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Joshua Schall Joshua Schall

State of Supplements Within Convenience Stores

What’s the current state of supplements within the convenience sales channel? While I might be a bit biased considering my background, I've always believed the best and brightest of specifically the sports/active nutrition space could compete against any large food/beverage CPG incumbent. And if you walked around The NACS Show expo within the "in-store merchandise" section...you undoubtedly started to see that happening. For one…the sheer volume increase of exhibitors that would be considered “birthed/incubated within the supplement industry” was extremely noticeable. Secondly, many of these brands that are on maybe year 2 to 5 in their convenience sales channel strategy definitely went bigger in terms of event marketing. Big CPG are sneaky voyeurs…using strategists/analysts like me that are deep in the niche to help them spot the mainstreaming ideas within the influential epicenter of the CPG world. They could implement watered-down copycat innovations without much fear of competition. That’s mainly because the previous era of sports/active nutrition entrepreneurs "stayed in their sales channel lanes of specialty.” But that isn’t the case anymore…and it should make large food/beverage CPG incumbents a bit nervous.

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