Imagine discovering that within the supplement market, one format commands the highest prices, generates the deepest engagement, consistently over-delivers on revenue potential…and yet represents less than 10% of what retailers actually offer.
If that’s true, it immediately raises uncomfortable questions:
- Are we over-invested in formats consumers no longer truly value?
- Have we been building strategy around what’s easiest to produce, not what’s most profitable to sell?
- And if there is a structural white space sitting inside our existing category, why haven’t we seen it sooner?
Over the past few years, supplements have quietly moved from the edges of beauty and wellness into the center of how people take care of themselves. Consumers no longer think in terms of “topical vs ingestible” or “beauty vs wellness.” They think in terms of routines: morning routines, evening routines, longevity routines. Sleep, energy, skin, resilience, prevention.
But routines don’t form because of category labels or marketing language. They form because the experience is easy enough to repeat. Format is a behavior design and not just a delivery method. Taste, convenience, and friction determine whether a product becomes a habit, and habits determine which products win.
This is where many format strategies break down. Consumers may say they value science, efficacy, and dosage, but in practice, those benefits only materialize if the product can be used consistently over time. Formats that feel effortless but under-deliver struggle to sustain trust, while formats that deliver strong efficacy but introduce daily friction struggle to sustain habits. The formats that win are those that remove this trade-off entirely, where meaningful dosing, sensory acceptance, and routine fit reinforce one another. Markets do not reward experience alone, nor efficacy alone; they reward formats that make real efficacy easy to repeat [1].
If that’s how consumers actually behave, what does that mean for the next five years of market evolution?
To move beyond assumptions, we analyzed data from online retail channels.
Retail ecosystems surface revealed behavior: what people search for, click on, buy, review, and come back for. By looking at Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Ulta, we can compare capsules, tablets, powders, gummies, and liquids on equal footing. Independent of brand positioning and established category definitions.
What happens when you ask questions like:
- Which formats dominate shelf space, and which ones dominate consumer attention?
- Where are consumers willing to pay the most?
- Which formats generate enough satisfaction and engagement to motivate reviews—and is that reflected in how much space they get?
- When you model revenue using real-world signals (price, purchase volume, SKU share), which formats actually carry the category?
If capsules and tablets were the strongest formats, then everything would make sense. Stores would be giving shelf space to what consumers value most. Formats would be interchangeable delivery choices with no major structural gaps.
That is not what the data shows.
You will not find hype cycles, ingredient trend forecasts, or campaign case studies in the pages that follow. You will find something more uncomfortable, and potentially more valuable:
a view of the supplement market that suggests many brands compete in the most crowded, least advantageous part of the board, while a disproportionately powerful format continues to sit at the edge.
If that picture is even partially true, then the real risk is not moving toward this format “too early.”
The real risk is realizing, too late, that consumers have already organized their routines around a different experience, and someone else has built the capabilities and supply chains to meet them there.
The data is already visible. The only question now is who will act on it first.
The Macro Shift: Supplements Are Mainstream (But Evolving)
Across the global beauty and wellness landscape, one shift is becoming impossible to ignore: consumer care is expanding beyond appearance into long-term health, prevention, and whole-self wellbeing.
The scale of this shift comes through clearly in Kenvue’s global study of more than 10,000 consumers [2]. Personal care routines are becoming foundational health behaviors and are no longer only cosmetic rituals. Kenvue describes this transformation as a movement toward “daily routines formed at home, proactively maintained”.
These routines now include consistent use of vitamins and supplements alongside skincare, oral care, OTC medication, dietary choices, and practicing mindfulness as core components of modern care rituals.
Consumers are also increasingly motivated by long-term health, healthy aging, and prevention of issues, rather than surface-level beauty concerns. In fact, the top relatable personal care identities worldwide are Whole Self Care, Healthy Aging and Longevity, and Staying Ahead of Health Issues. Supplements naturally plug into these motivations because they support the outcomes consumers now prioritize: longevity, resilience, energy, sleep, mobility, skin health, and internal vitality.
And critically, personal care routines are not fringe behaviors. 88% of consumers globally say their routines positively contribute to their health, and nearly half expect to spend more time or money on these routines [2]. Supplements are becoming part of everyday behavior, not optional add-ons.
This macro transformation matters because it challenges how the beauty and wellness industry still frames nutricosmetics. The category is often described as a small $8B niche [3]. But when viewed through the lens of how consumers actually behave, and how routines actually form, the real picture is much larger. People buy according to need, outcome, and lifestyle, not industry category lines.
This is why real consumer spending on ingestible beauty and functional liquids is already approaching $50 billion [4] [5], dispersed across overlapping categories hidden in sports nutrition, wellness tonics, powders, ready-to-drink functional beverages, and beauty shots. These purchases simply do not sit in the narrow “nutricosmetics” box industry analysts monitor.
