Balchem talks strategies for meeting consumer demands and increasing ingredient awareness

02 Nov 2023 --- At this year’s SupplySide West tradeshow, we caught up with the vice president of marketing and science at Balchem Human Nutrition and Health (HN&H) and sat down to better understand the trends shaping the nutrition, supplement and nutraceutical spaces.

In this first of our two-part interview with Dominik Mattern, Nutrition Insight discusses the sustainability and the plant-based market, the innovative ingredients shaking up the space, the necessity of consumer education and the future of human health and nutrition.

How is the consumer demand for sustainable ingredients and practices impacting the industry?
Mattern: It will affect each and every one in the industry. We see today that certain customers have certain requirements in terms of the environmental footprint of the products they choose. It is already a part of the request for proposal, and it’s part of the product specifications.

In the past, it was price and delivery time and quality, but now the focus is on price, delivery time, quality and the sustainability profile. This is definitely a trend that is not going to go away, and that is basically what we are trying to build over the next year.

In that same way, the plant-based movement certainly will affect us as well. Of course, that is not historically where we are coming from, but it is certainly something that we are willing to look into, like with the plant-based coffee creamer we are featuring here, and we are building this into our food production units.

It is the same in our innovation pipeline for the different brands on the minerals and nutrients side. We are also looking more into plant-based combinations and fermentation-based combinations.

What are some of the other trends impacting industry right now?
Mattern: I think gender equality and diversification. We are a top diversity employer, according to Newsweek, consecutively and for a couple of years already here at Balchem. We are also doing a couple of interesting initiatives locally with the regions and supporting the communities.

Also, when you look at the science strategy we have, we are building a lot of science behind our brands and pioneering a lot of ingredients. We have brought OptiMSM, VitaCholine, vitamin K2 and ethical standards into the market and the industry.

I would also like to highlight that as part of the overall approach to sustainability or social governance, including our collaborations with associations. We are working with the American Society of Nutrition and we partner with associations that are mission-aligned in making the world a healthier place. That’s the Balchem vision statement.

We are also working to improve consumer healthcare literacy so that consumers are more educated about what ingredients to take and what the science says — building everything on trustworthy brands, ethical compliance and science.

Several companies here at the show have noted an increasing consumer awareness of branded ingredients. How does Balchem meet this demand, educate its consumers on its ingredients and meet this growing trend?
Mattern: Yes, not just the customers, but now the consumers are looking for those branded ingredients and that is leading to a bit of the strategy piece of Balchem over the next five years. What we are and what we envision is that we want to build more consumer awareness for some of the ingredients.

Just yesterday, I was in an Uber and the woman who picked me up talked with me about supplements. She asked me what I take and I told her and I asked her what she takes and she said she does not take anything anymore because she is not really sure if she can trust the ingredients and if they really keep their promises in terms of the claims they make.

I think that is exactly the issue we have to solve and is one of the industry’s responsibilities. We have to build science, we have to educate the consumers on the ingredients in the product and branded ingredients play an important role here.

And that is what we would like to invest more into in the future — building more consumer awareness and education and building health benefit awareness, which ultimately drives purchase interest. I think this is the big piece that’s coming — to compete on consumer awareness.

That is a big initiative for us and it is exciting to be changing the discussion from the end product to what the ingredients are in the product.

By William Bradford Nichols