Science-backed personalized nutrition key amid marketing “ploys,” flags B2B personalized nutrition expert

11 Jan 2021 --- Nutrition industry consultancy Qina is launching a B2B company directory platform with personalized nutrition at its core.

The platform offers B2B matchmaking, while informing subscribers of the various nutrition ingredient companies currently active in the personalization space and how their services might meet the subscribers’ needs.

Qina’s new platform targets food and biotechnology companies, as well as healthcare practitioners. Before launching this week, it already garnered significant interest from ingredient and telehealth companies.

The platform launch arrives at a time when faster and better data sharing is coveted to stay on top of nutrition industry trends. 

Qina founder and CEO Dr. Mariette Abrahams sits down with NutritionInsight to discuss how her platform fills the gaps of obtaining speed-to-market data and B2B companies struggling to stay on top of industry trends.

How does it work?
Abrahams and her team have mapped out the personalized nutrition industry and created tabs for specific industry segments, ranging from metabolites and meal planning to recipes and dietary preferences.

Searching tags, such as 3D printing, AI/Machine Learning, or even specific countries or diseases also yields companies active in those particular segments. 

Subscribers can search by segment or tag, for example companies integrating AI/Machine Learning.Paid subscribers to Qina gain access to different company profiles, as well as their respective product portfolios, scientific journal publications and practitioner reviews. 

The new website ranks each listed company with a Qina score from 1 (not yet scored) to 100 (highly recommended). The score is based on the company’s scientific validation, team diversity, adherence to sustainable goals and transparency/privacy efforts.

The accumulated score builds credibility in the company, says Abrahams. “Those things really, really matter.”

Ingredient companies “removed” from end-consumers
In Qina’s eight-year industry experience, there is a noticeable gap in food and nutrition companies’ understanding of what specific interests and demands consumers have given rapidly accelerating trends.

“[Conducting research] six to eight months beforehand might not be completely relevant anymore,” Abrahams explains.

“I don’t think any of us would have expected nutritional supplements to take off like this during COVID-19. You can’t predict these things.” 

Moreover, she highlights that nutrition companies’ research doesn’t always directly connect to the target consumer group, who are increasingly producing personalized data through wearables, smartphones and other digital solutions. 

“Ingredient companies do traditional market research based on focus groups. They sell to a retailer or a distributor, but the end seller has the data. They are removed from that real-time data that end users are generating.”

To bridge the gap in this space, Qina subscribers can explore listed companies’ latest research and technological endeavors, while also requesting specific information from businesses in real-time. 

The Qina score ranks companies based on their commitments to research, transparency and sustainability.Too much marketing weakening industry’s rep?
The industry is shifting from a marketing-based to a consumer-based approach. “[The consumer] decides what’s good, if they like it or not. That has increased awareness and created more educated consumers,” says Abrahams.

The growth of consumer education on health and nutrition is also creating more nutritional education platforms. Not all websites and companies are backed by nutritional experts. 

Also viewed as problematic, some have taken a fast-tracked approach to nutritional schooling, attempting to align themselves with registered dieticians and nutritionists after completing a six-month online training course.

“Now we are seeing so many companies pop up. It’s a marketing ploy and it gives the industry a bad name.”

“We want to make sure that the companies are investing in research and have a scientific backup. There are so many recipe platforms, but [the Qina platform shows] which companies have actually done their homework and have done nutritional analysis,” Abrahams details.

This creates a baseline to separate the scientifically evidence-based solutions on the market from the ones that are marketing-based – “rather than just searching ‘healthy eating’ on Google and coming up with a blogger, for example,” she muses.

The Qina team has notified the companies already listed in the platform that they are in the database. “They love the idea,” Abrahams adds. 

Dr. Mariette Abrahams joined the personalized nutrition sector nearly a decade ago, with previous experience in clinical nutrition.Companies interested in being listed on the Qina platform need to apply, providing sufficient evidence that they take a science-based approach to personalized nutrition.

Personalization rising in popularity
Abrahams founded her company in 2012 when personalization in the nutrition industry first started. The trend started taking off in 2018, she recalls, and is now “exploding.” 

Personalization is taking on various forms throughout industry, with examples ranging from stress-reducing nutritional bars to apps for cyclists and DNA testing kits.

Innova Market Insights crowned “Tailored to Fit” as its third top-ranking industry trend for 2021. The market researcher highlights how the personalization trend focuses on differences in generational preferences within this category.

Lu Ann Williams, global insights director at Innova Market Insights, further detailed the market researcher’s Top Ten Trends for 2021 in a video interview with NutritionInsight. 

By Anni Schleicher