Dividing the Sports and Active Nutrition Market: A Focus on Everyday and Elite Athletes
The booming sports and active nutrition marketplace is continuously evolving, accommodating a plethora of fitness enthusiasts with varying goals.
Customers are shifting from generalized products to those catering to specific fitness levels, diet preferences, and health conditions. As Pelin Thorogood, Co-founder and Executive Chairwoman of Radicle Science, points out, this change mirrors the broad trend towards personalized wellness, where individuals anticipate products compatible with their body needs and lifestyle preferences.
The main clientele, traditionally elite athletes, still play an essential role in the sports nutrition market. However, everyday consumers have emerged as crucial drivers of market expansion. Today’s consumers, notes Susan Hewlings, Senior Vice President of Scientific Affairs at Radicle Science, are more concerned with optimizing their health and wellness rather than hitting peak athletic performance. They seek ingredients supporting vitality, joint health, skin elasticity, and immune health.
Mainstream consumers increasingly embrace sports and active nutrition products, fueled by changing perceptions around body image, the favourable image of protein, and an appreciation of comprehensive health goals linked with deeper lifestyle modifications says Matthew Oster, Senior Industry Manager of Consumer Health at Euromonitor International.
Marketing strategies reflect this shift: mainstream brands are attempting to attract avid sports nutrition consumers while established brands are trying to break into more mainstream markets, observes Jordan Miller, Vice President of Marketing at Nutrition21.
Bryan Morin, NOW Sports Brand Manager, asserts that this trend aligns with consumers’ spending habits, with wellness enthusiasts interested in general health products like vitamin D, omega-3, and probiotics, while traditional wellness consumers are exploring more performance-focused options.
This growing emphasis on comprehensive health and wellness is echoed by Sébastien Bornet, Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at Horphag Research. His observation is backed by a rise in sales of Pycnogenol, the firm’s patented pine bark extract, as athletes show increased interest in holistic health products.
Grand View Research estimates the global sports nutrition market to be worth $45.24 billion in 2023, projecting a CAGR of 7.5% from 2024 to 2030.
Oster indicates that the market’s most potent growth is in developing regions which have traditionally had little market penetration. Here, both traditional performance and muscle-building products, and more generalized active nutrition products are performing excellently.
In this rapidly shifting market, several brands stand out, such as NOW’s E-Sport Reaction with extended-release caffeine for sustained energy, GHOST Gamer energy supplements designed with gamers’ cognitive needs in mind, and Ascent’s Clean Hydration + Energy powder, offering 100 mg of caffeine for improved athlete energy, among others.