Future Nutra Foundation Leaders Preview What's New at This Year's Innovation Summit

Nutritional Outlook managing editor Sebastian Krawiec spoke with Joey Savage, founder of the Future Nutra Foundation, and Ben Kane, the organization's director of partnerships, to discuss the group's mission and its upcoming Innovation Summit, taking place September 9–11 in Lake Conroe, Texas.

Savage explains that Future Nutra was built on a three-pronged approach: creating educational content, conducting third-party testing to verify supplement label claims, and eventually funding research to close scientific knowledge gaps around botanical ingredients and mechanisms of action. Kane emphasizes the organization's role as a consumer advocacy group, citing last year's electrolyte-product testing as an example of holding the industry accountable.

The conversation then turns to the Innovation Summit itself — a deliberately smaller, slower-paced event with no scheduled meetings, curated educational talks, and unique programming such as a live beverage-flavoring competition. Kane details a lineup of high-profile speakers, including Ghost founder Dan Lourenco, NPA's Dan Fabricant, Iovate CEO Raza Bashir, and analysts covering protein trends, quality testing, and beverage innovation. Additionally, Scott Dicker, SPINS, will share data on anti-trends in the industry.

Watch the full interview to hear directly from Savage and Kane on how Future Nutra is working to reshape public perception of the supplement industry — and what attendees can expect from their industry event.

Transcript

Sebastian Krawiec: Hi everyone. I'm Sebastian Krawiec, managing editor of Nutritional Outlook. I am joined today by the founder of the Future Nutra Foundation, Joey Savage, as well as the director of partnerships, Ben Kane. Thank you both so much for joining me today.

Ben Kane: Thanks for having us.

Joey Savage: Yep, thanks for having us.

Krawiec: So to start, I just wanted to take the opportunity to ask you to give me a little bit of background on the FutureNutra Foundation and what you guys do.

Savage:So it started out as, you know, a three-pronged approach for education of, you know, the entire, you know, mass of consumers when it comes to the quality and transparency of different supplements. And we do that through creating content, but also through doing third-party testing of off-the-shelf products to make sure that certain things are hitting label claim. And we're doing this, you know, to try to show which brands are the best and the brightest of our industry, because we believe that despite what goes on in the media, you know, part of battling the misinformation of that that constantly paints our industry in a bad light, that there are quite a few people and brands in the industry that are actually playing by the rules. And it is our job to really expose that to the everyday consumer and to reeducate them kind of in opposition to what the media constantly paints us as. So also by doing the third-party testing, we have a bit of a consumer protection angle to us. So there's that.

And then, you know, long-term, what we want to do is we want to fund research in our industry that really kind of fills the informational gaps on a variety of different things when it comes to identifying, you know, new molecules inside of different botanical extracts, identifying, you know, unique mechanisms of action where, you know, a certain ingredient might have a finished human clinical study, but we have no idea what goes on at the cellular level. And, you know, trying to do this in a way to fill the knowledge gaps that of certain, you know, ingredients that have been around for a long time, but we may not know exactly how they work either from that cellular standpoint, or even from like the finished human clinical standpoint. So we're wanting to work on that as well. But since then, we've also become this interesting hub for educational efforts. And I think we've shown that by how often we attend, you know, different fly-in days or days on the hill in Washington D.C. where we're educating lawmakers on, you know, the right people doing the right thing in the industry, and the different types of objectives that our industry is setting out on to, you know, make the dietary supplement industry a better place. and that's also translating to our Innovation Summit that we're having September 9th through 11th, where, you know, we have 48 different educational talks lined out, you know, to help brands, to help contract manufacturers, and to help vendors, you know, find different synergies and work together to create more value, and also to help educate each other on what the future of the nutritional industry is going to look like for the next 20 to 30 years.

Kane: Yeah, if I could add on, I think one of the biggest things for people to hear about Future Nutra is the key that we're a consumer advocacy group. Early on when we were founded, there were a lot of questions from trade associations about who we were, what we were going to do, and how we're going to impact like the ecosystem that already exists. You know, there's a lot of great trade associations that we are members of. We frequent NPA's day on the NPA's fly-in day as well as CRN's Day on the Hill, and we, you know, put a lot of effort into helping, you know, our legislative branch of our government, but in terms of consumer advocacy, a lot of our testing off-shelf is to help show there is quality that we're offering the consumer, and then also to show other areas where there's room to improve. People might remember us from our electrolyte testing that we did last year, where we tested, I think, 15-plus hydration beverages or and powders off of shelf and showed which ones were meeting label claim and which ones weren't. It was overall a positive story, but there were some that we also wanted to show the industry, hey, we can improve in other areas. So we have multiple other quality tests like that in process right now that are going to be coming out soon.

