As part of Nutraceuticals World’s 2026 State of the Industry review, Steve Fink, Vice President of Marketing at PLT Health Solutions, explores how innovation has evolved from a mindset to a market necessity. He highlights the growing importance of consumer experience and ingredient technologies that enable clinically backed benefits in enjoyable, convenient formats like beverages, gummies, and stick packs.

As an industry, we have entered into an era with a new level of need for innovation. With new consumers, new channels, new attitudes and new technology, innovation isn’t just a market orientation anymore — it’s our product.

A 2022 report by McKinsey stated that by 2026, more than 50% of global revenues would come from products and services that did not exist in 2022. In the natural products business, this trend may be even more pronounced.

One area of innovation that PLT focuses on is helping create consumer experience in products that promote health and wellness. Consumer experience is quickly becoming a defining factor in supplement, functional food and beverage product success. Clinically demonstrated efficacy is still at the heart of everything we do, but science has to connect with real-world consumer needs.

Today’s shoppers not only want clinically validated results, they also expect products that reflect their values, from clean sourcing and traceability to certifications they can trust. Just as importantly, they’re seeking products that deliver results faster, and that are enjoyable to use.

The goal of promoting consumer experience is behind PLT’s work in inventing or adapting our ingredients to work well with new delivery systems. Functional beverages are one of the hottest trends in health and wellness today. In the past, functional beverages featured ingredients like vitamins and minerals, but today, consumers are demanding more function from their functional beverages.

What has been lacking, however, are ingredients that are backed by solid clinical science that don’t affect organoleptics and, at the same time, are easy to formulate. Today, we’re offering more than a dozen ingredients across a broad range of health categories — from mental energy, bone and joint health and weight management to healthy aging and sports nutrition — that are water-soluble and taste-neutral. That means they can work effectively in beverages, gummies, chews and stick packs.

In the botanical space, ingredients of this type are an innovative technology that we think will have great promise in the future.