Every supplement brand obsesses over what goes into the bottle. Far fewer think hard enough about whether customers will still be opening or repurchasing it months later.
A great formula does nothing from the back of a cabinet. Glanbia's Designing Smarter Supplementation campaign makes the case that format, flavor, and the technical work behind them decide whether people keep taking their supplements.
That second question is where routines fall apart. In Glanbia's consumer research, 1 in 10 people who stopped taking supplements said "boredom" was the reason. Mintel data in the same campaign materials adds that most consumers struggle to sustain more than three pill-based products at a time. Each new capsule makes the whole routine easier to drop.
Designing Smarter Supplementation: Part One of Two Ways to Win
Glanbia built its second-half 2026 campaign, Designing Smarter Supplementation, around that problem. The campaign runs on two tracks. One covers benefit-led products designed around a specific consumer need, which we'll dig into after SupplySide Global. This article covers the other: the gummies, chews, powders, and flavor systems that make people want to take their supplements, plus the technical work it takes to deliver them without wrecking the dose.
It picks up where our recent look at Glanbia's Custom Premix Solutions left off. That article covered the nutrient systems underneath these products. This one starts from the consumer's side of the counter.
Learn More at SupplySide Global 2026 Booth 6152
Heading to SupplySide Global in Las Vegas? Glanbia will be at Booth 6152 during expo hall hours (October 28 through 30), with samples from its prototype lineup. More on those at the end.
Efficacy Gets the Trial, Experience Gets the Refill
A strong formula is still the price of entry -- the days of cheap proprietary blends are long gone. Research-backed doses, quality ingredients, and a clean label are now table stakes to get a product into the cart. But whether it stays in someone's routine depends on how well it fits into an ordinary day.
That fit gets harder as routines grow. Consumers often start with a multivitamin, then add products for energy, beauty, sleep, or immunity as their goals shift. Every addition means another bottle, another pill to swallow or drink to consume, and sometimes another time of day to remember.
For many people, swallowing is the first obstacle. In a survey of 1,051 primary care patients, 37.4% reported difficulty swallowing tablets or capsules, with the problem more common among women and younger patients.[1] Of those affected, 9.4% reported being non-adherent. Note that those were German primary care patients on long-term medications and not supplement shoppers. But still, if people struggle with pills their health depends on, it's easy to guess how an optional vitamin fares!
Boredom piles on top of that friction, and Glanbia's lapse data shows it can end a routine by itself. Efficacy may win the first purchase. The experience earns the refill.
One in 10 lapsed supplement users blame boredom, and pill fatigue sets in beyond three pill-based products.
The Format Menu Keeps Growing
Gummies and soft chews moved from the kids' aisle to the center of adult supplementation because they feel more like a treat than a task. Ready-to-mix powders and stick packs turned supplements into drinks, and effervescent tablets made a glass of water part of the routine.
The experimentation keeps going. Innova's December 2025 supplement innovation data points to shots, dissolvable strips, chocolate bites, lollipops, purees, and even gelatin cakes as emerging delivery formats worldwide.
Shots, strips, chocolate bites, lollipops, gelatin cakes, and purees all chase the same goal: a daily supplement that feels like something you'd choose anyway.
Format Is a Development Decision
It's tempting to treat format as a packaging choice made after the formula is locked. In practice, format sets the rules for everything else:
- Gummies have a size ceiling that limits how much active ingredient fits in each piece. They're also cooked hot and typically acidified, conditions that degrade many vitamins and botanicals before the product leaves the plant.
- Soft chews use a different matrix (Glanbia's chew prototypes are built on sugars, coconut oil, and gelatin), so overages and ingredient behavior have to be worked out for that specific composition and process.
- Ready-to-mix powders have to flow through filling equipment, dissolve quickly, and taste right in solution, where off-notes have nowhere to hide.
Glanbia's North American supplement work centers on exactly these three formats. And the consumers pushing hardest for them skew young.
Younger Consumers Are Ditching the Pill
According to Glanbia's 2023 US consumer study, Gen Z and Millennials are nearly five times more likely to choose gummies, chews, and other enjoyable formats over traditional pills and tablets.
Among 18-to-25-year-olds, chews, lozenges, and lollipops alone outpaced pills and tablets by roughly five to one as the form of their most recent supplement. Gummies drew broad appeal in every age bracket, though. Pills and tablets climb sharply after 45, peaking in the 56-to-65 group.
Younger consumers also want different things from their supplements. Every generation uses vitamins and minerals for general health and immunity, but Glanbia's 2026 Pulse survey across the US, UK, and China found that Gen Z over-indexes on sleep support, muscle health, stress and mood, beauty, and cognitive health. Those needs map neatly onto formats that slot into a day: a calming chew before bed, a beauty gummy with breakfast, or a focus stick pack dropped into a water bottle at work.
Novelty only buys a trial, though. Someone might grab a lollipop vitamin once for the fun of it. Repeat use takes good taste, a texture that holds up from the first piece in the bottle to the last, and a dose that does what the label says.
Gen Z and Millennials are nearly five times more likely to choose gummies, chews, and other enjoyable formats over pills and tablets.
