Making Sense of Nutraceuticals in China

The Chinese nutraceutical market is considered the third largest in the world after the US and Japan, or the fourth largest if Europe is counted as a single market.Despite strong fundamentals and high rates of annual growth, though, the Chinese market remains some way from realizing its true potential. Its evolution is muddied by ambiguities around what nutraceuticals actually are and how they should be managed.The result has been polarization between over-zealous regulation of so-called health foods, and a grey market where products have skirted approval procedures through questionable positioning or by exploiting alternative channels such as cross-border e-commerce.These ambiguities undermine trust and confidence within a broader food market plagued by safety issues over the last decade.A revised Food Safety Law implemented in October 2015, however, and the health-food regulations that followed  should provide a more rational, stable and transparent way forward for nutraceuticals.Political impetusCertainly, there is a strong political impetus to accelerate trends towards personal health maintenance and disease-risk reduction in China.One crucial factor is rapid population aging under the government ’s decades-long one-child policy. That policy was modified from 2016, recognizing the growing imbalance between the elderly and the shrinking generations below them.Working through the age-dependency (% of working-age population)  legacy will take years, though. According to ...

Source: EyeForPharma - February 10, 2017 Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Marc Yates Source Type: news