Industry pushes personalized nutrition beyond the niche with scalable solutions

Suppliers are exploring the potential to scale personalized nutrition beyond highly individualized products. Advances in AI, health tracking, and consumer data are sharpening personalization, driving formulators to deliver more targeted benefits. 

From multifunctional supplements and premixes to solutions for specific health outcomes or consumer segments, the industry is increasingly looking at products that combine efficacy, stability, sensory performance, and scalability. 

Nutrition Insight explores the current state and future of personalized nutrition with experts from Cargill, Qina, Lonza Capsugel, Jubilant Ingrevia, and the Netherlands-based Wageningen University & Research.

“One of the most interesting developments is that premiumization and personalization are increasingly converging,” says Sandy van Espen, food and beverage commercial marketing director at Cargill.

She notes that consumers want food to fit more closely with how they live, but are not prepared to give up taste, convenience, or enjoyment to get there.

“For manufacturers, that changes the innovation question,” says Van Espen. “Rather than asking how many functional ingredients can be added to a dairy product, the better question is what this product can meaningfully do for a particular consumer, at a particular stage of life or moment in the day, and how we deliver that benefit in a product they genuinely enjoy.”

Mariette Abrahams, the CEO and founder of Qina, a specialized personalized nutrition consultancy and intelligence platform, predicts that the concepts set to survive in the coming years are convenience, instant feedback, measurable outcomes, and the increasing perception that food is a great determinant of health.

Abrahams believes that wearables and health tracking will only become more ingrained and non-invasive and will be used as behavior and educational tools.“I also don’t think the novelty of AI will wear off. I think we are at a point where we understand the personal, clinical, and operational utility of AI despite the many ethical challenges AI poses.”

“Wearables and health tracking will only become more ingrained and non-invasive and will be used as behavior and educational tools as part of remote health care, in my opinion,” she adds. 

Using personal data

Abrahams says that personalization today should be defined by leveraging personal data to deliver recommendations for a product or service. She notes that, currently, personalization is delivered through sophisticated consumer segmentation based on health goals and desired consumer benefits.

“Personal data can range from preferences and goals to genetics. Ultimately, it depends on who the target customers are, what their health goals are, and what problem they are trying to solve.”

However, Abrahams believes that the industry has not been effective at translating consumer data. She links this to several reasons, including a lack of longitudinal quality data sets, short lifespan of product use, high cost of solutions, lack of standardization of data, and lack of support. 

“With little real-world insight into consumer lifestyle and behavior, it is very difficult to translate that into personalized recommendations.”

Meanwhile, Cargill’s Van Espen says that “true individual customization” is an important direction, especially as digital tools, biomarker testing, and AI develop. She cautions that this brings additional complexity around data, formulation, production, and scale.

“The consumer interest is clearly there,” she adds. “Cargill’s TrendTracker 2025 finds that 63% of consumers want more opportunities to customize products to fit their lifestyles, and technology is beginning to enable more individualized approaches. For example, 45% of 25- to 34-year-olds say they are likely to use apps to help create personalized nutrition plans.”

Formulating nutritional objectives

Van Espen recommends the starting point for personalization to be the nutritional objective and consumption occasion, as these determine what the formulation needs to deliver. 

Van Espen says Cargill’s TrendTracker 2025 finds that 63% of consumers wish they had more opportunities to customize products to their lifestyle.“For active consumers, protein and carbohydrates can become particularly important considerations. Cargill’s sports nutrition work, for example, looks at carbohydrate strategies across pre-, during-, and post-exercise occasions, alongside protein for recovery. Importantly, the category itself is broadening beyond performance athletes toward consumers incorporating active nutrition into everyday lifestyles.”

She also highlights healthy aging, noting that Cargill’s TrendTracker shows that three out of four consumers report becoming more interested in health and nutrition as they get older, while older consumers focus on healthy aging when considering personalized nutrition benefits.

“For everyday wellness, the formulation brief can be broader, balancing nutritional value with convenience and enjoyment,” says Van Espen. 

“Across all three, however, the fundamentals remain the same: the nutritional proposition has to work alongside taste, texture, stability, affordability, and the realities of manufacturing. That is why we see the future moving toward integrated formulation rather than simply adding more functional ingredients to a product.”

Multifunctional solutions

Kori Lutenbacher, commercial development manager, dosage form solutions at Lonza Capsugel, points to a growing demand for multifunctional supplements, driven by consumers’ interest in personalized offerings that align with health needs and an interest in holistic health.

“Proprietary research from Lonza Capsugel highlights this in the joint health space, with 85.2% of supplement users saying they want energy benefits alongside joint health, followed by enhanced immune function (84.8%), and improved sleep quality (82%).” 