The macro trend is not just that supplements are growing. The macro trend is that supplements have become part of mainstream personal care, and the industry has not yet adjusted its offerings or shelf strategy to match how consumers build habits.
Which brings us to the purpose of this research.
If consumers now treat supplements as essential parts of their daily routines. If they rely on them to support health, aging, energy, appearance, and prevention. If the real category is many times larger than what traditional reporting captures.
The next question, then, is not whether this shift is real, but how it is taking shape. Where consumers are concentrating their spending, where retailers are misaligned in supply, and which formats are emerging as the next wave of opportunity.
Market Reality Check: Overserved vs. Underserved Formats
Using AI-driven data extraction and classification techniques, we systematically analyzed publicly available assortment, pricing, and performance data across the online supplement aisles of the largest U.S. retailers. This allowed us to surface fragmented signals that are not visible through traditional category reporting, including how different formats are actually represented, positioned, and consumed at scale.
Our analysis focused on Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Ulta, retailers that collectively shape both mass and premium perceptions of supplements and capture a broad spectrum of consumer intent, from everyday replenishment to beauty-led discovery.
The dataset was collected over a defined two-month window (August–September 2025), providing a stable snapshot of active retail assortments and consumer engagement across categories. In total, the analysis covered more than 15,000 supplement SKUs. This time-bounded approach allows for consistent cross-format comparison while minimizing seasonal distortion and promotional noise.
Retail ecosystems offer the clearest picture of real demand. By analyzing retailers, we can compare capsules, powders, gummies, and liquids on equal footing, revealing which formats consumers genuinely gravitate toward when choice and convenience are maximized.
Retail data shows what formats consumers actively search for, review, repurchase, and trust, making it the strongest indicator of actual market pull, not marketing push. We did, however, find that there might be some algorithm biases at one of the biggest retailers, making it impossible for brands to break through a certain ceiling of sales volume.
We wanted to see and understand if there is a clear signal that would scream consumer demand that isn’t addressed. Our claims and observations we’re seeing through macro analysis of the market, we’ve now seen also on the shelves, through offers, and consumers’ unmet demand.
We’ve got data about pricing, sales volumes, reviews, and ratings for Amazon, Target, and Ulta. These three components give us an interesting view into what is actually going on the shelves and what consumers are actually looking for but can’t find.
Unless otherwise noted, insights and conclusions in this paper are derived from proprietary internal analysis of publicly available retail data scraped [6].
Format Distribution: A Category Built Around What’s Easiest to Produce, Not What Consumers Want
When we analyzed the distribution of supplement formats across major beauty and wellness retailers, a single pattern appeared again and again: the shelf is dominated by dry formats. Capsules, powders, tablets, and gummies make up the overwhelming majority of available SKUs. Liquids consistently sit at the very bottom of retailer assortments.
The ratios tell the story clearly:
- Amazon: Capsules 35%, Powders 35%, Gummies 9%, Liquid 9%, Tablets 7%
- Target: Capsules 34%, Powders 21%, Gummies 10%, Tablets 19%, Liquid 9%
- Walmart: Capsules 30%, Gummies 19%, Tablets 18%, Powders 9%, Liquids 8%
- Ulta: Capsules 29%, Powders 29%, Gummies 22%, Liquid 10%
Across major U.S. mass-market retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Walmart, we see a consistent and nearly identical pattern. These platforms skew toward formats that are low-risk to execute at scale, favoring options that align with established production, shipping, and cost structures within traditional supplement supply chains.
Capsules, tablets, and powders dominate not because they are inherently superior, but because they represent the safest choice within the current ecosystem. They are supported by mature manufacturing capabilities, abundant suppliers, and well-understood retail and logistics models, making them easy for brands and retailers to support at scale.
Ulta, by contrast, operates as a beauty-first, premium retailer. Its assortment leans more heavily into experiential formats such as gummies and includes a slightly higher share of liquids. Even so, liquids account for only around 10% of the assortment. The shift is visible, but constrained.
This pattern reflects a broader structural reality. For more than a decade, ingestible beauty in Western markets has been shaped less by evolving consumer behavior than by the limitations of existing manufacturing and supply-chain infrastructure. Retail assortments tend to mirror what the industry can execute reliably, rather than what consumers may increasingly value.
The result is a persistent disconnect between retail supply and consumer behavior. A structural pattern driven by legacy systems and risk management, not a deliberate strategic choice.
This limited presence of liquid SKUs in Western retail is not a signal of weak consumer interest, nor a limitation of the format itself. Instead, it reflects an ecosystem that has been optimized for legacy supplement formats, in which:
- Brands often lack access to the knowledge, experience, and trusted partners needed to confidently develop and scale liquid formats, not because the capability is absent, but because it sits outside the industry’s default pathways.
