Social media, misinformation, and health & nutrition

Welcome to the Food Matters Live podcast, where we showcase the innovations, the big ideas and the visionaries in the food industry. We dig deep, we look to the future and the past, and we question everything we think we know about food. I'm Antoni Zara and this episode was recorded live at the Food Matters Live event held in Manchester in May 2025. Now, today, we're focusing on social media, how to health and nutrition brands cut through the noise when social media influencers can spark viral trends overnight with questionable claims. From apple cider vinegar miracle cures to dangerous weight loss promises, the supplement and nutrition industry faces constant battles against misinformation. The question is, can brands successfully compete against the speed and simplicity of misinformation, or is the battle already lost? So I'm going to let you just introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about the the organization you work for, tell us a little bit about the role that you do within that organization. And my first kind of main question, and let me just get my words right on this one is, how has social media changed the way we think about MPD? Now, thank you, Joe. So I'm Joe, so I'm general manager at No Nutrition. We make really tasty supplements that work ideally. Yeah, the work that do good but are accessible, because it shouldn't be, you know, for the 1% it should be available for everyone. My role is around B2B, but a lot of product development and an awful lot of operational things as well. So we have one of the biggest to hesitate, hesitate to say the biggest, but one of the biggest ranges of gummy supplements in the world. But we also have liposomal liquids and various other things. So very trendy, huge growth in gummy supplements as we've seen the biggest format now in the US, but a huge, ridiculous amount of misinformation going on. I suppose to cover that first point, how is it shaping? I mean, TikTok was originally, and you see a huge amount of this noise on LinkedIn, that TikTok is the place for people to discover new trends and build new trends. But they kind of don't, they just find a product that they gravitate towards and go, apple cider vinegar is the best thing ever. And we're two years on from that starting. And it's still the same noise. And it's not necessarily true. It's not good. It's not bad. It's just not necessarily, you know, God's gift to the world. So it has changed it. It gives us more options to socially listen. And it has helped us with developing more flavors, but we still rely on sources like Inuda and FMCG Gurus and Mintel to actually find more legit, real hard data. That's our preferred route, but we still use both. And you use social media to just maybe sense check what's going on, what's been hyped up at the moment. What's been hyped up, but there are brands that have dominated the space and they've done a great job of it. And they could be great brands, or they could be brands with selling complete snake oil, which one of which we called out, which is great fun. Fantastic. We'll come back and talk about just age profiling as well within social media, because we're not all tiktokers. And I won't profile myself on that. I'm going to let you introduce yourself, Jessica. Obviously, your brand is well known. But tell us a little bit about the brand where it came from and your role within within the organization as well. Hi, everyone. My name is Jess Stansfield. Just in advance, I'm so sorry if my voice goes to the first day all week that I've had a voice. So I've got my water on hand. I'm a registered nutritionist. I am the nutritional manager at Huell. So Huell, if you haven't heard of it, is a complete nutrition brand. So where we aim to be is a plan B option. I think a lot of people have a misconception that Huell, especially some of our products are powdered food. We are sitting here saying that you should have Huell all meals every day. That is absolutely not the case. We're just that option for when people are rushing out the door. They don't have much time and they need something to grab without compromising on nutrition. So what do I do? I've actually been at Huell for six, six and a half years now, and I've done a lot. I feel like when you join a company and there's sort of 20 or 30 people, you kind of get thrown in the deep end and I was for early 20s and you kind of just do a bit of everything. Currently, my job now is the content lead for the nutrition team. So any writing, any blog, any social media, that is basically my job, which ties in so nicely with this discussion because social media is a massive part of my role, but it's also the complete bane of my life. Not just at work, like outside of work as well. I'll go for dinner with my girlfriends and I just keep having to tell myself, Jess, you're not at work, you're not at work, just keep your mouth closed. Because there's so many benefits to social media. I mean, things can blow up overnight and you can get, there's such a faster feedback now. So you know what products people love, you know what products people don't love, and things really happen overnight. I mean, I don't know if any of you have tried the Marks and Spencers cookies, but that is just something that's happened on TikTok. And then they took advantage of it and did the Easter egg, the speckled eggs. And I think that's where social media can be incredible for brands, but it can also cause a lot of headaches, as you said. And I understand why people go to somewhere like TikTok to try and understand a situation. It makes sense to me, but it is so difficult to navigate. And even as a