She notes that formulators who want to combine multiple supplement ingredients in one dose need to navigate a “web of potential ingredient interactions.”

Lutenbacher says that capsule-in-capsule and beadlet technologies can help combine ingredients in different forms, such as solid and liquid.For example, she says that pairing hygroscopic ingredients such as mushroom powders or adaptogens with moisture-sensitive ingredients can increase the risk of clumping or degradation. Combining these with lipid-based compounds can also impact stability, she adds.

“Beyond moisture, ingredients can be sensitive in different ways: plant-based omega-3s and lipid-soluble vitamins D, E, A, and K are sensitive to oxygen, vitamin A and vitamin D are reactive to light, and vitamin D, carnitine, and some herbal extracts are sensitive to certain pH levels,” Lutenbacher details. “If left unprotected, these sensitive ingredients can break down, limiting their bioavailability and, as a result, their efficacy.”

She notes that capsule polymer science and advanced delivery technologies are key to combining such ingredients, suggesting that brands select a polymer that is best suited for the ingredients they’re protecting.

“Pullulan, for instance, can help prevent degradation of oxygen-sensitive ingredients, while hydroxypropyl methylcellulose offers a low-moisture, vegan alternative to gelatin for hygroscopic formulations.”

Lutenbacher adds that capsule-in-capsule and beadlet technologies can help combine ingredients in different forms, such as a solid and a liquid.

“To further increase the capabilities of dual-ingredient formulations, our Licaps tablet-in-capsule delivery system combines tablet and liquid-filled technology for flexibility in design and function.”

Potential of premixes

Premix provider Jubilant Ingrevia also spots a shift from commodity ingredients to integrated nutrition, says the company’s head of Human Nutrition & Health Solutions, Vishal Kadam.

Kadam says that customized premixes can make personalized nutrition more scalable by combining ingredients for nutritional needs.“The demand for targeted nutrition is accelerating this shift, pushing the premix market beyond standard, one-size-fits-all formulations toward more specialized, application-specific solutions.”

Kadam believes the future of premixes lies in greater customization, while retaining the benefits of scale. He says the company’s customers increasingly seek customized, application-ready nutrition solutions, which is accelerating demand for specialized premixes for specific health outcomes or dosage formats.

“As formulations become more sophisticated, ensuring compatibility between vitamins, minerals, botanicals, amino acids, probiotics, and functional actives becomes increasingly important,” he adds. “Stability, bioavailability, sensory performance, and processing conditions must all be considered simultaneously.”

To address these needs, he highlights Jubilant Ingrevia’s microencapsulation platform, which uses customized hot-melt encapsulation technology to develop heat-stable, slow-release nutrition solutions.

Mainstreaming personalization

Nard Clabbers, strategic partnerships and innovation lead for Health at Wageningen University & Research, suggests that the meaning of “personalized nutrition” may evolve.

“Personalized nutrition is more than ‘knowing what to eat.’ It’s also, and in the future perhaps even more, about personalized ways to motivate people to change their food behavior.”

“Personalization based on psychological traits, daily habits, and the social environment is still in its infancy and has great potential. An effective ‘personalized nutrition’ scheme takes the biology seriously but the psychology as well,” he says.

Clabbers underscores the importance of collaboration to scale personalized nutrition and make it simpler and more accessible.Clabbers underscores the urgency to collaborate to scale personalized nutrition. He believes that this is needed to make it simpler and more accessible.

“Companies need to think about how a combination of their products or services could help a given individual and about how this customer’s money could be fairly distributed between these partners. Both are quite a step for many players in the field. Many want to go it alone.”

Jubilant Ingrevia’s Kadam believes that personalized nutrition will become mainstream when it “stops feeling like a luxury” and starts solving everyday nutrition needs at an affordable price. “The key is to make personalization simple, scalable, and accessible, rather than creating highly complex solutions for every individual.”

He says that consumers are already looking for nutrition that fits their age, lifestyle, dietary preferences, and specific health goals.

“This creates an opportunity for targeted nutrition to move beyond a niche market. Across our industry, we’re already seeing this shift play out, from commodity ingredients to integrated nutrition solutions, increasingly defined by specialization, compliance, traceability, and application support.”

Cargill’s Van Espen adds that formulating products for targeted health benefits, such as protein, energy, digestion, healthy aging, and mental clarity, calls for a systemic approach.

“Rather than treating protein, sugar reduction, texture, and other functionality as separate development projects, manufacturers can consider how those elements work together in an application.”

She says this can help manufacturers create differentiated propositions without multiplying complexity behind the scenes. “A drinkable dairy format, for example, might provide the foundation for several propositions, with the nutritional profile and sensory experience adapted according to the intended need or occasion.”