Fitness professionals are often the first choice when a consumer decides it’s time to improve their health. According to the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), 68% of adults consume dietary supplements regularly — this is proof your customers are already buying nutritional supplements somewhere. It only makes sense to support them in-house. Understanding the critical role nutritional supplements play on long-term health can greatly impact customers’ health and the bottom line of your business.
Nutritionals supplement a healthy diet and active lifestyle, and fills nutritional gaps to prevent deficiencies that cause long-term disease. By building nutritionals, such as a broad-spectrum multivitamin/multi-mineral, antioxidants, and polyphenols into your customers’ programs, you’ll help create nutrient balance in an otherwise unbalanced physiology.
The numbers don’t lie. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 92% of adults are deficient in at least one nutrient that can cause disease and only 2% of adults consume their RDA for fruits and vegetables. Judy Blatman, senior vice president at the CRN stated, “The survey is just another indicator of the important role dietary supplements play for men and women of all ages who are trying to achieve a lifestyle of wellness.”
The American Dietetic Association (ADA) has stated the best nutritional strategy for promoting optimal health is to choose a wide variety of foods. Contradicting the ADA’s position, a study published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (JISSN), showed convincingly that it’s really hard to get all the essential vitamins and minerals from food alone. Although a small sample in the JISSN study, 70 diets were analyzed from the menu of athletes seeking to improve the quality of micronutrient intake from food choices. All dietary analyses fell short of the recommended micronutrient level and concluded “food alone may not provide sufficient micronutrients for preventing deficiency.”
Although fitness professionals offer dietary programs to support clients, today’s population simply isn’t attaining the nutrient density necessary to prevent deficiency diseases. These are all very compelling reasons to build nutritional supplements into your business, allowing you to provide a holistic approach to long-term health, added value to your service offerings and capitalizing on a profit center.
Here are some best practices to make your supplement profit center thrive, not just survive:
- Have a structured platform to educate both your staff and clients on the benefits of your supplements.
- Embed why you chose your brand and how they support your core values.
- Align your supplements to your other program offerings.
- Follow the customers’ journeys and capture testimonies along the way. These testimonies build their internal awareness of the ongoing benefits your supplements have been and continue to provide.
Christopher Page has 25 years of experience in the fitness industry and is the co-founder of S3 Supplement Success System.
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