Something Is Shifting in the Supplement Aisle

By Sara Steinbeck, Sales & Marketing Director and Herbalist, Herbs, Etc.

If you've been paying attention to the natural products space lately, you may have noticed something a little uncomfortable: the brands that have been doing the work for decades are struggling in retail, while a wave of newer, digitally-savvy brands are stepping in and growing fast.

This isn't just an industry footnote. It's a signal worth paying attention to — for brands, for retailers, and especially for consumers.

“Fast supplements” vs. “slow supplements”

There's a conversation happening in fashion right now about fast fashion versus slow fashion. Fast fashion is responsive, trend-driven, visually compelling, and often cheap. Slow fashion is about craft, materials, ethics, and longevity. Neither is invisible, but one of them is easier to scale — and one of them is harder to fake.

The supplement world is having the same reckoning

A new generation of brands has figured out the digital game. They show up in your feed, they have clean branding, compelling founders, and the kind of social fluency that legacy brands often lack. Some of them make excellent products. But many of them are taking a concept to a co-packer, getting it manufactured, and then marketing it. They don't have relationships with the farmers growing their herbs. They're not making formulation decisions based on decades of clinical observation. They're not sourcing fresh plants and rushing them into extraction within hours of harvest.

They're doing marketing. And right now, marketing is winning in retail.

Why this matters more than you might think…

In herbal medicine, especially, quality isn't determined at the label level. It's determined at the plant level.

The difference between a tincture made from fresh-harvested milky oats and one made from dried oat extract isn't a matter of preference — it's a matter of what the plant still contains. Fresh milky oats, harvested at exactly the right window and extracted immediately, carry a profile of compounds that dried oats simply don't. That window lasts hours, not days. Capturing it requires close relationships with growers, precise timing, and the kind of facility that can actually process plants at that stage.

You can't outsource that to a co-packer and still say you're delivering the same thing.

This is why the conversation about which brands are "winning" in retail deserves a little more nuance. Winning on social media and winning on efficacy are not the same metric. Consumers deserve to know the difference.

The honest response to this moment isn't to throw up our hands or get defensive. Legacy brands — including us — have real work to do. We've been excellent at making high-quality products and getting them on shelves. We haven't always been excellent at telling our story in a way that lands digitally. We're changing that — not by becoming something we're not, but by learning how to bring what we've always known to new audiences.

But consumers have a role here too. When you buy from a brand that knows its farmers, that processes fresh plants in its own facility, that has been refining formulations for 57 years, you're not just buying a product. You're supporting a supply chain that prioritizes plants over packaging, expertise over aesthetics, and long-term efficacy over short-term marketing wins.

That's the slow supplement version of voting with your dollar.

It's easy to be dazzled by what's trending. It's harder — and more worthwhile — to ask what's actually in the bottle, who made it, and whether they can explain why.

At Herbs, Etc., we've been rooted in those questions since 1969. The plants haven't changed. The standards haven't changed. And we're not going anywhere.

Want to understand what goes into a truly efficacious herbal formula?  👉Start here.