A look forward into 2021 As we enter the final month of 2020, the supplement industry has certainly emerged as a bright spot in a particularly rocky year. While NBJ will finalize industry estimates for the year in the coming months, we know that industry growth hit double digits this year for the first time since 1997, with current estimates of 12.1% growth and $54.5 billion in sales. What is not so certain is the impact in 2021 and beyond. Here are some of the key questions I’m hearing from the industry right now: Will consumers who started purchasing supplements during the pandemic continue to do so? Will they branch out into new categories? How does the market normalize after a year of double-digit growth? Will interest in supplements wane once a vaccine becomes available? When we released our supplement market overview numbers in June of this year, NBJ projected a normalization of the growth curve in the coming years, to 6% in 2021 and 3% in 2022, but not to the extent of a decline in sales. In fact, we have consistently predicted a permanent lift to the industry, settling in 2023 at nearly $1.4 billion larger than pre-COVID forecasts. But the answers, or at least suspected answers, to the questions above will help shape and redefine NBJ’s projections for 2021 and beyond. New Hope Network consumer survey research has indicated that even in the best-case forward-looking pandemic scenarios, the majority of consumers who use supplements plan to continue to use the same amount, if not increase their use. In this same survey, consumers were asked to describe their future supplement usage in a scenario where “an effective COVID-19 vaccine becomes available and is mass-produced and widely distributed within the United States sometime in the next 6 to 12 months.” In this post-pandemic, vaccine scenario 21% of consumers expect increased supplement usage, 78% expect no change in supplement usage, and only 2% forecast a decrease in usage. It is no question that 2020 has permanently shifted consumer health awareness. The post-pandemic world will be a new normal, and NBJ expects that the nutrition industry will continue to thrive in this new normal. Based on everything we have seen thus far in 2020 and the little that we do know about the years to come, we are truly optimistic, not just for the sales that will come in, but for the long-term impact to how consumers are thinking about health.
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