nutritionist myself, sometimes I even find myself second guessing myself, which is so ridiculous. But yeah, massive. How does it feed your MPD pipeline? Is there anything like, do you use it as a source of information for flavors, as you said? Absolutely. Yeah, we actually have a small two person insights team who will use like social media listening tools. And one of the biggest things for us is we're a UK based company that have a small team out in New York. But the flavors that we over here in the UK think that would land really well in the US, don't necessarily land. So that's how sort of insights and social media can really help us, especially in other markets too. Brilliant, brilliant. And I suppose it's interesting to see your role is about managing that content. So you're incredibly conscious of what you're putting out as a brand. Obviously, you can't control the wider social media world. But in terms of what are the things that you have put in place in terms of your own strategy for for managing that content? What are the tips and tools that you put into place that maybe some of the brands can also learn from? Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's sort of like two parts of it. There's being proactive and then there's being reactive. So from a proactive perspective, I mean, we have even put in place it's called our like healthcare professional program, like there's all it's all well and good Jess from the nutrition team at Huell, who's been there for donkey's years is saying X about the ultra process food debate or X about seed oils. But actually, it's important for us to work with other healthcare professionals as well to be sort of educating people and cutting through that noise in the same way. So working with other healthcare professionals is something reactively as well. So as you can imagine, we get a lot of not just customers, but people just reaching out to you on any social media channel asking particular questions. Now, some of which can be like very specific. And actually, we have two nutritionists within the team who actually part of their job is to go back to customers directly and speak to those consumers. So actually just like engaging with people one on one. Yeah, okay, sometimes you're not going to win people over. Sometimes people are literally there to call you out and to catch you out. But actually, there's a lot of people that like any of us in the room have seen something on social media, don't understand it and are reaching out for help. And that's sort of like, how we can help as well by actually having dedicated team members to support those questions. Very good. And do you jump on some of the sort of hot topics that are being talked about in social media? Or is your sort of a policy to to just not get involved? You're better to say nothing than to. Oh, no, it's important we have a voice. I'm great. It's it's also important to like know how to navigate that. Like, sometimes it's hard not to like go quite heads on. But sometimes, like, misinformation can compromise trust for a brand. So it's really important that we do tackle it in the right manner. So yes, for the most part, obviously, there's a time and place, but I say 90% of the time, we would sort of counteract some sort of misinformation. Yeah, Very good. Joe, I suppose in the supplement world, there are bold claims that, you know, are sort of common out there. How do you ensure that you've got that sort of scientific rigor to support those claims? And again, what strategies have you had to put in place, whether it be structure, people, processes, extra cross in the T's and dot in the I's? What's been your experience? Yes. So obviously, as a supplement brand, we have to focus heavily on the approved health claims anyway. Yeah. They're the only things we will put on a bottle. We might and I have used a couple of on hold claims where they have enough value behind them for the markets that allow it. How many markets are you in out of interest? Is that because that's obviously Yeah, so we're kind of pan European at the moment, as well as Middle Eastern and extending into into African. We've got a lovely shop in Barbados. If you ever find yourselves in dwellings in Barbados, feel like you have to go. Lovely place. But you're kind of in this dichotomy of anybody who puts vitamin C in a product 15% of your NRV can claim whatever they want about that product. It doesn't mean it's good. It doesn't mean it's bad. It almost doesn't mean anything. It just just means it has vitamin C. And so we try and give a longer form answer to that and try to give really realistic expectations of that. Because if you take a product, we have a skin aging product, it's called skin aging full of antioxidants, vitamin C, vitamin E, botanicals. Lovely. Great. But you're not going to take that on a day and all of a sudden your skin will look like you're newly born. That's not how supplements work. So we really hold ourselves back from making anything that's over an over estimated claim or overzealous in terms of the word in what you use. We will only ever use good synonyms with those claims. So when we say, you know, you see the contributing contributes to the maintenance of this is the phrase right from from Esther, but we support sort of aids or helps. We won't say boosts. We won't say this will make this better. Well, you know, it's about getting your body to the optimal, not making you a superhuman. That's not how it works. We will also stop people who are trying to say, and we'll talk about influencers and creators in particular. Tiktok's a great example. A Friday night, my phone started going off because we were getting hundreds of orders for a