Taste Is the Repeat-Purchase Engine
If one number explains the gummy boom, it's this: 52% of gummy users say "tastes good" is a characteristic they look for in supplements, compared with just 16% of all vitamin, mineral, and supplement (VMS) users. For gummy buyers, taste tops the list, ahead of price.
The rest of the data is revealing too. Gummy users are more likely than the average VMS shopper to want an affordable product (37% vs. 32%) and high-quality ingredients (25% vs. 19%). They want candy-shop flavor, a clean ingredient list, and a price that doesn't sting. That's a demanding list, because every masking agent, overage, and reformulation adds cost.
Consumers also judge a gummy against real candy and a drink mix against whatever's in their fridge. "Pretty good for a vitamin" no longer cuts it.
Why Great Taste Is Hard
The ingredients benefit-led products need are often the hardest to hide:
- Minerals like iron and zinc bring metallic, astringent notes
- Caffeine is intensely bitter
- Thiamine and other B vitamins can carry sulfurous off-notes
- Choline sources lean fishy
- Ashwagandha is bitter and earthy (its Sanskrit name roughly translates to "smell of horse")
- Amino acids and proteins add bitterness and lingering aftertastes
Sugar-reduced and sugar-free versions raise the difficulty, since sugar is one of the most pleasant masking tools available. Flavor teams have to balance sweetness, acidity, aroma, texture, color, and aftertaste, then make sure the product tastes the same at the end of its shelf life as it did on day one.
That's the job of Glanbia's two flavor houses, Flavor Producers and Foodarom, which we first covered in our Pleasure with Purpose breakdown. Glanbia pitches them on off-note masking, a natural and organic flavor portfolio, and hands-on application and sensory support.
Taste is the top attribute for gummy users, at 52% versus 16% for VMS users overall.
Flavor That Signals the Benefit
Masking is only half of flavor's job. The right profile can tell consumers what a product does before they read the label. Glanbia groups the flavors gaining traction in supplements into five families, each matched to the benefits it reinforces.
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Functional Fruits
Pink guava, Korean pear, white peach, pomelo, and calamansi suit beauty, immunity, and vitality products. They're familiar enough to feel approachable and global enough to feel elevated.
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Floral-Forward
Lychee rose, jasmine berry, orange blossom citrus, and honey lavender fit relaxation and beauty. Floral notes cue self-care and a premium experience, which raises perceived value.
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Tea-Inspired Rituals
White peach honey matcha, blackberry citrus green tea, and elderberry mint pair with focus, cognition, and energy. Tea is already a daily ritual with a better-for-you reputation, so these flavors feel familiar on the first try.
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Modern Indulgence
Vanilla chai, brown sugar milk tea, toasted coconut, and raspberry rosemary are built for mood products. Glanbia's view is that indulgent profiles drive purchase intent and adherence because they feel rewarding and permissible at the same time.
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Tropical Retreat
Pink guava, dragon fruit, passionfruit, and coconut citrus fit hydration, beauty, and vitality. They evoke freshness and escape, and they naturally reinforce the hydration story behind electrolyte drink mixes.
What the Social Data Says
Glanbia also built three concept products around Tastewise social-conversation data from June 2026.
- Glow & Radiance beauty gummy (Blueberry Honeydew): Honeydew melon is the second-fastest-rising flavor in beauty conversations, up 128% year over year.
- Daily Defense immune support chew (Mandarin Orange Lemongrass): Mandarin orange is the fastest-rising flavor in immunity conversations, up 136%, and lemongrass is up 99%.
- Calm & Clarity mood and focus drink mix (Sour Apple Passion Fruit): Sour apple is the fastest-rising flavor in mood conversations, up 327%, with passion fruit second at 273%.
Treat social chatter as an early signal rather than a sales forecast. It still gives a product team a concrete reason to choose one flavor over another. Glanbia's concepts even account for looks, with EdiSparklz® edible glitter adding color without flavor, sweetness, or calories.
Glanbia's five flavor families, each matched to the benefits it reinforces.
Building It: Where Format, Flavor, and Formula Meet
Everything above fits neatly on a slide. Turning it into a gummy that tastes like candy and still carries its labeled dose through cooking, curing, and a long shelf life is where products fall apart.
Independent testing shows how often it happens. In 2023, researchers led by Pieter Cohen analyzed 25 melatonin gummy products sold in the US.[2] Measured melatonin ranged from 74% to 347% of the labeled amount. Twenty-two of the 25 products were inaccurately labeled, and only three landed within 10% of their claim. One contained no detectable melatonin at all, but did contain 31.3mg of CBD! The furthest off target, at 347%, was a multi-ingredient "sleep plus immune" gummy.
The study had limits (one sample per brand, gummies only), and the researchers didn't explore why most products ran high. But gummy makers have long protected label claims by adding extra active up front to cover what processing and shelf life destroy. Get those overages wrong, or blend unevenly, and the dose drifts. That's why the partner behind a gummy matters as much as the formula on its label.
