Vitaquest's 2027 Consumer Trends Forecast

Live from SupplySide Global 2026, Nutritional Outlook’s Nicholas Jacobus speaks with Michael Anthonavage, VP of innovation at Vitaquest International, about the company’s 2027 consumer trends forecast and how it’s shaping supplement formulation. In the conversation, Anthonavage discusses why brands need to design around how a product fits into consumers’ daily routines, not just what’s in it, and why powder formats, including stick packs and ready-to-mix drinks, are better suited than capsules for multi-ingredient longevity formulas built around emerging ingredients like spermidine, NMN, resveratrol, CoQ10, and fisetin.

Transcript:

Nicholas Jacobus: Vitaquest’s 2027 forecast says consumers will stop asking only what’s in a supplement and start asking how it fits into their day. What does that mean for brands?

Michael Anthonavage: I think most brands need to understand that everybody's got a busy lifestyle. They have nutritional goals at the end of their plan, whether it be long-term, short-term, gym, motherhood, aging, mobility, what have you. So consumers need to need to find a format, find something that they're going to stick to, create a habit, preferably a new habit, and have brands ensure that their pack size, their dosage, their flavor systems are all positively accepted by their customers. Back in the day, eating greens that tasted like cut grass was okay back then, now it's not, right?

So, ease of mixing, powder formulations that go into solution very quickly, sensorial aspects to things that keep people interested in trying new flavor systems while still staying with the brand. It all works really well.

Jacobus: So your recent report highlights that longevity formulas are using emerging ingredients such as spermidine, NMN, resveratrol, CoQ10, and fisetin. Why do powders suit these multi-ingredient formulas better than capsules and what are the formulation challenges, such as taste, stability, and mixing? 

Anthonavage: The reason why we like powder forms of those is because this allows us to get into different delivery formats, such as stick packs. So capsules have the greatest limitation in terms of capacity. So, I have to keep under a gram per capsule, so to speak.

We have this problem in nutritional side of things called capsule fatigue, and this is where gummies start to come in. But we don't want to talk about gummies because gummies have a lot of sugar, and having different formats like chews or stick packs or ready-to-mix drinks make these particular ingredients easy to mix, and if you need to take larger quantities of these things, they won't fit into the capsules. So the capsule fatigue or the pill fatigue, at the same time, giving a more universal way to get them into your body, I think is the reason why that that all makes sense. I mean, all those ingredients are for longevity, so this is something that you're going to have to do for the rest of your life, right? You don't just take longevity supplements for two weeks and say I'm going to live longer, right? So it's a new way of life. It's a new habit, just like brushing your teeth. You make time for it, and if it can taste different every couple times you buy it, then it makes you stick with it longer. And the longer you take it, the better the benefits are.