Speaking with us at the recent SupplySide West in Las Vegas, Paraskevakos said that the global probiotic supplements category experienced growth of 10% in 2020 to hit $6.5 billion. That growth has continued into 2021, with another 6% this year. “We’re almost hitting US$7 billion for supplements,” he said.
And the online space has been a key driver in all of this growth, he added. “We looked at data from Lumina, and they reported a [$1.7 billion] online market [for probiotics in 2021],” said Paraskevakos. This was interesting, he said, because at Probiota in Dublin [February 2020] Lumina valued the online probiotics market in 2019 at about $1 billion, indicating huge growth in just a couple of years.
In addition, Lumina told NutraIngredients-USA that probiotic supplement e-commerce sales had a growth rate of 35% in 2020, and the analysts expect the market to grow 15.5% in 2021. Online sales of probiotic supplements in the USA were US$579.5 million in 2020 and US$664.2 million in 2021. The growth rate for 2020 for the US market was 31%, and Lumina estimates this will be just under 15% in 2021.
Paraskevakos added: “We also did some work with another data partner who does specifically Amazon, and we saw that probiotics is the number one selling in VMS [on Amazon]. “Probiotics outsold the multivitamins, outsold the collagens, and the interesting thing is that the other ingredient categories grew fast and then you’re starting to see waning off, whereas the growth for probiotics this past year on Amazon was 50%, and it’s pointing still north.”