- Large beauty and wellness organizations are structurally oriented around topical and dry ingestible categories, shaping internal processes, incentives, and decision-making in ways that deprioritize liquid-format development.
- Retailers optimize assortments around categories with deep, predictable supply, reinforcing formats that fit existing replenishment and logistics models rather than expanding into underdeveloped but growing opportunities.
- Liquid supplements require a more integrated approach across formulation, stability, taste, and manufacturing capabilities that currently exist within a relatively small group of specialized partners, leaving significant room for ecosystem expansion as demand continues to grow.
This context is essential because it sets the stage for the rest of our analysis: if retailer assortments undervalue liquid formats, do consumers undervalue them as well?
Pricing Ranges: What Consumers Are Willing to Pay for Each Format — and What That Reveals About Perceived Value
After understanding how formats are distributed across retailers, we asked: What are consumers actually willing to pay for each format on a per-day basis?
To answer this, we analyzed the daily-dose pricing of SKUs across Amazon, Target, Walmart and Ulta, mapping each format into a box-plot showing median, quartiles, and distribution range. Outliers, single SKUs priced dramatically above the category, were removed, as they typically represent intentional price anchors rather than meaningful market signals.
Amazon, Target, and Walmart: Value-Driven Channels That Still Reveal a Premium Story
Across retailers, a clear hierarchy emerges. And that hierarchy reflects how consumers intuitively perceive value, efficacy, convenience, and purpose within the supplements landscape.
Amazon, Target, and Walmart serve broad, price-sensitive audiences. Their pricing structures reflect that. Despite differences in assortment size and merchandising, all three retailers show nearly identical consumer behavior by format.
Capsules, Tablets, Softgels, Drops: $0.25–0.80 per day
These formats consistently cluster in the lowest price band. Consumers interpret them as functional, familiar, pharmaceutical, straightforward products with limited experiential or premium cues. Their format inherently constrains how much value consumers attach to them, regardless of ingredient story.
Gummies: $0.45–0.70 per day
Despite their popularity, gummies remain closer to the “fun discovery” segment than the high-value segment. They are fun, enjoyable, and trendy, but consumers do not treat them as serious beauty formats. Walmart’s especially low ceiling reinforces this: in mass-channel retail, gummies sit closer to confectionery than to premium beauty wellness.
Powders: $0.75–1.60 per day
Powders reliably occupy a higher range. They benefit from strong associations with sports nutrition, performance lifestyles, and high-dose efficacy. Concepts consumers already link to premium value. Walmart shows a slightly lower peak than Amazon or Target, but the upward pricing trend remains intact.
Liquids: $0.80–2.60 per day
Across all three value-driven retailers, liquids clearly stand apart. They command the highest prices of any format – even in channels not designed to sell premium beauty.
This result is among the most impactful signals revealed by the research. Liquids earn premium pricing even where the channel itself is not premium.
This suggests that the format, and not merely the retailer, shapes perceived value. Consumers associate liquids with efficacy, faster absorption, a richer experience, and a more elevated beauty outcome. Dry formats simply do not unlock the same willingness to pay.
Ulta: When Beauty Is the Lens, the Pricing Hierarchy Shifts
Ulta, unlike Amazon, Target or Walmart, is a beauty-first retailer. Its merchandising, brand selection, and customer expectations skew toward premium beauty outcomes, not general wellness. This environment produces a higher pricing baseline across the board, but with familiar structural patterns underneath.
Capsules & Tablets: $0.70–1.65 per day
In a beauty-first environment, even the most traditional formats climb into premium territory. Beauty labeling elevates them beyond general-wellness pricing norms.
Gummies: $0.50–1.00 per day
Even in a beauty-focused environment like Ulta, gummies struggle to reach the same price levels as capsules and tablets. Because they are often perceived through a confectionery lens, gummies sit closer to indulgence than treatment, which limits how much consumers are willing to pay. Capsules and tablets, by contrast, more naturally signal efficacy and seriousness, allowing beauty-positioned supplements in these formats to support higher price points.
Powders: $1.30–1.95 per day
Powders retain their premium athletic-lifestyle credibility, appealing to consumers who want both performance and beauty benefits.
Liquids (Bottles): $1.40–2.60 per day
Liquid bottles again occupy the high end of the range, aligning with their global reputation for results and strong consumer trust. But Ulta reveals one more layer of insight.
Liquid Sachets: $3.10–4.40 per day
Sachets sit dramatically above the rest — a signal of how strongly convenience, portability, and beauty-centric branding can elevate perceived value. Sachets succeed particularly well as “on-the-go beauty” and “targeted treatment” formats.
