The market of hundreds of billions of probiotics is in a chaotic battle, from the "marketing first half" to the "R & D second half".

Pay Attention to Intestinal Health, Probiotics Create a Hundred-Billion-Market

Unsmooth defecation is one of the biggest pain points for contemporary young people.

Under a Xiaohongshu post that "Pray for the freedom of defecation and no constipation problems", several comments of "Hope to have smooth defecation and good luck" were received. Even when discussing what the happiest thing in life is, the freedom of defecation is also on the list. Young people who are troubled by business meals, unhealthy takeout, sedentary lifestyle, and poor gastrointestinal environment are paying more and more attention to defecation and gastrointestinal problems. The first step of their health preservation often starts with regulating the gastrointestinal tract.

The 27-year-old Kele and several friends established a "Constipation Reporting Group". They often talk about their daily defecation situation in the group. A smooth defecation once a day is the common aspiration of everyone. However, the reality is difficult - Kele is from Hunan, prefers heavy flavors, and also has many business meals. However, drinking less water and not exercising are also the norm. Sometimes, she doesn't have a bowel movement for four or five days, and she gradually becomes a member of the constipation army.

"Defecation is really an important thing in life." Kele describes defecation as an important benchmark to measure the happiness of urban workers who are physically and mentally exhausted.

In order to regain the happiness of regular defecation, Kele tried laxatives. Although it was effective, the feeling of diarrhea was particularly uncomfortable, which was completely different from the refreshing feeling of truly smooth defecation. Later, she came into contact with probiotics. Compared with taking medicine, probiotics, as a living edible microorganism, can improve the balance of intestinal flora, promote intestinal peristalsis, and enhance digestive function, while reducing people's concerns about "three parts of the medicine are poisonous".

After trying for a period of time, Kele felt that her stomach was no longer bloated. With the excretion of gas and feces, the stone that had been weighing on Kele's heart for a long time was also removed.

According to the report of Ipsos on Insights into Adult Health Management in China 2024, the attention to gastrointestinal health is ranked in the first camp along with sleep and immunity. More than half of the people who pay attention to gastrointestinal health said that they have increased their health spending in the past year, and 40% of them choose to take health functional foods to improve intestinal health. And probiotics are the most chosen type by people who pay attention to the gastrointestinal tract.

The probiotics market in China has gradually emerged, and more and more young people like Kele choose to scientifically use probiotic products to re-establish their intestinal flora ecology, achieve regular defecation once a day, and truly achieve "the freedom of defecation".

Reactivating the vitality of the intestinal flora can not only make defecation smoother, but also help dieters really "control their mouths".

The two common sayings for dieters are nothing more than "Control your mouth and move your legs" and "Three parts of training, seven parts of eating". However, restraining the desire for food is a very tormenting process. Sister Jing, on the road of losing weight, once fell into a vicious cycle of "The more you eat, the heavier you get, the more anxious you become, and the more anxious you are, the more you eat". With a height of 164cm and a weight of 180 catties, Sister Jing's joints have difficulty bearing such a weight, and she even has a long-term knee pain.

"When I take my children out to play, they run in front, and no matter how hard I try, I can't catch up. I feel very sad." Sister Jing suddenly realized that if she didn't lose weight, it might be an unknown how far she could accompany her children.

After a series of failed attempts such as intense aerobic and anaerobic exercises but getting injured, unable to refuse the carbohydrate diet habits of the family, and severe rebound from dieting, Sister Jing chose Huada Probiotics with a try-it-out mentality. Some studies have shown that quantitative supplementation of probiotics for obese people is beneficial to improving intestinal function, promoting fat metabolism, and affecting appetite by regulating appetite hormones.

After taking probiotics in combination with the adjustment of the eating order, Sister Jing finally lost 30 catties. Her once tortuous, painful, and difficult weight loss journey is also a lesson for many people. How to lose weight healthily at a speed that our body can bear is the ultimate goal of dieters, and probiotics also play a good bridging role in this.

The role of probiotics is being widely recognized by people. In the 2024 New Forms of Consumption in China's Big Health Survey conducted by Dentsu Creative, probiotics surpassed basic nutrients such as protein and vitamins, ranking first among the health components that Chinese consumers are most concerned about with a proportion of 43.1%. "Using bacteria to attack toxins" through light conditioning has become one of the secrets for fragile people to cultivate health.

The domestic market for probiotics is also expanding steadily. According to the data of the China Health Care Products Association, the overall scale of the domestic probiotics market has increased significantly from 64.77 billion yuan in 2018 to 109.38 billion yuan in 2022, with an average annual compound growth rate of 14%. It is expected that by 2026, the probiotics market in China is expected to reach 137.7 billion yuan.

