Sales of food, drinks and over-the-counter (OTC) supplements with a probiotic claim topped $1.26 billion in U.S. supermarkets for the year ended 3/20/10, up more than 7% over last year, according to Nielsen.
But despite its success, unaided awareness of probiotics remains relatively low—28% in 2009, up from 19% in 2008 and 5% in 2005, reports Gallup’s “2009 Study of Probiotic Consumers.”
Moreover, probiotics are closely associated with yogurt and, to date, attempts to broaden its product base have been met with limited success at best. According to Mintel, 32% of consumers bought a fortified yogurt in 2009; 27% a heart/cholesterol claiming yogurt and 20% a probiotic and/or prebiotic or digestive claim yogurt. Only 16% looked for probiotics in a functional food;11% in a healthy beverage.
If companies are to realize the potential of probiotics, and capitalize on the bevy of highly desired health linkages, it’s time to adjust marketing efforts to better solidify the specific health connections.
Market Potential
According to Sloan Trends’ TrendSense model, probiotics represent a strong and rapidly accelerating market segment, having crossed into the Commercialization mass-market phase in 2007. Scientific/Nutrition activity has increased nearly 10-fold in the past decade, after crossing the Medical Threshold, which signaled the beginning of a long-term sustainable trend, in the late 1990s.
But even with skyrocketing Medical activity, the amount of research actively linking probiotics to immunity and/or digestion and prebiotics directly has not kept pace, resulting in significantly lower marketplace receptivity for either of these associations vs. probiotics alone.
On an unaided basis, Gallup reports that only 1 in 10 U.S. adults associates probiotics with digestive health; there is no recall of probiotics with immune defense on an unaided basis at all—that benefit is attributed largely to vitamin C. As a result, coupling probiotics with other well-recognized ingredients linked with digestive health or immunity is a smart strategy.
However, probiotics and their association with immunity, digestion and prebiotics crossed over into the Popularization Phase by 2008, signaling perfect timing for launching products with these associations into the health food/specialty channels and for very health conscious and condition-specific consumers. Unaided awareness of prebiotics, however, remains very low, at 4% per Gallup.