However, sachets tend to shine in occasional or targeted use, while bottle formats are better at building daily routines – and daily routines are where retention, repeat purchase, and long-term profitability come from. Sachets create excitement. Bottles create habits. Brands that combine the two can capture both sides of the opportunity – maximizing both value perception and lifetime value.
As part of our pricing review, we also examined the limited sales-volume data available for Amazon and Target. One pattern stood out on Amazon: many brands appear to plateau at a visible sales ceiling, regardless of improvements in marketing or optimization.
If this ceiling effect holds true across categories, it raises an interesting question:
Did legacy supplement formats hit an algorithmic wall that liquids with higher differentiation and higher price points may be better positioned to break through?
It is impossible to conclude causality from public data alone. But the possibility is enough to underscore a broader point that formats with superior economics are less vulnerable to channel limits, algorithmic ceilings, and commoditization pressures.
And liquidity – both literally and strategically – appears to be where the most headroom exists.
Ratings & Reviews: Where Consumer Satisfaction Begins to Reveal the Real Story
If consumers are consistently willing to pay premium prices for liquid supplements, there must be evidence of something deeper. Satisfaction, trust, and a level of enthusiasm strong enough to generate reviews and recommendations.
So we began with the simplest layer of average star ratings. Across all retailers, formats sit between 4.1 and 4.7 stars on average.
This is not surprising. Ratings tend to cluster tightly at the top end of the scale, and a meaningful portion of SKUs across categories do not carry ratings at all. This pattern reflects the long-tail nature of retail assortments: while a small number of high-velocity products generate consistent traffic and customer engagement, the majority of SKUs operate in the low-visibility tail of the catalog, accumulating reviews very slowly or not at all. As a result, ratings alone offer limited differentiation between formats.
We could have gone further, dissecting the distribution and identifying underperforming subcategories within each format. But that would serve a different purpose, one reserved for a separate, format-specific quality study.
Our goal here is to understand the big picture of which formats consumers are actually engaging with, talking about, reviewing, and returning to.
To get as close as possible to real consumer activity, we analyzed review volume per SKU, one of the most reliable publicly available indicators of actual consumer behavior.
Review Volume per Format: Where Engagement Truly Lives
Across retailers, the numbers vary in scale, but a single trend emerges unmistakably: liquid formats consistently attract the highest levels of consumer engagement.
Walmart: Liquid SKUs lead with over 2,500 reviews per product on average, outperforming even powders, which reach just above 2,000. After that, the drop is steep: softgels around 1,200, and all remaining formats between 1,000 and 400 reviews per SKU.
Amazon: Here, the scale expands dramatically, but the hierarchy remains familiar. Softgels sit highest at 4,300 reviews per SKU, followed closely by liquids at 2,700. Powders follow at 2,500, with tablets (2,200), capsules (1,700), and gummies (1,100) trailing behind.
Target: Review numbers shrink, but the relative dynamics do not. Gummies lead slightly at 500 reviews per SKU, with liquids close behind at 450, then powders around 350, and all other formats between 120–300 reviews.
Ulta: A beauty-first environment changes the scale once again, but not the pattern. Liquids sit well ahead with 1,300 reviews per SKU, followed by tablets (900), capsules (600), gummies (450), and finally powders (100).
How Retailers Look Different, Yet Tell the Same Story
The absolute numbers fluctuate widely across retailers for reasons that reflect each channel’s identity:
- Amazon is a volume powerhouse, where long-standing listings often accumulate very large review counts over time due to the platform’s scale and sustained traffic.
- Walmart shows similar patterns, though typical review volumes may trend lower than Amazon’s, reflecting differences in assortment breadth, marketplace maturity, and traffic dynamics.
- Target tends to show lower review volumes in categories like supplements, which may reflect overall platform scale, shopper behavior, and product visibility, rather than assortment size alone.
- Ulta, positioned around beauty rather than general wellness, attracts a different consumer mindset, one where discovery is high but SKU lifecycle and legacy review accumulation differ from mass retail.
Despite these differences, one constant repeats across every ecosystem we analyzed: Liquids always rank at or near the top in review volume per SKU. Everywhere. Without exception.
Across the assortment, liquids appear only in small numbers, making up just 8–10% of SKUs. But in consumer engagement, where people vote with their clicks, their reviews, and their recommendations, liquids consistently stand out.
High review volume does not automatically equal high sales, but it is one of the strongest early indicators of consumer interest, satisfaction, and perceived efficacy.
If a category is underrepresented on the shelf yet shows disproportionately high consumer engagement, it suggests a structural imbalance between what the industry supplies and what consumers actually show up for.