However, even so, compared with the nearly 50% penetration rate in the foreign market, the penetration rate of the domestic probiotics market is less than 10%, and a potential huge emerging market is showing its commercial attractiveness.The Battle in the Hundred-Billion Market: From the "First Half of Marketing" to the "Second Half of R & D"

The booming probiotics market has attracted many businesses that want to "make big money with small bacteria" to enter the market.

Searching with the keyword "probiotics" on Tianyancha, the number of related enterprises has reached more than 4,600. Compared with the data of more than 3,000 in 2022, 1,600 probiotics enterprises have increased in just two years, and the intensity of competition cannot be underestimated.

The expansion of the market and the surge of participants have created a situation where Chinese probiotics brands are mixed. In addition to some leading brands, such as Huada Nutrition, Wonderlab Wellab, Lifespace, and others, there are more small brands and white-label merchants with uneven quality lurking in this promising probiotics market.

Yin Ye, the CEO of Huada Group, summarized the current business model of probiotics as two types: "short cycle" and "big closed loop". "Some probiotics brands are more focused on playing the business model. They import strains from abroad, change the packaging, and hire a large number of celebrities to endorse and advertise. They are playing a short cycle. The other is to start from independent scientific research and create a long-term big closed loop from scientific research, technology to industry."

In other words, the probiotics market has differentiated into two paths: either only do the product packaging at the back end, or cover the entire industry from basic scientific research to experimental verification to product transformation.

According to an industry insider, if you choose to buy raw materials and then package them to make a probiotics product, you only need to find a relevant contract manufacturer to give a budget, and the factory can "tailor-made" the formula and the amount of probiotics added. It can handle everything from design, raw material procurement, finished product production, to packaging and printing. "If it's fast, it can be launched in the market in 20 days."

According to a report by National Business Daily in 2023, the contract manufacturing link is also often a high-incidence area of chaos in the probiotics industry. Many probiotics contract manufacturers have the phenomenon of falsely marking and exaggerating the amount of probiotics added. The contract manufacturing price can be very low. Taking a 3g/bag dose as an example, 7 to 8 cents per bag is already a medium-to-high-end contract manufacturing product.

A large amount of costs are spent on advertising and marketing, competing on "whose packaging is more beautiful and whose marketing gimmick is more sufficient".

In contrast, the other R & D path is a truly hard mode, which means a huge investment in both time and cost.

Professor Wang Gang from Jiangnan University said in an interview with the media, "The advent of each functional probiotic is not an easy task." The research of a strain, from the genetic background to the physiological and biochemical characteristics to the probiotic effect, takes a short period of 2 years and a long period of 4 to 8 years. And the development cost of a strain is at least several hundred thousand yuan and up to several million yuan.

Taking the R & D of probiotics products of Huada Nutrition as an example, Huada's research on the human intestinal flora started as early as 2008. Huada, as the only non-EU organization, participated in the MetaHIT project (the Human Intestinal Microbiome Project) to study the species distribution of bacteria in the human intestine. After that, it spent several years exploring the relationship between intestinal microorganisms and human diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and enteritis. As of December 2024, Huada has participated in the publication of a total of 117 articles related to microorganisms, including 37 articles in CNNS (Cell/Nature/Science/NEJM journals and their subjournals).

In 2010, Huada's research results on "Constructing a Reference Gene Set of the Human Intestinal Microbiome" were published in "Nature" as a cover article

It was not until 2015 that Huada Nutrition released its first probiotics product "Yichang" to improve problems such as constipation. Zhang Haifeng, the general manager of Huada Nutrition, introduced to 36Kr that it took 7 years for a product to be born, which requires the isolation and cultivation of strains and a series of scientific validations of physiological characteristics and functions. From whole-genome sequencing, in vitro experiments, to the evaluation of functions using cell models and animal models, to the clinical trial verification of the probiotic effects in the human body, the birth of each probiotic strain of Huada has to go through rigorous evidence-based in each link before it can be put into production.

This is also the reason why most domestic enterprises choose to intervene from the环节 after the raw materials. The long R & D cycle and high cost of probiotics are beyond the affordability of ordinary companies. Huada Nutrition, backed by Huada Group, relied on the group's funds to support the high investment without early returns.

However, at the market end, it has to be admitted that consumers' cognitive cost of probiotics products is still relatively high, and their purchasing basis more depends on which brand has a greater voice.