Coating the Actives
Eight vitamins, three minerals, a botanical extract, and a sweetener blend. Nearly all from different suppliers. One late shipment and your production run stalls. Glanbia's Custom Premix Solutions turn that whole list into a single tested ingredient.
We covered Glanbia's TechVantage® Functionally Optimized Nutrient Technologies in depth in the premix article: NutraShield® microencapsulation, GranulPlex® granulation, and UniTrit® trituration. For gummies and chews, NutraShield does the heavy lifting. A thin ethylcellulose coating protects sensitive nutrients from heat and acid during processing, and Glanbia says it can cut required overages by half or more. Smaller overages mean more predictable doses and less raw material per batch, which matters when your buyer wants premium taste at a fair price.
Glanbia also tackles the testing problem head-on. Coated nutrients come with known analytical challenges, so the company developed its own testing method, which it shares with brands and their third-party labs.
Encapsulation Doubles as a Taste Tool
This is where the technical and sensory halves of the story connect. TechVantage® lists flavor and taste among the problems it solves, alongside stability and homogeneity. And the NutraShield® coated-ingredient list reads like the off-note roster from earlier: caffeine, choline bitartrate, zinc, copper, iron, thiamin, and ashwagandha, plus L-theanine, vitamin C, folic acid, and vitamins A and D3.
A coating can limit how much of an active dissolves on the tongue, and the flavor system masks the rest. Glanbia's prototypes show the pairing at work:
- EnergiFuel Chews (Watermelon Splash) deliver 50mg of NutraShield® caffeine per chew, with a natural watermelon flavor blend and a separate masking blend.
- ZenGems Gummies (Berry Bliss) carry 300mg of NutraShield® KSM-66® Ashwagandha per gummy, with natural blueberry acai flavor and a masking blend.
- GlowUp Effervescents (Pineapple Passion) combine 1g of Collameta™ collagen with NutraShield®-protected beta carotene, vitamins D3 and E, and selenium, plus a vitamin flavor masker.
Every Format Needs Its Own Playbook
Glanbia's application teams approach each format differently.
- Gummies: overages tuned for heat, pH, and shelf-life claims, experience with gelatin and pectin systems, sugar-reduced and sugar-free options, and pilot-lab testing plus co-manufacturer relationships for scale-up
- Soft chews: overages tuned to the chew's composition and process, with prototyping and ingredient testing ahead of launch
- Ready-to-mix powders: GranulPlex® granulation for better instantization and solubility, V and paddle blending, and sachet pouching know-how
Glanbia isn't a co-manufacturer, though. As explained on Episode #199 of the PricePlow Podcast, it works as an ingredient house that connects brands with the right contract manufacturers. Bring your own, or lean on Glanbia's network.
Soft chews need their own overage math, flavor masking, and prototyping before they scale.
Taste It at SupplySide Global: Booth 6152
SupplySide Global runs October 26 to 30 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, with the expo hall open October 28, 29, and 30. Glanbia will be at Booth 6152, and it's a booth worth visiting hungry.
Along with EnergiFuel, ZenGems, and GlowUp, expect samples from Glanbia's prototype lineup, including:
- ImmunWell Gummies (Berry Pomegranate Elixir): 100mg of Immunel™ colostrum per two-gummy serving, plus the All N® Immunity Premix Accelerator with NutraShield® vitamin C, zinc, and elderberry extract
- Collagen Peach Citrus Gummies: made with Collameta™, Glanbia's marine-based, 50% tripeptide collagen (covered in our Glanbia Strength Platform article)
- Immunel™ Ready-to-Mix Immune & Hydration Powder (Passion Fruit Yuzu): 100mg of Immunel and 1.5g of the All N® Electrolyte Premix Accelerator, with 0g of sugar
- Immunel™ Orange Cream Tablet Chew: 100mg of Immunel in a chewable tablet
Each prototype pairs a benefit platform with a format and flavor built for it, which is the Designing Smarter Supplementation thesis in a single bite. We'll break down the full lineup, along with the benefit-led side of the campaign, in our post-show follow-up.
The Best Formula Is the One People Finish
Brad Meyers, VP of Functional Proteins and Snacking at Glanbia, breaks down the food science behind better-for-you protein products, from solving the protein bar hardness problem to designing the innovative OvenPro platform for high-protein baked goods on Episode #199 of the PricePlow Podcast.
Product teams spend months perfecting a label. Consumers then decide whether that product earns a permanent spot in their routine, and Glanbia's data shows what they're judging. Gummy users rank taste above everything else. Younger consumers are moving away from pills. And boredom alone is enough to end a routine.
Meeting those expectations takes more than a fun format and a trending flavor. It takes coated actives that survive processing, masking systems built around specific off-notes, format-specific manufacturing experience, and a way to verify that the dose on the label made it into the product. The melatonin data shows what happens when those pieces are missing.
That's the case Glanbia is bringing to Las Vegas. If you're developing a gummy, chew, or drink mix for 2027, Booth 6152 deserves a spot on your SupplySide schedule.
Sign up for Glanbia news alerts below, and we'll let you know when our post-show look at the benefit-led side of the campaign goes live:
