White Space in Postpartum, Infant Nutrition, and Beyond

This segment centers on identifying underserved white space across the supplement and functional food landscape. Panelists point to probiotics as an area of continued expansion, noting that strains once limited to gut health claims are now being studied for skin, mood, and menopause-related symptom support, while postbiotics offer formulators an easier path around live-culture stability challenges. A newer ingredient example surfaces in this context: a probiotic-derived pump and blood-flow ingredient recently launched in a major pre-workout brand's product line, illustrating how far probiotic applications have moved beyond digestive health.

Postpartum nutrition draws particular attention as a category panelists feel is consistently overlooked, despite the psychological, metabolic, and hormonal complexity new mothers face; even recipe content and consumer blogs, panelists note, tend to miss the realistic needs of this population. Infant nutrition receives similar scrutiny, with one panelist recounting a personal experience finding corn syrup as a leading ingredient in mainstream infant formula, and pointing to a recent partnership bringing bioidentical lactoferrin into the category as a sign that larger infant nutrition companies may be starting to address the gap.

The conversation also turns to functional food formats for children, noting that younger parents, who grew up with functional products as a normal category, are more receptive to foods that quietly deliver nutrition, such as hidden-vegetable snacks, than to fights over vegetables at the dinner table.

The segment closes on creatine, with panelists agreeing that proving two-year shelf stability for creatine in ready-to-drink beverages remains one of the industry's biggest unclaimed opportunities. They also discuss growing consumer interest in creatine sourcing and purity, including branded, verifiably pure forms, alongside expectations that creatine monohydrate will remain the category's dominant, most trusted form.

Participants include Scott Dicker, senior director, head of research and insights for SPINS; Joshua Schall, owner and president of J. Schall Consulting; Lauren Samot, commercial innovation director of Vitaquest International; and Spencer Lynn, vice president at PricePlow and Bevlab.

A transcript of their conversation can be found below.

Scott Dicker: I will say there's also a big opportunity in the functional food space for kids. We know that millennials specifically really over-index in these functional products. Just using protein as an example, older generations over-index in inherently high protein categories, where younger generations over-index on your protein cereal, or something like that. Something with added functionality. We see that not just with protein, but they also over-index on that.

What you find is that a lot of parents, they don't want to have the fights to get them to eat their raw vegetables, but they want them to eat healthy, so their compromise to themselves is have this product with the hidden veggies in it, or some of that. As the industry looks at that, knowing that these millennial parents grew up where there's not a weird thing to give functional products or to consume them, there's an opportunity to lean into that.

We talk about a lot of ingredients attached to some of these health focuses. What are some of the other standout ingredients that you guys are seeing? Lauren mentioned probiotics. I'll add a couple more to the conversation. Magnesium's still driving almost all the growth for minerals. Fiber is still doing really well. I'd love to have a conversation about where we see fiber, prebiotics, jin general, to go off of that gut health conversation, but are there any ones that we see? I've got a few more, but I'd love to toss it into the panel first.

Spencer Lynn: I think choline is one that we're still starting to see a lot of places. Cognizant is in everything now. We're seeing it in bars, we're seeing it in gummies, we're seeing it in every other beverage that gets launched, in addition to all the powders that it's in. It's cool to see the different formats that Cognizant is breaking into, even just powders that you dump straight into your mouth. I've seen it in that, so I think there's really no limit. I think it's even in a chocolate multivitamin, candy-type thing that I've seen Cognizant in recently, so it seems like there's no limit to things you could put choline in.

Dicker: That was on my list as well. Lauren, what were you going to say?

Lauren Samot: I think there's interest around a lot of ingredients reimagined, so there's been some new branded lemon balm extracts that have been really interesting. We know lemon balm has been around forever, but like you said, what's old is new. If you can have a lemon balm that calms down your stress levels so you can concentrate more and focus, that's sort of a new way to look at it. The same with postbiotics, not just looking at how it affects the gut microbiota, but how it affects your mood and your sleep in specific populations, and just seeing ingredients come to life again with either new research, new activities, new ways to look at them, even Shatavari.

