannot imply a product treats or prevents anything without authorised evidence behind it. A DTC website can walk consumers through nuance. A shelf cannot.
Marco: So the packaging has to earn the sale without overstepping the line.
Klara: Exactly — and getting that balance right is harder than most brands admit. The regulatory risk of a bold shelf claim is real, especially under UK FSA scrutiny post-Brexit.
Marco: Every premium wellness brand should be watching this closely. It's a live experiment in whether digital credibility actually transfers to physical retail.
Marco: Now let's move to our next story.
Klara: Beauty subscription box Ipsy is pushing into wellness — and it tells us something important about where the supplement market is heading.
Klara: The wellness aisle has become genuinely hard to navigate. Hundreds of brands, thousands of SKUs, and an avalanche of competing claims. Research consistently shows that too much choice leads to decision paralysis — consumers either buy nothing or default to whatever they already know.
Klara: Ipsy's CMO Stacey Politi is making a direct argument: curated subscription boxes solve that problem by acting as a trusted filter. Ipsy, built on beauty discovery boxes, is now formally extending into supplements and health products. The bet is that consumers who trust a box to pick their skincare will hand over the same trust for their nutrition.
Klara: From where I sit, that trust question is enormous — and it cuts both ways. If a curation platform is genuinely rigorous, it could do something valuable: surface products with solid evidence and weed out the noise. But if curation is driven by commercial deals rather than quality, consumers end up just as lost, only now they're paying a subscription fee for the confusion.
Marco: Commercially, I think this is one of the most significant channel developments we've seen in wellness this year. Getting listed in the right subscription box could become as strategically valuable as landing a pharmacy or health food retailer. You're bypassing the discovery problem entirely — the editorial work is done for you.
Klara: My concern is accountability. Who decides what qualifies as a credible wellness product for inclusion? That criteria needs to be transparent.
Marco: Agreed — and brands that invest in clinical backing will have a clear advantage when curation platforms start asking harder questions.
Klara: Right, let's move to our next story.
Marco: A German mycoprotein startup has just landed a listing at one of Germany's biggest supermarket chains — and it's worth paying attention to.
Marco: Mycoprotein is protein derived from fungi. It's been around since Quorn made it mainstream decades ago, but a new generation of startups is pushing the format further — better texture, cleaner ingredients, stronger nutritional profiles. The category has long been tipped as the next frontier after pea and soy protein. Until now, most of that conversation has stayed within health food circles.
Marco: Infinite Roots, a German fungi-based protein company, has secured a product listing at Rewe — Germany's second-largest supermarket chain, with thousands of stores across the country. That's a genuine leap. Moving from specialist health retail into mainstream grocery is where alternative protein categories either prove themselves or stall.
Marco: Commercially, this is a significant signal. Rewe doesn't take risks on niche products without solid evidence of consumer demand. The fact that they've ranged a mycoprotein product tells you the buyer team sees genuine appetite. For brands and ingredient suppliers across the alternative protein space, this is the moment to reassess whether German mainstream retail is now accessible.
Klara: I'd want to know more about the nutritional positioning. Mycoprotein has a reasonable amino acid profile — the building blocks your body needs from protein — but bioavailability data, meaning how well the body actually absorbs and uses it, varies between products and production methods. If Infinite Roots is making specific protein or health claims on pack, those need to be backed by EFSA-authorised evidence or kept carefully general.
Marco: That's a fair distinction. Sustainability credentials alone won't carry shelf space at Rewe. The nutritional case has to stand up.
Klara: And that's where brands who've invested in proper clinical work will pull ahead as this category scales.
Marco: Let's move to our final story for today.
Klara: New research suggests that severe fatty liver disease can be reversed by repairing the gut — and that has real implications beyond the pharmaceutical world.
Klara: Fatty liver disease affects hundreds of millions of people globally, and rates across Europe are climbing alongside obesity trends. The gut-liver axis — the biological communication highway between your gut microbiome and your liver — has been a growing area of scientific interest, but hard clinical proof of cause and effect has been slow to arrive.
Klara: This study, published through Science Daily Health, identified a drug compound that reversed severe non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in animal models. It worked by restoring the gut microbiome — the community of bacteria living in your intestines — and blocking harmful signals that a damaged gut sends to the liver. The research draws a direct line between gut dysbiosis, meaning an imbalanced gut bacteria population, and liver fat accumulation and inflammation.
Klara: For me, the significance here is the mechanistic clarity. We've had correlational data linking gut health and metabolic disease for years. This study points to a specific pathway. That matters enormously when you're trying to build a credible ingredient positioning story. It's not enough to say a probiotic or prebiotic "supports gut health" — EFSA's authorised claims in this area are already tightly scoped. But if brands can point to this kind of mechanistic research as scientific context, the narrative becomes much richer.
Marco: Commercially, this opens a category that supplements have historically ignored. Liver wellness has sat firmly in the pharmaceutical lane. Now there's a credible scientific hook connecting gut health ingredients to metabolic and liver outcomes — and that's a significant positioning opportunity for functional food and nutraceutical brands ready to invest in the evidence.
Klara: The caveat is real though. Animal model data is a starting point, not a finish line. Brands that leap straight to liver health claims without human trial data will find regulators unmoved.
Marco: So the smart play is building the gut-liver narrative carefully — using this research to educate, not to claim.
Marco: Today's throughline is simple — the brands winning right now are the ones that earn trust before they ask for the sale.
Klara: And trust, in this industry, means your claims can survive scrutiny, not just a scroll.
Marco: Credibility is the only currency that compounds.