A Shift in the Standards of Health Consumption

Health-related consumption is moving away from a model of adding more things that are good for the body and toward one of first reducing elements considered burdensome. In fact, order value for zero-related products increased 523% compared with the same period two years earlier, showing that practical, everyday judgments aimed at managing sugar, additives, and processing burdens have moved to the center of the market, more than functionality itself.

This change is less a temporary fad than the result of a shift in the language consumers use to interpret health. In the past, broad nutritional supplementation was effective, but now purchasing standards are becoming more segmented around deciding what to exclude and what alone to choose according to individual eating habits and physical condition.

The Weakening of General Health Supplements and More Segmented Demand

Amid this trend, order value for general health supplements such as red ginseng and multivitamins fell by around 30%, while enzymes rose 284%, indicating that the health functional food market is moving away from mass-market flagship items toward purpose-driven and specific-function products. KT&G’s health supplement business also recorded cumulative first-half sales of 556.4 billion won, but the key to its rebound lay not in expanding scale but in improving profitability, meaning that efficient channel operation has become more important than high-volume sales.

In particular, even businesses with traditionally strong product categories are finding it harder to sustain growth using old methods alone. Sales in China once plunged 42.5% year over year, suggesting that even overseas, companies have entered a phase where they must realign channel efficiency and local demand fit rather than rely solely on brand recognition.

Reconfiguring Distribution and Product Planning

Distributors are treating this shift not simply as strong sales but as a change in classification systems. The reason they are dividing health supplements into 111 detailed categories, strengthening customized curation, and expanding specialty sections such as wellness food markets is their judgment that consumers no longer view health products as a single, undifferentiated group.

Ultimately, shelf composition is also shifting away from comprehensive nutrition-centered displays toward everyday lifestyle-oriented proposals where food, function, and preference overlap. As it becomes more important to combine health, taste, and ease of management, home shopping and commerce players are increasingly strengthening their role not just as product sellers but as lifestyle planners.

Latecomer Companies Expanding Ingredients and Functions

Meanwhile, startups and the investment market are interpreting this segmentation trend as a race to secure functional ingredients. Cases such as the development of metabolic health ingredients like fermented postbiotics from bitter melon and the incorporation of Pure Bio show that, as it becomes harder to differentiate through finished-product sales alone, momentum is growing toward directly securing raw materials and technology.

From this perspective, the significance of the recent wellness market is not simply that the number of health food products has increased. As consumer selection criteria become more sophisticated, companies are moving into a structure where they must compete through evidence-based functional differentiation, stable ingredient supply, and purpose-specific product design rather than brand advertising.