product. And somebody basically said, this product made me lose four pounds in a week. It didn't I can guarantee you that it did not do that. We sold about it was literally pulled up pulled off Tiktok within about three hours. All their commission was pulled. And then they were essentially shadow banned for a while. Education for us there because that was very early on in our Tiktok journey. Education was if we get a creator who wants to work with us, we're educating you more because that is not something that's not okay to say weight is so sensitive. Yes, you cannot say that. We even had somebody claiming that lines made mushrooms cured their dogs cancer. So you should take it. See Sharon's face sinking into the chair. We're like, what? No, delete. But it and this kind of becomes a problem. It's great. And when we try to do some reach out and work with health care professionals. And similarly, we have to train nutritionists on team to try and educate people. And I'm not from a health, but I'm not from a regulatory background. I'm not from a nutrition background. So I'm hyper careful of anything that gets said. What have you done internally to sort of help manage it because it is, you know, a full time job at the moment. And you never know Friday nights are ruined. No, there you go. Yeah. So how what have you done internally to just help house with all of that? So I'm a big fan of using AI tools to help. Great. So I like I built a GPT model that would allow you to just literally search through our products in a conversational way that can find accurate claims, accurate products that will do things that either a customer is asking, or if a customer is challenging or asking for a particular nuances about that product, it could help give the initial structure of an answer. It then needs a human to check it and make sure it's right. And then one of our nutritionists can also comment on that, but it's about how the standard place and a culture internally a culture of curiosity and a culture of wanting to do the right thing. And something goes viral or creates a lot of conversation, be it positive or negative around your product, around your brand. What's the protocol for reacting? Is there like you've got to be on it in two minutes or are we going to hold until we know our facts and then we're going to, you know, what typically happens behind the scenes? It's a little bit of both. We can't, we can't just knee jerk react. And in the case of we did the, the recent thing that we did around create team, we held off and said, there are results coming in here. Here are literal lab test results undocked, like the full Euro Finns testing that we shared and an explanation of how that works. And that was a social media posts that linked back to independent lab testing in a long form piece on our site. And because these 10, 15, 20 second conversations you have on social media are just unhelpful and too binary. Yeah, we actually find that we have to react quite quickly. The reason for that is the quicker that you can sort of, if you choose to add a comment as a brand, the quicker that you can do that, the quicker you can sort of knit other comments in the bud. And to be honest, a lot of the time you'll have a lot of people just, you know, acting the brand and asking for support as well or asking us to address it. I think as yours got bigger, we're getting called out a lot more, especially from like social media influencers. I mean, I'm sure most of you in the room would know someone like tonic health. He literally will go into supermarkets and grab out certain products and brands and call them out. And actually a lot of the work that he does is absolutely fantastic, but if we didn't comment when he's calling certain things out, we're just not defending ourselves. So time and place. But I also think like part of our job and part of my job as being a healthcare professional is helping to equip people to understand and equip people to what they can look out for because it really, really is confusing. So, you know, a couple of us in the team have worked on what are a few of the red flags that people can look out for? So we all do it. We all do scroll at eight o'clock at night when we should be going to bed or whatever it is. What can we tell people to look out for? So like a couple of things. So does that person speak in absolute? So what I mean by that is are they saying terms like you must. So you must eat 200 grams protein a day. Realistically, they should be saying, you know, you may or evidence suggests or just, you know, nutrition is really quite nuanced. And as well, demonizing entire food groups is another one. So, you know, people will come to me whether it's in or outside of work and say, oh, like I've heard, you know, I can't consume still carbohydrates. I don't know why they still have such a bad name. You know, I still can't, you know, Jess, I've got a wedding in six months time. Like I'm not going to eat carbohydrates. Like nutrition is supposed to be enjoyed. It is so far more complicated than putting things in these good or bad boxes and sort of just closing the lid on those boxes. So yes, addressing things when they come to us, being reactive, cutting through the noise, but also equipping people with certain things to look out for. So when they are doing their scrolling and they have lots of questions, they know sort of how to like cut through the noise themselves a little bit as well. Easier said than done. But indeed, indeed, George, you want to add anything to that? Yeah, but we, myself and our like our MPD development team, a couple has made comment for an independent article recently, which was focused on that red and green