Japan "sports nutrition" functional food rise

Overall, the development of Japan's functional food industry cannot be separated from the promotion of policies. Japan's functional food is divided into specific functional food, nutritional functional food and functional labeling food three categories, the implementation of classification and grading management. The market is mature and tends to be saturated, and there are three policy adjustments in the course of the Japanese health care industry. In the case of slowing market growth, the widening of the policy threshold has stimulated the growth of the industry scale.

Before 2005: Japan experienced the transformation of the third to fourth consumption era, experienced the bubble economy and financial bankruptcy, and the lipstick effect was obvious under the economic depression; At the same time, the aging of the Japanese population and the growth of consumer spending on medical care have stimulated the rapid growth of the scale of the health care product industry.

After 2005: on the whole, Japan's functional food growth rate fell from a high level to a low single digit level, and once turned negative under the impact of the epidemic, mainly because the industry has passed the rapid growth period, in the case of the impact of the earthquake and lack of domestic demand, even the introduction of the functional labeling system has not changed the low-speed growth trend of the industry. However, this does not mean that the functional food industry has no bright spots, among which the sports nutrition market of the subsector has heated up rapidly after the introduction of the policy, once breaking the growth of 25%, and the proportion of the health care product industry has increased from 4.2% in 2009 to 11% in 2023.

Looking at the Japanese functional food market segments, the scale of dietary supplements is still the first in the industry, and the field of sports nutrition is gradually emerging, with a compound growth rate of 12% in the past five years. According to Euromonitor, from 2009 to 2023, the share of dietary supplement industry showed a decreasing trend, but it still opened a significant gap with other industries, and its share has remained top1. The overall scale and proportion of traditional nourishing and weight management industries have decreased; The sports nutrition market accounted for the smallest proportion, but showed a clear upward trend, with CAGR5 and CAGR10 accounting for 12.0%/9.3%, respectively. As of 2023, the total market share of dietary supplement/weight management/traditional tonic/sports nutrition in the four fine molecule industries of functional food is 61.2%, 6.0%, 21.7% and 11.0%, respectively, and sports nutrition has surpassed weight management to become the third largest market for functional food.

Sports nutrition market: gradually rising niche functional food track, linkage dairy companies participate. Per capita protein intake in Japan has dropped in recent years to the same level as in the 1950s, mainly due to excessive dieting and awareness of eating habits that focus too much on vegetables, resulting in inadequate intake. On November 4, 2020, Meiji published a study demonstrating for the first time a general positive correlation between daily protein intake and muscle mass gain. Sports nutrition products are gradually rising for the daily protein supplement needs of fitness groups and general groups. Up to now, the participation of different types of enterprises in the health food industry chain is mainly divided into two paths:

Register to become a specific functional food, but most of these enterprises are large manufacturers, can complete the product planning to manufacturing, sales of the complete industry chain. Apply to become a relatively low development cost of functional labeling food, nutritional functional food, most of these enterprises focus on product planning and advertising, the production is entrusted to the outside.

From virtual to real, consumers' demands for functional foods have gradually changed from the additional attribute of beautifying life to the attribute of life-oriented disease prevention/health enhancement, and the fitness awareness brought by the weight loss trend and the epidemic situation is conducive to the development of the sports nutrition market. According to Yano Institute of Economic Research, health maintenance and promotion products such as green juice, basic nutrients such as VC, and beauty products such as hyaluronic acid occupy the top three, but the accumulation of neutral and visceral fat caused by modern lifestyles. Groups of all ages began to pay attention to "belly fat and weight loss", and focused on whitening anti-aging and other beautiful additional attributes of health products such as VC and hyaluronic acid demand has shown a declining trend, the scale of lactic acid bacteria with intestinal regulation function has shown rapid growth, is expected to show a continued growth trend in the future. According to the public opinion survey of the Japan Sports Agency, more and more people are aware of the importance of strengthening immunity and basic physical strength, and the top three reasons for people to improve fitness are [no longer busy], [to prevent COVID-19] and [to establish interest in sports]. The improvement of people's awareness of fitness and health and immunity has laid the mass foundation for the growth of the sports nutrition market.

The rapid development of functional food track has attracted the attention of various enterprises, and has become an important way for sports nutrition market participants to cut into. The introduction of the special insurance system is also an epoch-making significance for the previous time. However, with the advance of time, due to the requirements of the system of specific functional foods, the listing of special guaranteed products needs to go through a long time of research and development, clinical trials and policy process inspection, often ordinary small and medium-sized enterprises can not afford high research and development costs and slow time costs, so generally only large enterprises or industry leaders will choose to apply for registration of specific functional foods. Therefore, more than ten years after the listing of the special insurance system, product registration has grown from explosive growth to leveling off, whether it is the high cost brought by the economic downturn, or the industry itself tends to saturation, the stronger the small and medium-sized enterprises do not have the opportunity to continue to survive, so the industry scale once fell into a bottleneck. Since the launch of the functional food policy in 2015, a new channel has opened up for small and medium-sized enterprises, and the reduction of the entry threshold and the system of registration and listing before approval has also reduced the trial and error cost of enterprises, so a large number of enterprises have begun to try to apply for registration of functional food.

In recent years, small and medium-sized dairy companies are also trying to cut into the sports nutrition market by registering functional foods. As mentioned above, the functional labeling food policy is favored by smes because of its low threshold and the system characteristics of first marketing and then approval. At the same time, according to the Yano Institute of Economic Research, the proportion of functional food nutrition/general food/fresh products is 53.6%/42.6%/3.8%, and general food also occupies a high share, inclusive of multi-industry enterprises to enter and enrich the form of functional food.