NBJ Data Corner: When supplements lose trust

How hard is it for a supplement to regain trust after consumers become skeptical of its effectiveness or use? Attempting to use sales figures as a guide shows that once a supplement category suffers back-to-back years of decline, the likelihood of a rosy outcome becomes frighteningly tough as only two of the eight supplements that qualified for the study showed dramatic rebounds. Only one, Selenium, was able to reach higher sales dollars than it had prior to the beginning of its "recession."

What did NBJ find? On average, once a supplement category suffers back-to-back declining years the supplement category shrinks by 25 percent before reaching back-to-back sales growth years. How is the rebound? Overall it looks decent at first, with growth of 16.3 percent on average; however, if we remove our two stars (Chromium and Selenium), the rebound averages only 2.1 percent.