Functional food: health care or profitable business‪?‬

Nowadays, the process of aging is becoming more and more unpopular. The market is full of remedies against the signs of aging, some of dubitable worth. In a more scientific approach, “anti-aging” researchers have examined the effects of nutrients on pathologic metabolism.

After the first discoveries of significant effects, the impact of this new discipline was extraordinary. Researchers and the pharmaceutical industry as well as nutritional and retail companies enthusiastically started to develop frameworks to combine clinical expertise with the new concept of private health prevention. In the late 1980’s, the term “functional food” was coined in Japan.

High customer acceptance from the beginning has brought on an expansion of the “functional food” market segment from the early 1990’s on, rendering the market more and more competitive. For competing enterprises, identifying the determining factors of customer acceptance is therefore of great importance.

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