And that imbalance is exactly what appears in the data. Liquid supplements are substantially over-indexing in engagement relative to their shelf presence.
What this means is that retail assortments continue to reflect what the broader brand and manufacturing ecosystem can produce and scale most reliably, while consumers consistently lean toward formats they perceive as more effective, more experiential, and more worth engaging with.
Such a consistent pattern in reviews leads us to a deeper curiosity. Are consumers simply vocal about liquid formats, or are they voting with their wallets, too?
Sales Proxies: Where Consumer Behavior Turns Into Relative Revenue Power
After establishing pricing patterns and the depth of consumer engagement, we turned to how price, demand signals, and engagement combine to determine which formats generate the greatest relative revenue power across retailers.
To answer this, we built a standardized demand-proxy model and applied it independently to Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Rather than relying solely on engagement metrics such as review counts, the model incorporates three publicly observable behavioral indicators:
- Format Share – the percentage of total SKUs each format represents
- Average Daily Price – the typical cost per consumer use
- Average Purchase Volume – the visible order-volume signal available for each SKU
Applied consistently across all retailers, this framework produces a modeled monthly revenue share for each format. It does not represent retailer POS data; instead, it provides a replicable analytical view of relative format performance, grounded in standardized, observable inputs.
By using average purchase volume rather than review-derived estimates, the model captures something closer to real buying behavior. This makes the analysis more grounded, more consistent across channels, and more predictive of underlying consumer preference. The result is a cross-channel pattern that reflects how consumers behave when presented with different supplement formats across three very different retail ecosystems.
When we applied this demand-proxy methodology across Amazon, Target, and Walmart, a remarkably clear and stable pattern emerged. Despite major differences in audience, merchandising strategy, and price sensitivity, format behavior is strikingly similar across retailers.
- Capsules dominate shelf presence everywhere yet consistently underperform in modeled revenue. They behave like commodities, abundant but economically shallow.
- Powders perform reliably well across all three channels, supported by a deep cultural association with performance and sports nutrition.
- Gummies contribute moderately relative to their SKU presence, reflecting their role as accessible, low-commitment formats rather than high-value ones.
- Liquids consistently outperform their shelf presence across all retailers, generating disproportionately strong revenue signals relative to their availability.
Across Amazon, Target, and Walmart, liquids represent roughly 8–10% of SKUs, yet capture three to four times that share in modeled revenue. The pattern holds across value-driven mass retail, broad marketplaces, and curated wellness assortments. Regardless of retail strategy or demographic, the behavior is identical: limited supply, outsized consumer demand, and superior revenue density.
This is not an anomaly. It is not retailer bias. And it is not tied to any one market or price tier. This structural signal is telling us that consumers reward liquid formats far more strongly than retailers supply them.
The Combined View: A Structural Pattern Hidden in Plain Sight
When the same demand-proxy model is applied across all three retailers, and the results are averaged, one conclusion becomes unavoidable. Liquid formats significantly outperform their shelf presence in revenue power.
The contrast is striking:
- 9% of SKUs → 30% of modeled revenue.
- Liquids generate more than triple their share of shelf space.
- Powders also overperform, but from a far larger SKU base.
- Liquids achieve disproportionate revenue power with significantly fewer listings.
This mirrors the imbalances observed earlier in pricing and review density, now visible in revenue contribution as well.
Across all retailers, the structural pattern does not change:
- Capsules dominate supply, but not revenue.
- Dry formats behave like commodities.
- Powders consistently outperform due to strong category positioning.
- Liquids outperform their shelf share everywhere.
The consistency of this result is not driven by chance, channel bias, or demographic composition. It is a market-level pattern of consumer demand that overperforms where supply is most limited, and nowhere is this more visible than in liquid formats.
Unmet demand: The Structural Imbalance Between What Consumers Want and What the Market Supplies
Up to this point, each layer of analysis has revealed a different angle of the same story. SKU distribution showed which formats the industry is choosing to supply. Pricing showed that consumers are willing to pay significantly more for certain formats. Reviews showed where engagement and satisfaction naturally concentrate. Modeled revenue share showed which formats consumers reward most strongly when those products actually exist.
But to understand the true market gap, the unmet demand, you need all of these signals together.
To measure this gap objectively, we applied an unmet-demand indicator that weighs consumer engagement signals against real buying patterns. A value above 1 shows formats that consumers lean toward more strongly than the market currently serves. A value below 1 highlights oversupply.
This gives us a structural demand–supply measure. Which formats are underserved relative to their engagement? Which formats are overrepresented relative to what consumers actually reward?
When we applied the unmet-demand metric across Amazon, Target, and Walmart, the picture that emerged was surprisingly consistent, despite these retailers serving very different audiences, price sensitivities, and product mixes.
