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iHerb survey finds 50%+ of supplement shoppers fear fakes; Mondelez acquires Undercover Snacks; Nutricia prizes diabetes nutrition study.
Over half of supplement shoppers distrust what they're buying online — and Mondelez is snapping up better-for-you brands while they're still independent. Today's briefing has direct implications for your brand strategy.
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: Today's show is packed — trust issues in e-commerce, fresh gut health science, and Big Food making moves in the better-for-you space.
Klara: Plus, a prize-winning diabetes study that could reshape how brands talk about medical nutrition in Europe.
Marco: Counterfeits, walnuts, Mondelez acquisitions, and nutritional intervention research.
Klara: A lot to work through.
Marco: Let's get into it.
Marco: More than half of people buying supplements online are worried they might be getting fake products.
Marco: The supplement e-commerce market has grown fast — and that speed has created problems. Third-party marketplaces, where independent sellers list products alongside official brands, are notoriously difficult to police. Counterfeit supplements aren't just a brand equity problem. They can be genuinely dangerous.
Marco: A new survey by iHerb, one of the world's largest online supplement retailers, found that over 50% of online supplement shoppers report concerns about counterfeit products. That's a majority of customers entering the purchase journey already anxious. Retailers and brands are now actively exploring authentication tools and verification programmes to close that trust gap.
Marco: From where I sit, this is a commercial red flag that's been ignored for too long. European brands pushing into e-commerce — whether through Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk, or even their own DTC sites — need to treat authenticity signalling as a core part of their marketing strategy. QR codes linking to batch testing, verified seller badges, direct-to-consumer channels. These aren't nice extras anymore. They're purchase drivers.
Klara: I'd add a regulatory layer here. In the EU, supplement brands are already required to notify authorities before placing products on the market. But that notification process does nothing to stop a counterfeiter from copying your label and listing it on a marketplace. The regulation protects the system — it doesn't protect the consumer at the point of purchase. Verification has to happen at the retail layer, not just the regulatory one.
Marco: And that's where I'd push the disagreement slightly. Klara wants systemic regulatory solutions. I think brands can't wait for those. The brands that move first on consumer-facing authentication will build a trust premium their competitors can't easily match.
Klara: That's a fair commercial instinct. Though I'd argue systemic change is the only thing that truly fixes this at scale.
Marco: Let's move to our next story.
Klara: New research is linking walnut consumption to gut microbiome diversity — and it's making waves in European nutrition science circles.
Klara: The gut microbiome refers to the trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms living in your digestive system. Diversity in that microbial community is generally associated with better health outcomes. It's become one of the hottest areas in nutrition research, and European consumers have noticed — gut health is now a dominant purchase driver across supplements, fermented foods, and functional ingredients.
Klara: German nutrition publication Ernährungs Umschau is spotlighting new research commissioned by the California Walnut Commission that explores the relationship between eating walnuts and microbiome diversity. The research is entering peer-reviewed scientific press — but it's worth being clear that it was funded by the commodity board that exists to promote walnut consumption. That doesn't automatically invalidate the science, but it's a context every marketer and formulator should hold in mind.
Klara: From a scientific standpoint, walnuts do have a credible nutritional profile — omega-3 fatty acids, polyphenols, fibre. All of these have plausible mechanisms for influencing the gut environment. What I'd caution against is treating this as settled proof. Industry-commissioned studies are hypothesis-generating, not definitive.
Marco: Commercially, though, this creates a real headache for supplement brands. If a bag of walnuts from a supermarket can claim gut health credentials backed by published research, a probiotic capsule costing €30 a month has to work much harder to justify its price point. Whole foods muscling into functional territory puts pressure on concentration, bioavailability, and dose precision — areas where supplement formats actually have advantages.
Klara: Which is exactly where the marketing argument should live. Not against whole foods, but beyond them.
Marco: Let's move to our next story.
Marco: Mondelez has just acquired a majority stake in Undercover Snacks, a better-for-you snack brand — and it tells us something important about where Big Food is placing its bets.
Marco: Mondelez is one of the world's largest snack companies — Oreo, Cadbury, that world. For years, their growth came from scale and distribution muscle. Now they're running a deliberate bolt-on M&A strategy — meaning they're systematically acquiring smaller brands rather than building from scratch. Better-for-you snacking is clearly a priority lane.
Marco: Undercover Snacks fits a profile that's become familiar: a credible, health-positioned challenger brand with an established consumer following. Mondelez takes a majority stake, absorbs the brand into its distribution network, and instantly accelerates reach. This is the same playbook we've seen from Nestlé, Unilever, and other major CPG players — consumer packaged goods companies — across Europe and the US.
Marco: For European wellness snack founders and their investors, this deal is a meaningful signal. The exit landscape is active. Acquirers with serious chequebooks are circling credible better-for-you assets. If you're building a scaled snack brand with clean credentials, you're a target — and valuations in this category are holding up.
Klara: From a regulatory perspective, I'd add a note of caution for brands thinking ahead. Once a Big Food parent acquires you, scrutiny of your health positioning sharpens considerably. EFSA's rules on nutrition and health claims — the EU framework governing what you're allowed to say about a product's health benefits — apply equally to a small challenger brand and a Mondelez subsidiary. But when a major corporation makes the claims, regulators and NGOs pay far closer attention.
Marco: That's a real tension. Scale amplifies both opportunity and exposure.
Klara: Exactly the kind of thing to plan for before the deal, not after.
Marco: On to our final story for today.
Klara: Nutricia has just awarded its 2026 research prize to a study on achieving Type 2 diabetes remission through nutritional intervention — and the timing could not be more deliberate.
Klara: Type 2 diabetes remission means bringing blood sugar levels back to a normal range without ongoing medication. It's been considered achievable through structured dietary approaches in clinical settings for several years now, but it remains underutilised in mainstream care. Meanwhile, metabolic health — meaning how well the body regulates blood sugar, weight, and energy metabolism — has become one of the most commercially contested spaces in European health.
Klara: Nutricia, the medical nutrition division of Danone, awards its annual Förderpreis — a funded research prize — to outstanding work in clinical nutrition science. This year's winner focuses specifically on dietary and nutritional protocols as a route to diabetes remission. The study adds weight to a body of evidence suggesting that structured food-based interventions can produce measurable metabolic outcomes, not just marginal improvements.
Klara: Scientifically, I find this encouraging. The research space around dietary remission of Type 2 diabetes is serious — there are robust randomised controlled trials, including the DiRECT trial out of the UK, supporting this direction. Nutricia aligning its prize with this area signals that medical nutrition is ready to be part of the clinical conversation, not just the wellness one.
Marco: Commercially, I read this as a direct response to the GLP-1 drug phenomenon. Ozempic and its relatives have captured enormous consumer attention. But they're expensive, not universally accessible, and carry side effects many people want to avoid. Nutricia is quietly positioning medical nutrition as the credible, dietary alternative for a very large audience looking for non-pharmaceutical routes to metabolic health.
Klara: Which is smart — as long as the claims stay anchored to the evidence and don't drift into territory EFSA wouldn't sanction.
Marco: That's the discipline that separates a long-term positioning play from a short-term marketing grab.
Marco: If there's one thing today made clear, it's that trust — not innovation — is the currency that will separate winning brands from the rest.
Klara: And trust only holds when the science behind your claims is solid and your supply chain is clean.
Marco: That's the standard. Full stop.