LIFE SCIENCES
Nutraceuticals
World's Most Productive Companies
Performance Nutrition: Channel Shifts and Cost Pressures Reset Productivity
These firms operate in the global nutrition and wellness value chain, spanning performance nutrition, vitamins, minerals, and supplements, weight management, and beauty-adjacent nutrition. Across the group, demand is driven by long-term health consciousness and preventive wellness adoption, which remained high before and after the pandemic. The peer group sells through relationship-driven and increasingly social-commerce channels, faces volatile protein and logistics costs, and manages heightened scrutiny of marketing and earnings claims. Strategy now centers on digital acquisition, compliance, and higher-protein, nutrient-dense portfolios, as GLP-1 drugs reshape consumer behavior.
Six forces dominated the six years, starting with a pandemic spike in interest in nutrition and health-related concerns. This then stabilized as the pandemic eased and has continued at a higher level. The adoption of social-commerce approaches by consumers has changed the landscape. Input-cost volatility, coupled with privacy-driven ad transparency frictions, created headwinds. Winners built creator channels, first-party data, agile pricing, and compliant claims.
2024 featured softer discretionary spending, rapid scaling of social commerce, persistent frictions with privacy policies, mixed but rising protein inputs, and accelerating adoption of GLP-1, which shifted the category mix toward higher-protein, nutrient-dense products. Compliance remained a priority in the U.S. and China, influencing launch pacing and field messaging. Three execution realities depressed 2024 productivity in this peer group. Lower volume leverage, customer acquisition frictions, portfolio transition in response to GLP-1 adoption, and cost pressure from higher protein input pricing manifest in lower productivity in 2024, even as foundational capabilities, data assets, and product roadmaps improve the medium-term trajectory.
Top 100 World's Most Productive Companies - Nutraceuticals
Productivity Snapshot
The Nutraceuticals peer group generally followed the pattern of the overall IPI, albeit with a shallower bump in productivity from 2020 through 2021, and a decline beginning in 2022, rather than the typical 2023, which continued through 2024.
- Productivity for the sector declined by 11.6% over the last six years. This Peer Group performed worse than the average for manufacturers represented in the IPI.
- Five of the six companies in this peer group had negative productivity growth in 2024.
- 2024 Productivity declined by 7.5% compared to 2023 overall for the group.
- Glanbia earned distinction as an LNS Research 2025 World's Most Productive Company. Glanbia distinguished itself from the peer group by improving productivity by over 100 times the peer group average. Glanbia achieved this through building a durable productivity edge by simplifying the portfolio (exiting Glanbia Ireland and mozzarella JVs), institutionalizing the GPN transformation, and, in 2024, coupling a quantified Group cost-savings program with decisive portfolio pruning and acquisition to shift mix and expand efficiency faster than peers.
