IFF and Salus Optima’s new platform offers users tailored nutrition solutions

23 Nov 2022 --- Flavor and ingredient innovator IFF has announced its intent to rapidly move into the personalized nutrition sector via a newly formed strategic partnership with UK-based Salus Optima, a company specializing in tech solutions to individual wellness. 

Together, they will launch a nutrition platform capable of delivering personalized brand offerings to the customer. IFF hopes its vast portfolio of health-enhancing ingredients will synergize well with Salus Optima’s technology.

The union hopes to appeal to consumers by offering insight into each user’s unique metabolism.

Nicolas Mirzayantz, president of Nourish, IFF, stresses that this partnership represents an effort to address individual customers’ needs via a scalable platform model.

Salus Optima’s technology will provide customized product recommendations for users.“The partnership with Salus Optima places us at the forefront of the personalized nutrition space,” he says. “Our novel approach – an end-to-end personalized nutrition offering with ingredient and flavor solutions, together with a scalable digital capability – is critical to meet the needs of consumers.”

IFF states that “The initial focus for the partnership will be metabolic health, including obesity, pre-diabetes, high cholesterol and pre-hypertension, which impacts over 25 percent1 of the adult population globally.”

The future of nutrition guidance?
Personalized guidance is the core element of this partnership. In offering data-backed recommendations for IFF products, tailored to the user and supported by features such as digital coaching, IFF hopes to enter and then enhance the personalized nutrition market. 

“We see digital services as an enhancement to – not a replacement for – the overall personalized nutrition market,” says Sébastien Guery, vice president at IFF Health. 

“IFF’s partnership with Salus Optima will enable our customers to empower consumers to make sustainable lifestyle choices to achieve their health and wellness goals with the blend of a physical product and a digital platform.”

This platform model will ultimately enable IFF to allow brand owners to create wellness products that will blend specifically well into the app platform.

According to an IFF statement, the company “will collaborate with brand owners to craft specialized wellness products for consumers, incorporating the company’s extensive portfolio of science-backed and clinically tested ingredients, such as probiotics, prebiotics, plant proteins and fibers.” 

Data-informed wellness
Earlier this year, IFF worked closely with North Carolina State University to expand its probiotic portfolio. 

At the time, Echo Pan, a functional genomics Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University, told NutritionInsights: “We are working closely with our industry collaborator, IFF, one of the largest probiotic suppliers in the world, to study the Bifidobacterium strains in their proprietary portfolio to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of the probiotic benefits.”

This came not long after, a primary developer of nutritional supplements. IFF’s acquisition further cemented its control of the nutritional space and equipped it with more effective means of developing customized health solutions.

Simon Herriott, president of IFF Health & Biosciences at the time told NutritionInsight, “producing thousands of unique and complex formulations for the industry’s most trusted brands, Health Wright Products formulation and finish format capabilities will allow IFF to develop new and customize solutions and formats for a broad base of customers.”IFF hopes its new app will synergize with its end-to-end NPD model.

Tailor-made nutrition
These early acquisitions by IFF in the nutrition space reveal a plan by IFF over the long term to develop a business model focused on customized nutrition.

IFF’s Nourish division, which develops end-to-end nutrition products, is ideally placed to use the Salus Optima union to its full advantage.

The company’s portfolio in this sector has generally expanded massively over the last year, so users of their newly developed platform will likely be spoilt for choice. However, IFF also hopes that the mobility and flexibility of the app will also provide appeal for their family of brands, most notably by enhancing lifetime brand value.

“Salus Optima Technology, providing leading behavior change techniques, has been shown to increase brand lifetime value as much as double digits by supporting, motivating and empowering consumers to achieve their health and wellness goals,” says IFF.

Products from IFF’s probiotic portfolio stand to interact exceptionally well with the platform. Its Howaru range, which targets weight management, immune health and feminine health, should integrate well.

Rodrigo Jesus, Salus Optima CEO, hopes the app will enhance customer convenience. “Deploying this technology on mobile phones and wearables tackles head-on the challenges many consumers face, such as accessibility, convenience and cost,” he says. 

“By collaborating with IFF, Salus is confident that we can empower individuals to make simple and sustainable food, supplement and lifestyle choices for better human health.”

By James Davies