Across all three, traditional dry formats such as capsules and tablets sit below benchmark, meaning the market supplies far more of them than consumers meaningfully engage with. They are abundant, easy to manufacture, and deeply embedded in retailer assortment logic, but the engagement and purchase indicators simply don’t support the volume at which they are offered.
Gummies behave differently depending on the retailer, sometimes showing pockets of stronger demand, sometimes the opposite. This reflects their nature: a novelty-driven format whose performance depends heavily on merchandising, flavor trends, and impulse behavior rather than consistent perceived efficacy.
Powders hover close to balance everywhere. They neither dramatically outperform nor underperform. They show reliable engagement, but not breakthrough unmet demand.
And then there are liquids. As seen repeatedly across previous categories, liquid formats again sit well above the benchmark line. In every ecosystem, they generate meaningfully more engagement than the market currently captures in sales. Walmart, generally the most value-oriented retailer in the group, actually displays the strongest unmet-demand signal for liquids, reinforcing that this is not a premium-channel anomaly but a structural consumer preference.
This cross-retailer consistency is critical. The signal is the same everywhere. Liquids are systematically undersupplied relative to how strongly consumers respond to them. Even when they represent the smallest share of SKUs, they generate disproportionate attention, interest, and purchase intent.
Dry formats dominate supply; liquids dominate demand signals. And this divergence is visible no matter where we look.
The White Space: Where Unmet Demand Meets Willingness to Pay
Before we overlay everything together, a quick recap helps reinforce the core signals the data has been pointing to throughout.
Across all major retailers, more than half of total shelf space (58% on average) is still dedicated to capsules and tablets, even though these formats consistently show lower satisfaction, weaker engagement, and limited pricing power. Their dominance reflects not consumer demand, but an industry tendency to default to the most familiar and readily available formats, rather than rethinking what else could be built.
Meanwhile, liquid formats sit at the opposite extreme:
- they represent less than 10% of SKUs,
- yet generate 3-4x more reviews per product,
- consistently achieve the highest daily prices across all retailers,
- and capture 3-4x their shelf presence in modeled revenue share.
With each chapter, the picture becomes sharper: liquids are structurally undersupplied relative to outsized demand.
Mapping unmet demand against willingness to pay reveals where true commercial white space exists, not as an opinion, but as a measurable pattern.
The Map Where Consumers Show Both Desire and Willingness to Pay
In the scatterplots, each bubble represents a format.
The X-axis reflects willingness to pay (daily price). The Y-axis reflects unmet demand (the gap between consumer engagement and the market’s ability to satisfy it). Bubble size reflects current buying volume.
Together, the plot divides the category into four strategic zones:
- Top right (high unmet demand, high willingness to pay) → formats consumers want and are willing to pay a premium for.
- Top left (high unmet demand, low willingness to pay) → latent value yet to be priced.
- Bottom right (low unmet demand, high willingness to pay) → formats that may be priced ahead of demand.
- Bottom left (low unmet demand, low willingness to pay) → structurally weak formats.
Only one format consistently lands in the top-right quadrant: liquid supplements.
Liquids are the single format where unmet demand, willingness to pay, and consumer engagement are structurally high, yet supply remains structurally low.
No other format combines these characteristics.
Powders sit just below this, performing strongly on willingness to pay but close to balanced on demand.
Gummies tend to sit in the “high unmet demand, low price” quadrant, indicating headroom for premiumization but weaker perceived efficacy.
Capsules and tablets consistently fall into the bottom-left and lower mid quadrants – low unmet demand, low willingness to pay – signaling commoditization and oversupply.
Regardless of the retailer, the bubbles migrate to the same places. Scale changes, but the shape of the category does not.
The Big Picture: The Category’s Future Is Already Visible
Taken together, all preceding analyses converge on one conclusion: Consumers are already signaling the future of ingestible beauty and wellness. The only thing missing is supply.
Liquids outperform in perceived efficacy, satisfaction, review volume, pricing power, modeled revenue share, unmet demand…and now, finally, the scatter plot confirms that they sit exactly where true white space lives: the intersection of high willingness to pay and high unmet demand.
This is the rarest and most commercially attractive position in any category where market pull exceeds market supply, and where consumers show both desire and pricing elasticity.
It is the type of opportunity that entire product categories are built around. And today, it exists almost entirely in liquid formats.
The data is clear: The brands that move into liquids early, and do so with quality, consistency, and credibility, will define the next cycle of beauty-from-within and wellness innovation.
Not because liquids are trendy. But because consumers have already chosen them, long before the industry is catching up.
Liquids Are Hard Sell – And Why That Shouldn’t Scare Brands Away
If there is one misconception that still holds the category back, it’s the idea that nutricosmetics are a “hard sell.”
