Rude Health: How wellness has become big business

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People have become more health-focused - particularly since the start of the pandemic - which has helped the 'wellness industry' to boom, writes Adam Maguire.

This week Mondelez International – the owner of confectionary brands like Cadbury's, Oreo and Toblerone – agreed to pay $2.9 billion to acquire energy bar maker Clif Bar & Company.

But what exactly is the wellness industry, and why are companies spending big money to get involved in it?We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences

And of course we now have the influencers – who might not quite fit into any of those categories, but are still making a living by publishing content to social media – and selling products – relating to health and well-being. One estimate from McKinsey put its global value at $1.5 trillion, while the Global Wellness Institute says it was worth $4.4 trillion in 2020.

Glanbia is a great Irish example – people probably still think of it as a dairy firm, with brands like Avonmore or GAIN Nutrition coming to mind. And if you’re wondering how an Irish dairy firm could find itself as a world-leader in sports nutrition – the answer is whey. That’s of course a by-product of cheese production, and at one stage it would only really have been fed to the pigs.

And Apple is also now making money through a Fitness-focused subscription service – people pay €10 a month to get access to an online library of workouts that sync up with the watch, so they can track their heartrate and so on while they’re working out.Yes; like a lot of sectors, the wellness industry was changed utterly by the pandemic.

A good example of that is the app Calm – it’s a meditation app, it also gets famous people to read bedtime stories to help people get to sleep, which you can access in return for a monthly fee. So a huge outlay – but sales boomed in the pandemic, because it was a way of people to get close to the fitness class experience, even though they couldn’t go to an actual class.

The big trick with those scams was that the salesman would arrive in a town, make all sorts of claims about the product, sell it to the locals and then hit the road before people realised it was useless. Maybe it’s a free trial that you forget about, and suddenly find your being charged a monthly fee. Or the gym membership that’s really hard to cancel.

A few years ago RTÉ Prime Time reported on a cult claiming that industrial bleach could cure autism, for example. So if someone is suggesting this product or service is going to be the silver bullet in helping you – you need to scrutinise what is actually being offered. As yourself - is it a reputable seller, and are you paying securely? Is it a one-off fee, or are you going to be charged that amount every month?

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