Drops and shots: CBD trend paves way for liquid formats at Expo West
With more than 3,000 brands big and small exhibiting products to more than 85,000 attendees, Expo West is a good place to forecast the hottest trends for the health and wellness space.
At the show, we caught up with Matthew Oster, industry manager of consumer health at market research firm Euromonitor International, to hear about the trends he spotted on the floor.
“If you think about 2019 Expo West, I feel like CBD is ever present,” Oster said. Cannabidiols, the active compound found in leaves in the Cannabis family that does not have a psychoactive effect (that would be THC), made a splash at last year’s show, but it was noticeably more ubiquitous at this year’s show.
“It’s definitely popping right now, there are a lot of CBD type products both in foods and in supplementation,” he added. “I think it’s the number one ingredient in the show.”
Rise of the liquid format
Because drops and tinctures are a popular way to deliver CBD, Oster posited that this has pushed the liquid format trend onto other categories as well.
From his observations of the show floor for health and wellness-positioned products, the liquid format seemed to be in vogue, he said.
“It’s either tinctures and drops, or mini shots,” he said.
“You’re seeing a big movement around these types of products which have traditionally been very popular in Asia but never really caught on in the US.”
Still some momentum for collagen, pushing overall beauty-positioning
CBD took the spotlight from collagen, which was last year’s star ingredient.
But collagen was still a hot ingredient used in the latest product launches for food, beverages, and supplements.
“There’s a lot of beauty-positioned products around collagen,” Oster said.
Collagen’s boom last year in the consumer health and wellness space opened up avenues for other ingredients like ceramides and botanical extracts to shine in the beauty-from-within space.
“You’re seeing beauty-from-within being very, very popular. This is moving from lifestyle and beauty brands into the more mainstream of the supplement space,” he said.
“You’re seeing more products directly positioned around skin health, aging, and beauty as a major functional ingredient that five years ago was probably not something in the mainstream.”
Watch the video above to learn more about the trends from this year’s Natural Products Expo West show.