In particular in recent years, domestic probiotics products have caught the fast lane of the development of live-streaming e-commerce. Many brands have quickly become leading brands by increasing their investment in live-streaming with internet celebrities on platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin. The platform data of Douyin shows that probiotics brands that rely on live-streaming with talents account for nearly 70%, and large-scale investment in traffic has become an important force to promote brands to occupy a high market position in the short term.

Then, since relying on the "short cycle" of marketing can quickly achieve profits, what is the significance of seemingly investing in scientific research with a "stupid method"?

First, the strains imported from abroad may not be suitable for the stomachs of Chinese people. "The local environment nurtures the local bacteria. Factors such as dietary habits and living environment have a very strong influence on the intestinal flora. Therefore, the intestinal flora of Chinese people and that of foreign people are greatly different in terms of both strain distribution and functional composition. Because regardless of dietary habits or environmental factors, they will eventually lead to differences in the intestinal flora. Strains screened from the intestinal tracts of the Chinese population are themselves more adapted to the intestinal environment of the Chinese population and are easier to colonize. This is also an important reason why Huada is based on localization and independently builds a strain library of symbiotic bacteria from the Chinese intestinal tract."

Second, the reliance on imported strain raw materials will lead to a serious homogenization of probiotics products in the market. Careful consumers will find that the strain numbers are more or less the same when looking at the product ingredients or the publicity on the detail page. Many products are based on the same type of strains supplied by a few raw material suppliers, and the entire market lacks personalization and innovation.

Due to the late start of microbial breeding in China, the probiotics field in China needs to solve the "bottleneck" problem of the lack of independent supply of strains.

In response, the solution given by Huada Nutrition is, "We hope to start from the root. It's a bit like we say that IT needs to go to the chip, and agriculture needs to go to the seed. If it's probiotics, I want to start from the strain." Yin Ye, the CEO of Huada Group, said.

The strain library is the cornerstone of probiotics research and industrialization. Since its establishment, Huada Nutrition has established a human symbiotic strain library with a preservation volume of more than 50,000 strains, analyzed more than 5,000 whole-genome sequences of intestinal bacteria, and established a high-quality reference gene set of human intestinal bacteria. All these are to master the key resources from the "root" and enhance the discourse power in the industry.

Live bacteria sample preservation library

In fact, the domestic probiotics market is entering the "second half of R & D" from the "first half of marketing", and the entire market is in a reshuffling period.

Ma Qingying, the brand director of Huada Nutrition, told 36Kr that the probiotics market was very active in 2022, and the number of actively selling brands reached a peak in 2023, but it began to decline in 2024. The top ten brands in terms of sales and voice accounted for 70% of the share of an e-commerce market. In the future, the probiotics industry will usher in a major reshuffle, and those brands that lack technical strength and quickly overdraw themselves through marketing will be gradually eliminated by the market.

As a typical enterprise from basic scientific research to product development to industry "big closed loop", Huada Nutrition has also begun to receive market feedback after many years of investment. According to official data, the repurchase rate of Huada Nutrition's Youmeida probiotics currently reaches 40%, which is at the leading level in the industry and has been highly recognized by customers. As of November 2023, the transaction volume of Huada Nutrition's probiotics products has exceeded 1 billion yuan, and its ranking in the probiotics market share has entered the top ten.

James Collins and Jerry Porras once summarized in the book "Built to Last": "To become a visionary company that can prosper for decades in the face of great changes, the first and most important step is to clarify the core ideology and establish a firm set of values that are unwavering under any circumstances."

In the probiotics industry, which is still to be matured, in the face of the temptation of interests, adhering to the investment concept of long-termism in life science is becoming a necessary condition for maintaining "evergreen".The Breakthrough Path for Probiotics Enterprises: Precision and High Activity

There are two prerequisites for probiotics to play a role. One is that there must be a sufficient number of live bacteria that can reach the intestine, and the other is that specific functions require specific strains, and cannot be generalized. Therefore, the high activity of probiotics and the precise functional segmentation have become the core for the breakthrough of probiotics enterprises in the future.

With the technological development in the field of microbiology in recent years, the activity and variety of probiotics products have been continuously improved, and have become one of the core standards for consumers to identify product quality.

Data from Mintel, a global authoritative research agency in 2022, shows that nearly half (49%) of consumers aged 18 - 59 consider the number of live bacteria in probiotics as the primary factor in purchasing, highlighting the strong market demand for highly active probiotics.

In the production process, the activity of probiotics is easily affected by environmental factors. Various details such as production technology, formula, equipment, and storage temperature may cause the