Spend enough time at trade shows and on wellness socmeds and you start to notice a pattern. It isn’t just about “feel better today” anymore. It’s age better, think clearer, digest smoother, sleep deeper – optimize every system now so you can keep going for longer.

At some point, I realized I was basically looking at one giant organizing principle: longevity. All roads seem to lead back to “live longer, but nicely please”. And with that very obvious revelation, modern wellness starts to make more sense. Everything is being arranged by supplement category:  there’s something for every organ, mood, and micro-function.

This reorganization is dragging some fascinating ingredients into the spotlight. They’re not all new and they’re certainly not all pretty, but these 5 are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

For the longest time, any time someone said “vegan collagen”, I’d turn into that insufferable asshole who goes, “Umm actually, collagen is an animal protein. What you have there is a collagen booster.”

It is now, to my great unhappiness, time to retire that line. I’ll see myself out, thanks. 

Because vegan collagen is very much a thing. Technically it’s tank-grown via precision fermentation, but “lab-grown” still causes half the internet to break out into hives, so the industry is forced to waste time workshopping friendlier words like biodesigned and animal-free. 

California-based biotech company Geltor’s product, PrimaColl, is a collagen polypeptide made by engineered microbes, entirely animal-free, and recently got that coveted “no questions” GRAS letter from the US FDA, making it the first new collagen to make it onto the FDA’s list since 1999. PrimaColl is designed to mimic an amino acid sequence of avian Type 21 collagen.  That opens the door for Geltor to expand commercially into global nutrition and wellness markets. It also ticks a number of boxes that traditional collagen couldn’t: animal-free, Halal, Kosher, and vegan. 

This is a breakthrough for a couple of reasons. 

But on supermarket shelves, the first wave of real “vegan collagen” products you’re likely to come across aren’t using that tank-grown stuff yet. 

They’re instead using VeCollal, a plant-based collagen alternative. VeCollal doesn’t contain collagen; instead precisely mirrors the amino acid profile of human type I collagen (biomimetic, if you fancy)) using plant-derived amino acids, plus “inductors” to nudge fibroblasts to make more of your own. A clinical trial published in the Journal of Functional Foods reported that VeCollal cut wrinkle depth by 32.9% and increased collagen density by 7.7% in 8 weeks at a 5 g/day dose. 

Two companies are already using this ingredient. The first is Care Lab Divas, who I met at Anuga a few weeks ago. In fact, I started looking into this after my conversation with CEO and founder Lucia Tarnoczy. The company’s Care Bubbles Wellness Soda range includes 4 functional ingredients, including the vegan collagen alternative. This range is meant for skin, bone, and joint health as well as overall immunity and wellness.

In the UK, The Turmeric Co has launched a 60 ml shot combining raw turmeric with VeCollal, vitamin C, zinc, and a parade of “real food” ingredients like watermelon, beetroot, and pomegranate, sold as a 7-day “self-shot” bottle. This combination is said to optimize the absorption and bioavailability of the functional ingredients in the shot.

What’s interesting about these developments is how there is now essentially a “collagen stack”.

Consumers will split into camps. Some will love the idea of precision-fermented, pharma-grade, traceable collagen and see it as pure and potent, maybe even better than natural. Others will quietly (or loudly) file it under “weird lab stuff” and stick to bone-derived collagen or plant-based blends that feel are closer to food.

And as the products and regulations become clearer, brands will also figure out how best to position themselves: how to name, frame, combine with other ingredients, whether to lean into the biotech swagger or steer clear of it. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if we see some extremely interesting collagen mashups with other longevity and beauty ingredients very soon.

Until last year, my only brush with magnesium was milk of magnesia, that chalky, old-timey constipation fix my grandparents swore by. Then magnesium started popping up in stress content and “eat more nuts and seeds” listicles, which felt reasonable enough. But I didn’t clock its full main-character energy until Anuga this year, where every fourth product seemed to shout about magnesium for sleep, relaxation, post-workout recovery, PMS support, and calm.

It wasn’t just the trade-show bubble. I walked into a German pharmacy and an entire section was basically an ode to magnesium supplements. That checks out with new survey data: 76.9% of Germans use dietary supplements, and magnesium is the single most popular one, taken by over half of users. Their motivation was pretty straightforward: classic prevention, staying healthy, avoiding deficiency, keeping muscles, nerves, and hearts behaving.

Full disclosure: I only have photos of this shelf because I asked a friend in Germany to go to the store and take them for me. I forgot to. Priorities.