The truth is: they are.
But the more important truth is: so is everything else in beauty.
Dermatologists and MDs are slowly becoming more open to ingestible beauty, but many still hesitate for one very human reason: nutricosmetics do not deliver instant gratification.
A capsule or a liquid does not produce the immediate sensory cues associated with topicals. While topicals can deliver subtle instant sensations, such as cooling or light tingling, true biological change still depends on sustained, consistent use over time.
Consumers struggle with that. Doctors struggle with that. Even the biggest beauty companies struggle with that.
Why?
Because the modern consumer is trained to expect speed – faster shipping, faster results, faster everything. Six to eight weeks feels like an eternity when every product category competes to deliver ‘’instant transformation.’’
This creates a paradox that the industry hasn’t fully resolved: Nutricosmetics demand patience, but the category has been marketed like a sprint rather than a marathon.
And this is where brands, large and small, tend to stumble.
Startups often arrive with bold new ideas, novel ingredients, and innovative formats. Consumers love the products, but the companies themselves struggle to scale. The operational and financial rigor required for a long-cycle category simply isn’t in place. Great ideas collapse not because the product failed, but because the business behind it couldn’t keep pace with the opportunity. They underestimate operations.
Big companies make the opposite mistake. They are operationally strong but strategically hesitant. They treat nutricosmetics as an experiment, produce 10,000 or 50,000 units, send them through a couple of channels, and wait to see what happens. If it works, good. If not, it quietly disappears. They underestimate commitment.
But nutricosmetics do not behave like experimental SKUs. They require a different kind of innovation pipeline, different education, different expectations, and different marketing mechanics.
Launching them as a “test” is not a strategy; it’s a setup for failure.
Our entire analysis (pricing, reviews, modeled revenue, unmet demand, and finally the white-space map) shows that consumer demand for ingestible beauty is real, strong, and consistent across every retailer we analyzed.
The challenge has never been demand. The challenge has been execution. The category isn’t difficult because it lacks consumer appetite. It’s difficult because too few players understand how to build and sustain it.
And this is exactly why the structural pattern we uncovered matters.
The reality is that every beauty category demands persistence. Whether topical or ingestible, the industry runs on fights for attention, low retention, and the constant challenge of educating consumers. There is no format that escapes this.
But if the effort is unavoidable, then the smartest move is to choose formats where the economics fundamentally work in your favor. Where consumers reward you more strongly, pay more willingly, and engage more deeply, and where the market still massively under-supplies what they want.
The Economics of Behavior: What Format Choice Means for Brand Strategy in 2026
By now, the story is clear. Across pricing, consumer engagement, satisfaction, revenue performance, and unmet demand, the same pattern repeats: liquid formats sit where consumer behavior and commercial potential align most strongly.
For brands, this alignment shifts the discussion from whether the opportunity exists to how value is actually created, captured, and sustained at the format level.
This is where the conversation moves from market data to business mechanics. And the truth is both simple and powerful: Ingestible beauty and wellness are not led by hype, but by behavior. And behavior is what drives retention.
Across the past decade, working behind the scenes with some of the fastest-scaling brands in the category – including a publicly traded company that generated nine-figure revenue in 18 months with a single liquid SKU, and still growing 10%YoY – we’ve seen the same pattern. Brands that build around retention grow predictably and profitably. Brands that don’t are trapped in endless acquisition cycles.
What separates the two groups is not marketing spend. It’s not hype. It’s not even a category. It’s format economics.
Liquid supplements are not just a different dosage form – they function as behavioral products. They live where habits already exist: in the kitchen, beside morning routines, next to coffee machines, in the fridge. Always visible. Always part of the day. Always reinforcing the next use.
This is why the data across multiple brands points to the same outcome:
- customers using liquid supplements buy 11–12 times per year on average,
- more than 60% of those customers continue repurchasing,
- retention becomes the engine of growth, not acquisition,
- predictable cash flow replaces campaign-dependent revenue,
- profitability increases because the business grows from within.
This is the fundamental mechanism: the easier the habit, the stronger the retention. And nothing integrates into daily life as naturally and automatically as a liquid ritual. They create frictionless consistency. And consistency is the foundation of retention-led growth.
Other formats can work, but they rarely create routines with the same consistency. Capsules require remembering. Gummies feel like treats, not health behaviors. Powders require preparation.
When a format sits at the intersection of habit formation, consumer trust, and pricing elasticity, it stops behaving like a product, and it becomes a recurring revenue stream. That is the structural advantage liquids offer.
