Vitafoods Europe 2025: Balchem on active nutrition trends in focus, hydration, and muscle health
03 Jun 2025 | Balchem
At the recent Vitafoods Europe trade show, Dominik Mattern, Balchem’s VP of science, business development, and marketing, highlighted how the company’s branded nutrients can support key sports and active nutrition trends. He spotted that consumers increasingly seek a mental edge while looking for products supporting hydration, recovery, lean body mass, and muscle health. He also explained how the company’s microencapsulated choline, VitaCholine Pro-Flo, launched in Europe for the first time, can be incorporated into multivitamins for cognition.
This is Yolanda van Health Nutrition Insight.
I'm here at B to Europe 2025 with Dominic Matter from Balcom.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here.
And I'm really curious because you have a lot of products on display here, but I'm curious if you can talk about key trends that you see in sports and active nutrition and how your products address those.
Yeah, I think there are a couple of interesting trends in the sports and active nutrition.
Landscape and most of our brands just fit right into it.
I guess you have to look from the bigger performance perspective first of all about sports nutrition and the fact that there is not this elite athletes anymore.
There still are certainly, but it's also about everyday performance and talking about everyday performance, certainly one aspect is people performers seeking the mental edge, talking about cognition.
Energy and focus is certainly something that is quite a big thing, and our solution to this is the brand called Vitacoline, which is obviously a choline product that is a very important ingredient in terms of supplying neurotransmitters, so it's a precursor to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is very important for mental performance, for clarity, for accuracy.
And reaction times and at the same time choline is an essential element and nutrient of every cell membrane, including your brain cells.
So that certainly is a big thing in sports nutrition.
We see more and more brands in the pre-workout space or in the ready to mix power boosters that include choline and watercoline in their drinks.
And product preparations.
Another trend, another key theme in sports nutrition is also hydration.
Always been around, like water is the basic hydration system, but certainly minerals play a key role here.
But also the recovery space which is connected to endurance and hydration.
Our solution here is the.
Which is a sulfur, providing compound, a very bioavailable organic component, and sulfur is a is a key component for luta found, very important antioxidant system which is great to support inflammation or combat inflammation.
At the same time it provides joint health and recovery.
So that's, that's, maybe in the endurance field.
And then it's about lean body mass and muscle health.
Certainly protein, the big thing since the last, I would say 25 years.
It's a really growing, growing category, and I think there's a bit of a commodification in the protein space.
You certainly have the whey protein as the muscle protein.
You have the bland protein as the more sustainable, holistic proteins, and you have collagen, which is the beauty protein it's called.
And what we see is that really brands look more into how can we even be a bit more sophisticated or add a little extra to the protein.
You see signature flavors, right?
Lately I saw a brand launching Chiquita banana flavor, but we also see brands incorporating minerals or nutrients like Albion minerals or vitamin K2 or MSM or.
I spoke about the choline already for cognitive enhancement, so we really see that protein branches out into more precision proteins to really add a little extra to it.
I think that's also another piece that is interesting to note.
And then of course there's the big thing of women's health, women's performance, women's athletes.
And here iron is certainly one of the most underrated nutrients.
We have ferrocal, a chelated a mineral chelated iron that is very, very tolerated in the gut and has great bioavailability as as Opti MSM.
I just mentioned, it's a great product that crosses over into beauty because MSM is a great collagen.
The sulfur component is important for keratin, for skin elasticity, for hydration, for skin roughness, for against skin roughness, and at the same time it's part of the antioxidant system I explained before, which makes it a great component for beauty from the inside as.
I think these are some of the trends we could see in the experience and some of the solutions we provide.
And I'm also curious, phytocholine Proflone, it's being launched for the first time in Europe, I understand, and I'm really curious if you can talk about how this micro encapsulated format enhances formulation possibilities for cognition in multivitamin products or others.
It's an exciting launch we bring to the show here these days.
Indeed it's proflow and You know, choline is provided in different forms depending on the application challenge you have.
It's a choline chloride form, which is a liquid coline, ideally for for liquid drinks for.
We are ready to drink products.
We have a CBT, a choline be tartrate, which is important for anything that is hygroscopic or anything that is in powder form.
We have a more stable form of choline supplementation.
And then there is the big challenge of multivitamins.
90% of at least the US population are deficient in in in choline as a nutrient, and it always has been a bit of a challenge to put choline into.
Vitamins because choline is hygroscopic, it can attract moisture, and as a consequence, the vitamin C in a multivitamin can create a reaction and can turn into some brown spots, which is not a quality concern, but it is a visual distraction.
So there was always the idea of how can we build a coline that works for multivitamins without this spotting, without these little spots that you see on the surface of a tablet which just looks ugly with all respect.
And vitacoline propo is exactly this patented micro-encapsulated form of vitacoline that provides this ease of use in terms of having a super ironclad solution to drop into your mix and have a spotting-free, clutterless-free way of applying choline into multivitamins.
And again I want to highlight the opportunity that nearly no multivitamin contains choline.
It's a great opportunity to step into this and to provide the first ever complete multivitamin, as is an essential nutrient.
Interesting.
And I'm also curious, as you mentioned, delivery formats already before as , what developments are you seeing in delivery formats and how are you ensuring ingredient stability and bioavailability across these different applications?
Like I said before, I guess like 2025 years ago you had the one size fits all multivitamin products for everybody, and now with the whole biohacking scenery and the precision medicine, the precision nutrition, the wearable technologies, I think the whole supplement world has really become much more creative, much more individualized, and you see all forms you can imagine.
Happening still, the big application forms are still capsules and tablets, and then of course gummies growing at an astronomical rate, but still tablets, capsules, and powders are still, I would say some of the predominant forms.
But still on top of it you see some really exotic forms like lately I saw magnesium, magnesium topical patches that you can put for wellness and overnight.
Relaxation and sleep or lollipops.
We have seen supplement lollipops lately with spinach powder in it or minerals and vitamins in the lollipops, or even the vaping scenery, the vaping movement where you have a scent of wellness of magnesium for sleep.
So you really see the sky is the limit, and it's a really creative scenery and the one size fits all model has been outpaced.
And I still think that that coming back to your question about the bioavailability and stability, which is a major important element of applying nutrients, that there also is not an easy answer to how can we make sure that you choose the best application because it's always a mix of having multiple forms and Salts and compounds for different applications, meaning we have a CBT form like I said before for coline for powdered form hyroscopic salts.
We have a liquid form for ready to drink.
We have different forms for different salts with different challenges.
Same for vitamin K2.
You have a powdered form, you have an oil-based form.
We have a patented micro-encapsulated form that has less interactions with minerals.
Combinations and for albion minerals we have different chelated forms.
We have odor-free forms, we have buffered forms, different levels.
So I think what I want to say in a nutshell is as a quality provider you need to have a versatility for different applications, versatility of ingredients.
The other aspect is it needs to come with technical counseling, so there is no perfect.
Ingredient that withstands all scenarios and all applications.
So certainly it's important to consult our customers with some technical expertise, how to formulate, how to make sure it's stable, what packaging to choose, what form to choose, what is, how do you have to protect from light, what is, what is to be selected.
All of these aspects are really important to have a really at the end of the day for our consumers.
Lastly, my third point would be it's important to have a good network of manufacturers and contract manufacturers that know their game, that know their applications, and they can also consult and help the brand partners develop the best possible products.
I think this would be my 3 watch out when you look into bioavailability and stability.
