Editor's Take: What 2025 has in store for the nutrition industryEditor's Take: What 2025 has in store for the nutrition industry

Welcome to Q2… of the 21^st century. Can you believe it? We’ve been in the 2000s long enough that some readers of this newsletter have known only the 21^st century. And what “interesting times” we’ve had in Q1.

We’ve seen extraordinary presidential elections from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue largely unchecked. As I write, wildfires are leveling entire Los Angeles neighborhoods, a catastrophic event we would hope to reasonably label “unprecedented.” Instead, such natural disasters are growing commonplace on the surface of this warming planet.

We’ve been through a global pandemic that simultaneously shut the world down and boosted the dietary supplement industry to capacity. And through this, we’ve learned the importance of partnerships to address supply concerns and collaboration and self-regulation to protect consumers from fraud. We’ve seen the significant impact our products can have on human health and even—especially in the broader natural products industry—the opportunities to unite around agricultural practices that reverse climate change.

Next week begins the second Trump presidency, and with it come new challenges and opportunities. Trump’s familiar threat of China tariffs could have significant impacts in the form of near-term stockpiling and longer-term price spikes and may create flashbacks to 2020 for many sourcing managers. Trump’s unfamiliar focus on human health—and particularly the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services—provides the biggest surprise. And opportunity.

If confirmed, Kennedy promises to transform the health of Americans, hitting everything from childhood obesity to dementia, and do so with shifts in incentives away from processed foods and toward regenerative agriculture. While these aspirations are deeply aligned with the founding principles of the dietary supplement industry, they come in a package so blurring of partisan lines and so confounding to the left that many of Kennedy’s philosophical affinities are obscured by disbelief and even disdain.

But affinities they are, although Kennedy’s methods for enacting them remain to be seen. What will his promises to send FDA staffers packing and implement tough actions against big pharma and processed foods mean? Reduction of government oversight could indeed pave a clearer path to innovation but will require even greater industry self-regulation. Being tough on pharma and processed foods may create a favorable landscape for supplements and natural products CPG but may erase “natural products” differentiation while making competition brutal.

Indeed, interesting times continue, and NBJ is poised to light the path with another quarter century of market-clarifying data and sharp journalism to help our readers and clients navigate an ever-changing landscape. In 2025, look for deep dives into conditions previously only viewed high level. Our Sexual and Reproductive Health Report publishes next week, and our Gut Health Report follows in late February. (Fun fact: according to a survey presently in field, well over half of respondents are optimizing their gut health in some fashion—and more of them are doing it for related conditions than for digestive disorders!).

On the journal side, NBJ’s Dark Issue is back by popular demand, publishing at the end of this month. We could call this the Wake-Up Call issue, and one that takes a hard look at threats coming from inside the house. Look for journalistic explorations of fraudulently diluted herbal extracts, the underbelly of unscrupulous contract manufacturing and the risks of psilocybin products posing as supplements, as well as guest contributions digging into lessons from delta-8 THC and risks of overstepping the science in the GLP-1 game.

Let’s heed the wake-up call together, strengthen the responsible dietary supplement industry and make it a great 2025 and a solid Q2… of the century.

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