The market signal: Personalised nutrition is no longer a niche
The numbers speak clearly. The global personalised nutrition market was valued at approximately $15 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach nearly $31 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of around 14.4 per cent (MarketsandMarkets). Asia-Pacific, including India, is expected to be the fastest-growing region, driven by rising health awareness, lifestyle disease burden, and digital adoption.
In India, the broader nutraceuticals market currently sits in the range of $6–8 billion and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11–13 per cent through the early 2030s. Personalised nutrition is increasingly cited by Indian industry leaders as the defining trend for 2025–26 — a shift from generic supplementation to condition-specific, individually tailored solutions that consumers are actively seeking.
What do we actually mean by personalisation?
Personalisation in nutrition exists on a spectrum. At one end is the simple questionnaire that recommends a generic vitamin pack based on age and gender. At the other is true personalisation — a multi-dimensional, data-driven formulation built on an individual’s unique biology, behaviour, and environment. Between these poles lie several increasingly sophisticated layers: lifestyle and dietary profiling; biomarker testing; genomic analysis (nutrigenomics) of SNPs that shape how a person metabolises nutrients; microbiome profiling of the gut ecosystem; and finally, multiomics integration that combines all of the above with real-time physiological data. Each layer adds scientific depth — and operational complexity and cost.
Our journey: Building a multi-dimensional personalised supplement
As someone who has worked in the intersection of science and consumer nutrition, I want to share our experience of attempting to operationalise true personalisation — not as a theoretical exercise, but as a real product offered to real customers.
Our proposition was a personalised nutraceutical and probiotic supplement covering health conditions including weight management, gut health, performance and endurance, general health, and sleep — customised for each individual based on a three-pronged data approach: lifestyle, genomic data, and microbiome data.
The process
Step 1 – Lifestyle and dietary profiling:
Customers filled a detailed questionnaire of approximately 50 questions, capturing diet patterns, sleep quality, physical activity levels, stress indicators, existing health concerns, and supplementation history.
Step 2 – Genomic analysis:
A saliva sample was collected from the customer and sequenced to identify genetic markers — specific SNPs — that indicated predisposition to certain nutritional deficiencies or health conditions, and to assess the degree of that risk.
This is the domain of nutrigenomics, where the science examines how genes influence nutrient metabolism and absorption.
Step 3 – Microbiome profiling:
A stool sample was collected and analysed using 16SrRNA sequencing to create a detailed
microbiome portfolio — identifying the species composition and relative abundance of the customer’s gut bacterial community. The 16S rRNA sequencing approach is a widely used, validated method for profiling microbial communities in the gut.
Step 4 – Integrated risk profiling:
The lifestyle, dietary, genomic, and microbiome data were combined to create a comprehensive health and nutritional risk profile for each individual. From this, the reference requirement for each nutrient was established, and the estimated deficit was identified.
Step 5 – Formulation and delivery:
Based on the risk profile, a customised nutraceutical supplement and probiotic blend was formulated specifically for that individual and delivered to them.
In concept, this is as close to true personalisation as the nutraceutical industry has yet attempted at a consumer level.
What we ran into: The hard realities
The science held up reasonably well. The operationalisation, however, surfaced aformidable set of challenges — ones that anyone attempting this path will inevitably encounter.
- Cost of sequencing: Genomic and microbiome sequencing remain expensive. Each saliva sample and each stool sample analysis cost the customer approximately Rs 5,000 each. Together, the diagnostic cost alone ran to Rs 10,000 per customer before any supplement was formulated or delivered — placing this firmly in premium territory and limiting the addressable market.
- Turnaround time: From sample collection to report generation, the end-to-end lead time was approximately one month. This is far from the instant gratification that today’s consumer expects, particularly in a digital-first purchase environment. The extended wait period created drop-off and dissatisfaction even before the product was delivered.
- Questionnaire fatigue: The 50-question lifestyle and dietary questionnaire, while necessary for data quality, took approximately 10 minutes to complete. In an online setting, this was long enough to cause significant customer drop-off during the onboarding process.
- Scale and individualised manufacturing: By definition, each customer’s formulation was different. This meant no two batches were identical. Small-batch, individualised manufacturing is not how the nutraceutical supply chain is built — standard operations are designed for scale, not uniqueness.
Each personalised order required individual assessment and separate batch preparation, making operations labourintensive and costly.
- Efficacy and customer retention: The improvements from a science-based nutritional personalisation programme are real, but they are not immediate. Correcting nutritional deficits and achieving measurable health improvements takes weeks to months. In an environment where customers look for visible, rapid results, this mismatch between scientific timelines and consumer expectations led to early drop-off before the programme could demonstrate its value.
- Complex logistics: A personalised supplement model involves multiple touchpoints: dispatching the test kit to the customer, retrieving the samples, sending them to the sequencing centre, generating the report, formulating the batch, and then dispatching the supplement.
Many sequencing centres capable of handling this work are located outside India, adding complexity, cost, and time to an already multi-step logistics chain.
