Woman owned and operated supplement brand extends hot selling collagen line
Beauty sales skyrocketing
Euromonitor reported in September of last year that sales of supplements with a beauty positioning rose from $89 million in the year previous to $144 million in the most recent reporting period, and collagen was an important part of that upswing. According to data collection firm SPINS, the market for collagen in the US in 2017 was $53 million.
Further Food is a line of supplements that relies on the tub-and-scoop delivery system. Its collagen line now consists of a base powder and the chocolate product, which also includes reishi mushroom powder. Both
Brand started as online community
Co-founder Lillian Zhao said the brand began in 2014 as an online community sharing health information.
“We were more of content community-focused platform,” Zhao told NutraIngredients-USA.
“Then I had two friends come down with Crohn’s disease, and I started looking for some food and lifestyle changes that could help. My mother comes from a whole line of Chinese medicine doctors, and I got some ideas there.”
“On the platform we started to kind of crowdsource that idea, and we started to collect stories of what worked for people. I spent about two and half years doing that research and compiling a database,” she said.
“Then we worked hand in hand with a naturopathic doctor and an herbalist to create our line of products,” Zhao added.
In addition to the two collagen offerings, Further Food sells a turmeric product, meant to be mixed into milk (the resulting beverage is often referred to as ‘golden milk’) and an enhanced matcha tea blend, both of which contain additional adaptogenic herbs and, in the case of the tea, cordyceps mushroom powder. The company’s four products are all sold as dietary supplements.
The company makes a number of claims on the collagen products, the first of which is “Reduces wrinkles, increases skin elasticity.” It also makes claims pertaining to muscle repair, bone health and gut health.
Zhao said she was an investment consultant in the natural and organic food space for about 10 years before founding Further Food. She said doing due diligence on investment opportunities gave her a good feel for what works and what doesn’t in the space, and drove home the importance of using quality ingredients.
“There is a lot of collagen out there. We were very careful to source our collagen peptides from a quality manufacturer. We often get comments on how tasteless our collagen peptides are,” she said.
Big product launch planned soon
Since Further Food started as an online presence, it was a natural for the company to concentrate on online sales, Zhao said. The brand sells on its own website as well as other platforms. Zhao said Further Food’s collagen supplements are the best selling collagen products on costco.com.
“We focus on digital first because that’s where we were. We are an all women owned and operated business, and that’s rare in the supplement world. Our core demographic is definitely women,” she said.
“We sell to every city in the US and we have shipped to 190 countries,” she said. “We are still very early days, and we have a big product lineup set to launch in the next few months.”