Beauty and wellness are becoming increasingly competitive. Customer acquisition is becoming more expensive. Attention cycles are getting shorter. And the brands that survive are not the ones shouting the loudest, but the ones whose products integrate into daily life so cleanly that retention becomes automatic.
The reality is that every format in beauty is difficult to sell, and this is simply the nature of a category driven by attention, habit, and long-term outcomes. But if all formats require effort, then the most rational choice is to invest that effort where the underlying economics work in your favor, where consumers:
- demonstrate a stronger willingness to pay,
- engage consistently higher,
- repurchase naturally and therefore more frequently,
- and where supply still dramatically under-serves demand.
Not because liquids are trendy, not because they are new, but because they sit exactly where consumer behavior, economics, and market opportunity converge.
The companies operating in this space are not short on marketing expertise. Most already maintain sophisticated sales organizations, strong brand engines, and established distribution networks. Their challenge is not storytelling, but choosing formats that align with consumer behavior, unit economics, and long-term category momentum.
As the category evolves, the demands placed on product development and operations also change. They depend on a different innovation cadence and a more robust operational backbone than traditional dry formats.
Because of this, success in the next wave of ingestible beauty will not hinge on louder campaigns or trend-driven positioning, but on smart format decisions supported by technical excellence and reliable execution. The brands that grow most sustainably will be the ones that match their commercial strengths (sales, marketing, distribution) with product formats built to deliver retention, pricing power, and consumer trust.
In a category where demand is clear but supply remains structurally limited, the ability to execute consistently and at scale will determine who captures the opportunity that consumers have already created.
Conclusion: A Category Outgrowing Its Old Logic
Seen in isolation, each part of this analysis could be dismissed as an interesting detail. Taken together, they describe a category that has outgrown the logic it is still being managed by.
At the macro level, supplements have moved from the fringes into the core of personal care. Consumers now treat them as part of daily health routines, not as occasional add-ons. They use them to manage longevity, energy, resilience, skin health, and healthy aging. The way the market is measured, however, has not kept pace. A category still labeled an “$8B niche” already behaves more like a $50B ecosystem spread across overlapping segments and channels.
At the shelf level, the disconnect becomes visible. Retailers continue to allocate the majority of space to formats that are easiest to produce and most deeply embedded in legacy supply chains: capsules, tablets, and other dry formats. Liquids remain a small fraction of SKUs, despite consistently higher prices, stronger engagement, and superior modeled revenue performance. Retail supply, in other words, reflects industry habit more than consumer preference.
When pricing, review volume, revenue proxies, and unmet-demand indicators are layered together, the structural pattern is consistent across all major retailers analyzed. Dry formats dominate supply but behave like commodities. Powders perform well, anchored by sports-nutrition culture. Gummies oscillate between novelty and underpriced opportunity. Liquids are the outlier: they consistently sit where willingness to pay, engagement, and unmet demand intersect, while remaining systematically under-supplied.
At the same time, nutricosmetics remain a demanding category to build in. Results take time. Education is necessary. Both startups and large companies have historically underestimated either the operational discipline or the strategic commitment required. Yet none of this reflects a lack of consumer appetite. The data shows that demand is already present and remarkably stable; the friction lies in execution, format choice, and the ability to sustain long-cycle products.
Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, the implications are straightforward. Beauty and wellness will only become more competitive. Acquisition will only become more expensive. In that environment, formats that naturally support habits, retention, pricing power, and trust will offer a structural advantage.
Liquid supplements are not a universal solution, but they do sit at a rare intersection of consumer behavior and economic strength that few other formats match today.
For brands, the uncertainty no longer lies in whether ingestible beauty and wellness will grow or whether consumers are ready for it. Consumer readiness is already evident. The real challenge now is the speed at which the industry can realign its formats, assortments, and operational capabilities with where demand is clearly pointing.
Who will move early and execute consistently enough to turn that white space into lasting category leadership?
This question remains unanswered.
Sources & footnotes
Blueberry, blinded home-use trial (July 2025); commissioned by TOSLA Nutricosmetics
Kenvue, Global trends report, A New View of Care: The power of personal care routines, 2025: https://www.kenvue.com/anewviewofcare
Straits Research, Nutricosmetics Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth 2024–2033: https://straitsresearch.com/report/nutricosmetics-market
Future Market Insights, Beauty Supplement Market Analysis – Size, Share, and Forecast Outlook 2025 to 2035
The Liquid Oligopoly and Why Beauty-From-Within Will Be Dominated by a Few: https://whitepapers.toslanutricosmetics.com/the-liquid-oligopoly-and-why-beauty-from-within-will-be-dominated-by-a-few/
TOSLA Nutricosmetics proprietary analysis of publicly available online retail data (>15,000 SKUs; August–September 2025), using AI-assisted extraction and a proprietary performance projection models.