Shatavari's been around a long time, but now we've seen 3 or 4 brands launch with branded Shatavari ingredients that have different standardizations, different structure-function claims. That part of it is keeping it really interesting.

Dicker: That's a great call-out. Almost always the big functional ingredient trends are not new and novel. They're ingredients that found a new health focus, a new demographic, a new format. Josh, what ingredients are you keeping an eye on?

Joshua Schall: I tend to think from a business case standpoint. I love the intersection of versatility. If it's format-wise, what things are going to not have too much of an effect on taste? Things that are soluble are not going to be too affected by heat or pH levels. Those things are always exciting, because then you have more strategic optionality of where you're going to put things here.

A lot of the things that came to the top of my mind were things that were either the old is new type of things, reimagined, re-looked at—the creatines, the HMB, colostrum, those types of things—or to your point, these things that are attached to highly desirable, immediate daily frictions, like if it's sleep, relaxation, stress. You mentioned magnesium, or ashwagandha, just re-looking at that, and maybe, can it be attached to new delivery systems? Can it be something where there's different purity levels or extracts? Just looking at it differently, I think that's where you're probably going to find a lot of next-level growth, where they can precision-orient those things to people's need states within the day.

Dicker: I think this is the first time in years that I've gone 30 minutes in a supplement conversation where that was the first time creatine was mentioned.

Lynn: Let me pop that bubble, because if we're still talking about white space, I think some of the most glaringly bright white space in the industry right now is for the first company or brand to get creatine provably stable in liquid and be able to show that with a shelf life stability of 2 years. That is the biggest white space, I think, in the entire industry right now. People have gotten close, plenty of people are trying. It's even in products that have launched, where maybe the stability is there, maybe it's not, we can't really prove it yet. I think the first company to have provable evidence of 2-year shelf stability with creatine in a beverage is sitting on all the white space right now.

Dicker: You and I have talked about this over the years. I think that's a gold mine, but it has to hit those parameters there. Lauren, what do you want to say about creatine?

Samot: The thing that we love about creatine is it's so easy to work with from a formulation standpoint. We've been able to overcome challenges as far as compressibility. It's very easy to flavor. Even though it is a higher dose—it's 5 g or more—it's very easy to flavor, easier to work with from a solubility standpoint, and so it can be a good adjunct, and just a good add-on for other formulations.

Dicker: Creatine's one of the few ingredients that really took off as the ingredient, not being one brand driving it, and you've seen more and more this sourcing story getting bubbled up to the top, the transparency. Josh, are we going to care more about sourcing and transparency? Are the old formats that tried to come back, are these going bubble back up, or are we going to be mostly creatine monohydrate continuing?

Schall: I think that there's always been that story behind the purity and where it's coming from, with the Creapure being (I don't know if they call it the gold standard) German creatine, that people have propped up and put out there, and I think that that's a legitimate thing.

Where you have all these other funky things, I think maybe they have their place, and they've stuck around long enough at this point, but I do think the majority of the market will stay with the monohydrate. I think that you can broaden that question out a little bit, because I do think as transparency has gotten to this place where it's almost expected, or people have moved the measuring stick to a place where there's a certain expectation in the category, you start to then move into this idea of deeper traceability, and people wanting to know, is it the chain of custody or some digital verifiable type of things that then maybe provides a more premium positioning that you can play off of, because you do have something that you have as a backstop over just some creative storytelling that you let people know about how it's the highest, most purest thing out there.

Dicker: And we released a report recently on creatine, where the innovation as a new product launch is so high. Something like 25% of the market right now is new products that have been released in the last year. A lot of that ties into a lot of the trends we've talked about, such as women's health, so what can be paired with, to be a women's health product? I still think cognitive support is probably the biggest growth health focus.

It won't get as big as muscle and recovery and everything like that. But you're seeing a lot of that, and I think that's a way that people are trying to make it premium. What can they pair it with to stand out? So that's something.