- The probiotic strain gap: Microbiome sequencing using the 16S rRNA method can identify a large number of bacterial species in the gut — commonly in the range of 200 or more species in a single individual. However, only a very limited number of bacterial species are currently available in commercially viable, regulatory-compliant probiotic supplement formulations — typically around 20 species or fewer are commonly used in nutraceutical-grade preparations. This means the ability to act on microbiome data with targeted supplementation is severely constrained by the available probiotic toolkit.
- High manpower and scientific expertise cost: Operating this model requires a genuinely multidisciplinary team: bioinformaticians, geneticists, microbiome scientists, nutritionists, nutraceutical formulators, data analysts, and IT professionals — in addition to standard operations, customer service, and logistics personnel. Building and sustaining this team is a significant and recurring cost burden.
- Science is still catching up: The correlations underpinning genomic and microbiome-to-nutrition recommendations remain probabilistic rather than deterministic. More critically, the available literature is heavily skewed toward Western populations. The Indian gut microbiome is demonstrably distinct — the LogMPIE study across 14 locations identified Prevotella copri as the dominant genus, contrasting sharply with the Bacteroides-dominant Western profile — yet applied science translating this into nutraceutical formulation guidance for Indians is almost entirely absent.
- Regulatory and data privacy dimensions: Handling genomic and microbiome data from customers adds layers of responsibility around data privacy and security that are not typical of a standard supplement business. India’s evolving regulatory landscape around personal health data — under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 — adds compliance considerations that are still being interpreted for this emerging sector. Additionally, health claims on nutraceutical products in India are regulated by FSSAI, and claims derived from genomicor microbiome data must navigate this framework carefully.
The road ahead: Where technology is taking personalisation
Despite these challenges, the direction of travel is clear — and the technologies needed to make true personalisation viable at scale are coming.
Robotics and precision manufacturing: Automation through robotics is already transforming pharma manufacturing and is beginning to enter nutraceuticals. As precision small-batch robotic formulation systems become more accessible, the cost and complexity of producing individualised supplement batches will reduce significantly, making personalised manufacturing economically viable at greater scale.
Portable sequencing technology: Oxford Nanopore Technologies has already commercially launched compact, portable sequencing devices like the MinION, which can perform DNA and RNA sequencing in the field or in a clinical setting. Research published in Communications Biology has demonstrated the feasibility of analysing nanopore sequencing data on Android smartphones. As this technology matures and costs decline further, doorstep genomic and microbiome sequencing — where a compact device collects and processes samples on-site — becomes a realistic prospect within the next decade.
India-specific microbiome research: India is beginning to build its own microbiome research infrastructure. The Indian Human Microbiome Initiative (IHMI) — a pioneering national effort — has profiled over 4,000 healthy individuals from 17 distinct cultural and ecological communities across India, creating the first large-scale map of how traditional diets, regional environments, and genetic ancestry shape the Indian gut microbiome. Complementing this, the Indian Microbiome Database (IndMDB) is consolidating microbiome research conducted on Indian individuals across institutions including the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics and the National Centre for Cell Science. Government investment in expanding this kind of research through scientific institutions is essential — and early signs of it are visible.
Wearables and continuous physiological monitoring: The integration of IoT-connected wearable devices — smartwatches, smart rings, and emerging biosensors including skin-worn patches — with personalised nutrition platforms represents a significant next frontier. These devices can continuously transmit real-time physiological data (glucose levels, heart rate variability, sleep quality, activity patterns) that, when fed into personalised nutrition models alongside genomic and microbiome data, will allow nutritional recommendations to be dynamically adjusted over time rather than based on a single point-in-time assessment.
AI and bioinformatics automation: AI-driven tools are accelerating pattern recognition in genomic and microbiome datasets, reducing analysis time and cost while improving predictive accuracy. As these models mature, the translation from raw sequencing data to actionable nutraceutical recommendations will become faster and more reliable — a critical unlock for the entire personalisation pipeline.
Longitudinal tracking and adaptive formulation: Future personalisation models will not stop at formulation and delivery. The combination of wearables, regular microbiome check-ins, and AI-powered tracking will enable supplement formulations to evolve as the customer’s health status, lifestyle, and even microbiome composition change over time. Personalisation will shift from a static, one-time output to a continuous, adaptive process.
The honest answer
Yes — true personalisation in nutraceuticals is possible. We have done it. The science is real, and the quality of risk profiling it produces is genuinely superior to anything a generic supplement can offer.
But viable at scale, accessible in price, and fast enough for today’s consumer? Not yet.
The constraints we faced are not arguments against personalisation; they are a map of the problems to be solved. And the most urgent of those problems, for India, is building the scientific foundation — microbiome studies, nutrigenomics research, multi-omics integration — on Indian populations, Indian diets, and Indian genetic diversity. That foundation doesn’t yet exist. Until it does, true personalisation will remain impressive in concept but limited in precision.
References
The market size and growth figures cited in this article are drawn from published market research reports by MarketsandMarkets, Fortune Business Insights, Grand View Research, and IMARC Group (2024–2025). Indian microbiome research references are drawn from peer-reviewed publications and publicly documented initiatives including LogMPIE and the Indian Human Microbiome Initiative (IHMI). Sequencing technology references are drawn from Oxford Nanopore Technologies and peer-reviewed journals including Communications Biology and Frontiers in Microbiology.