In the UK, Holland & Barrett’s data shows the same mineral getting a lot of online love. Magnesium was the most-searched ingredient on H&B’s site in 2025 (but not the highest selling), racking up 8.5 million product searches, well ahead of collagen, vitamin D, and protein powder. 

Meanwhile in the US, trend analytics firm Spate and supplement brand MaryRuth looked at TikTok’s influence on wellness discovery and found that the social media site had some mad pull on supplement purchasing behavior. And magnesium was among TikTok’s hero ingredients, with magnesium content getting 39.8 million views (12 months to September 2025), up 51% over the year-ago period. The study also found that social commerce is collapsing the path from video to supplement cart. 

If we get into the weeds, the “which magnesium?” question is getting more interesting too. Glycinate for calm, citrate for digestion, and now magnesium L-threonate, sold as Magtein, positioned as the brainy one. The EU has approved magnesium L-threonate as a novel food and confirmed it as a safe, bioavailable magnesium source that can cross into the brain, opening it up further to everything from capsules to RTD drinks, gummies, and bars.

So, magnesium has quietly morphed into a premium, IP-ed, social-media-savvy hero ingredient, much like vegan collagen – but with a foot in both prevention and performance camps.

Zoom out from individual ingredients and you hit the bigger arc: healthy ageing and longevity. Longevity is slowly evolving from fringe biohacker obsession to mainstream F&B trend territory. That shift is dragging a whole toolkit of “age better” ingredients into the spotlight: collagen, spermidine, ergothioneine, resveratrol, nicotinamide riboside, and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN).

NMN (a form of vitamin B3) is a direct precursor to NAD⁺, a coenzyme needed for cellular energy production, DNA repair and stress responses. NAD⁺ levels decline with age and are further depleted by stress, poor diet, and inflammation, which is why topping up the pool has become a central longevity narrative. Supplementing NMN has repeatedly been shown to increase blood NAD⁺ concentrations in humans and is generally well tolerated at oral doses up to 900 mg/day.

The human data is still early, but it’s not nothing. 

At the same time, a recent review on NAD precursors and muscle function is pretty blunt: these ingredients are adjuncts, not magic. They don’t replace exercise, sleep, or diet. But people still love the idea of easy solutions. The industry is now talking about NMN personalization and moving from capsules into functional drinks, shots, bars, chocolate and gummies built around cellular energy and healthy aging. It puts NMN alongside vegan collagen, magnesium, and friends as part of a broader shift: longevity as a driver for format and formulation innovation, not just a supplement aisle staple.

Konjac is one of those ingredients that has been used in Asia forever. Konjac powder shows up in different formats like noodles, rice alternatives, jellies, diet foods, meat replacements, and drinks. Now, as people stop treating fiber as the ugly stepchild of the nutrition world, the rest of the world is eyeing it more closely for their fiber fix. 

The key component is konjac glucomannan (KGM), a highly viscous soluble fiber that swells with water, a bit like psyllium husk.

In China, constipation affects around 20% of adults, and prevalence is even higher among athletes. In a recent study, elite male Taekwondo athletes with functional constipation who took 3 g/day of KGM for eight weeks saw clear benefits versus placebo: more frequent bowel movements, lower constipation scores, better bowel function, and improved quality of life. Those changes went hand in hand with higher gut microbiota diversity.

For athletes and high-protein gym-goers living on low-fiber, high-stress routines, KGM offers a non-pharmacologic, label-friendly way to support regularity and microbiome health while riding the broader fibermaxxing trend.

I recently learned that asafetida is sometimes called devil’s dung in English and, honestly, that’s fair. That smell is… committed. It clings to your fingers even through half a dozen rounds of soap. But in hot oil, that aggression mellows into this magical alchemy that quietly pulls a whole dish together, as most Indian households know.  

This pungent resin has also long been used for gas and digestive issues. And it is now getting some serious attention for its gut–brain effects.

A recent study on adults with functional dyspepsia found that supplementation with an asafetida extract reduced dyspepsia severity, improved digestion, focus and sleep, and significantly modulated the microbiome-gut-brain axis. Participants taking the asafetida extract showed shifts in microbial diversity and composition alongside better symptom and cognitive scores. Which means that this very smelly spice may help calm both gut and mind.

It fits neatly into the growing acknowledgment that you can’t separate digestive comfort from mood, sleep and cognitive performance. For product developers, asafetida is an intriguing bridge: a traditional anti-bloating spice with emerging clinical studies, ready to be recast as a gut-brain axis ingredient in modern digestive, de-stress, and think-clearer formulations. 

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