But before then, obviously, the big talk is about our Innovation Summit in September, where, you know, if anyone's friends with me or Joey or aware of us at different trade shows, we go to pretty much every trade show. We're either talking, we're presenting, we're you know helping out brands or those shows at those shows, but we wanted to put together a show that's different from all the other ones. So as much as we love going to SupplySide or the Outlook on Nutrition and, you know, Expo West, we wanted to put our own flair that people are probably familiar with into our own kind of show and bring something a little hot and new in terms of innovation. So really presenting things that people aren't aware of. There's not one talk at this show that's going to be shown anywhere else at any other show. It's all fresh and new, and really excited to share it with everyone.

Krawiec: Excellent. So yeah, I wonder if you can kind of provide some more color about the summit. What are some highlights that you're excited for that you think attendees can look forward to?

Savage: I think there's a couple of different things that are exciting about this. One is that it's not a huge show, and it's designed that way. And we've also encouraged that that no meetings nor attendees set up any meetings because, you know, when we go to these things nowadays, like usually people are in a constant rush and in a constant hurry to get from point A to point B because their schedule is set before they even arrive. And we wanted things to be more casual. And casual in the sense where you can simply just walk this thing and discover new things that you didn't know about before because the pacing of it is slowed down dramatically. And in that sense, you know, we're we've got industry veterans that are at this show that are used to having their entire days just jam-packed with meetings. In some cases, where they can't even go to the trade show floor, they have people come to get to them in their hotels. But at this one, you know, they've got the freedom to just be themselves, to walk around and to discover, and to participate in these educational tracks.

Now the educational tracks take as much time at this show as the trade show floor does. So, you know, and in some cases, it does more, where you get to participate in, what is it, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 different talks per day, you get to learn from experts across the industry. And in some cases, we're bringing competitors together to kind of share information from one to the other, where we're trying to use this as an event that that that raises all ships. That there's conversations that get started here that are an open sharing of knowledge that helps everyone get better. And in addition to that, like we have the greatest recreational activities you can imagine, where there's like a lazy river and there's three pools, and there's boat and jet ski rentals, and we're having the first-ever Pumps Games, which is like a spin-off of, you know, Diana Morgan's What's Up with Pumps events, where, you know, we've got people that are active not only in the fitness space, but in the in in our community, where they get to compete against each other in a series of different events, which is like somewhere between an episode of Survivor and a high school field day, you know, which is which is something that's certainly new and unique.

And the other thing is actually having a beverage flavoring competition. On the last day of the show, we will have three beverage application scientists that come from contract manufacturers formulate, flavor, carbonate, and can a beverage within about 30 minutes to be evaluated by a judge or a panel of judges that are flavor chemists from a couple of different, you know, individual flavor suppliers. So we're doing a lot of things that are interesting that that have never been done before in a way at, you know, you could call it a show, you could call it a summit, you could call it a retreat, you know, but it's really all those things kind of wrapped into one.

Krawiec: That's really cool. Can you give me an example of some of the education that people could expect? You mentioned a number of education sessions, but I wonder if you can provide some examples.

Kane: Well, the really cool thing about how we set up our educational event this year is it's completely curated. None of this came from sponsors coming to us and telling us what they wanted us to talk about. We really wanted to key in on educational tracks so that people who are interested in specific topics can follow those tracks and find their way through there. And everything from consumer brands presenting to manufacturing to, you know, new ingredient innovation. So people are going to be really excited to learn about at least something wherever they live in in their day-to-day life in terms of their work.

So one that I'm really excited about that we worked hard to get is Dan Lourenco, the founder of Ghost, is going to be giving a talk. It's going to be more of like a sit-down fireside chat about the growth of Ghost and how they got where they went as far as you know selling to Keurig Dr Pepper.

We also have Elan Sudberg from Alkemist Labs, who is a leading analytical lab, who's going to be talking about quality and testing as a marketing you know selling point for brands. We also have Chris Ritter from Actus Nutrition, who's going to be talking about the stat status of whey protein and protein overall, which is a really hot topic right now. There are not many people that are more prepared to talk about that industry than Actus Nutrition, so to have Chris Ritter talking is really incredible.

One of our big sponsors, PLT Health, is going to be doing a talk. Steve Fink is going to be there. They have really pushed innovative beverage solutions over the last year in terms of a lot of ingredients that are beverage stable, so with the growth of functional beverage, I think that'll be really interesting to talk about. We have Dan Fabricant from NPA, the Natural Products Association, coming to talk. He's going to be following up Dan Lourenco, so we got Dan and Dan talking about two huge topics.

And then we also have Scott Dicker, who talks at a lot of shows. We always hear from him talk about SPINS data, but we have specifically asked him to talk about anti-trends. I know we always hear from him talking about what's hot right now, and you know the macro trends are usually kind of similar show-to-show, not that he does the same talk all the time, there are changes, but we wanted him to talk about something completely different this time. So I'm excited about that. And last, Raza Bashir, the new CEO of Iovate, is going to be doing a talk. MuscleTech has really pioneered peptide in peptides in dietary supplements over the last couple of years, also bringing things like Enfinity paraxanthine to market.

So some really interesting talks across whether it's brands, new ingredients, regulatory, or manufacturing. There's really something for anyone at this show.

Krawiec: Terrific. Well we look forward to attending and seeing all this happen. It's going to be exciting.