flags, essentially for supplements. And you do have to go back to focus on the label. You know, is it saying the right things on that label? Is it compliant in the UK? Does it like an American label? If not, maybe just check it. Just take your time and check it. And again, don't believe those absolutes because it isn't, it is too nuanced, far too nuanced. Indeed. Just going back on something you said earlier, Joe, which was education and something that you said Jess, around working with healthcare professionals. Is there, is there active work in both of your organizations around working specifically with influencers, whether it be paid partnerships, whether it just be dialogue and conversation, how are you managing that to sort of, I suppose, control the comms, you know, from, from, from within social media, like what's happening for both of you that's sort of leaning in on that. Do you want to take that one first? Yeah. Yeah. So, from sort of a Huell's perspective, so within the healthcare professional program, we have partnered with some absolutely fantastic nutritionist dieticians, both in the UK and in the US. And these partnerships are a little bit different. So somebody like Dr. Ids or Rihanna Lambert, we're not asking them to sit there and, you know, hold a Huell bottle and say, oh, I've had Huell for breakfast because I was rushing out the door. That's not sort of how the partnerships work. The partnerships work because there's that trust where we are trying to educate on a specific topic. So for example, how we can get people to understand that consuming more plant rich foods is a fantastic option. And it doesn't mean that you're not having enough protein and you're not going to get your gains in the gym. So we'd work with those healthcare professionals who are fantastic influencers and have brilliant platforms to actually talk about those topics, but then hand in hand help Huell, but we're not actively sort of pushing a product. And then I also run sort of like a university outreach program. So yes, I go as a representative of Huell, but actually the first half an hour of the conversation is talking about careers in nutrition, talking about how we're going to work through misinformation, talking about what a job could be like in nutrition. So actually just looking at, you know, the people that in five, 10 years time are going to be doing all of this because, you know, there's only a group of us now they're trying to cut through all this noise and actually talking to university students. There's a brilliant way of, you know, getting the next generation to pick up the bat one as well. It's funny because our product development director at my supplier with kind of partner companies is doing exactly that at MMU today with our shareholder. And we're also going to partner with them with the university Chester to do a similar sort of outreach and also to do some research for us because it's expensive. So that's been similar. And we've stayed away from any kind of major influence of partnerships for a long time. We don't kind of have a face of the brand and that was a conscious decision because the products are the brand. And you have such a big range as we do that that's kind of what it is focused on. And I wasn't going to start paying X hundreds of thousands to a random celebrity to say it's good or bad or otherwise, you know, it just wasn't what we do. And we have started using more creator content. More recently, we've restarted that, but being a lot more conscious in terms of how we educate them and also then going, okay, get their videos back. We'll never pay for a video beforehand. We'll never go to something and just pay for them straight away. They can get it to us. And if we like their content, we will tell them we'll use it and we'll then offer them the kind of paid partnership as it is, but we will never just let somebody put something out. It is always vetted by our team internally first. Excellent, excellent. So I appreciate neither if you have a crystal ball, but there is lots of things out there on social media. What is going to go viral next? Or what's maybe on the horizon of something that we should be, should be aware of and that you're sort of scanning for, for it to blow up. Well, if I knew that, I don't think I'd be working for you. I totally agree. But what are the things that are maybe keeping you awake at night? Well, definitely the cleaner label conversation. I'd say, I'd say maybe 12 months ago, the conversation about ultra processed foods. I mean, actually, we're a team of five, six nutritionists. We're a small group and we are a little, little family. So yeah, I'd say about 12 months ago, ultra processed foods were probably keeping us up at night a little bit because it, because of social media, really, it did kind of go from zero to 100 quite quickly. And as a result of that, and what a downside of social media is, there's quite a like fear mongering narrative. So that's why part of my job has just been so heavily focused on content because you, I would love to be able to answer your question. I have absolutely no idea, but I think it's going to be working through the narrative of, okay, actually 20 of those ingredients that you're concerned about are just really, really long names of vitamins. And actually, it's just that education piece. So as far saying that, I do think that consumer noise will become loud. So potentially, you know, shorter labelling will be something that people really want to see. Okay. We replaced anthocyanins on our label to grape skin extract, for that sort of reason, because it's exactly the same thing, you know, but you don't get somebody going, there's a chemical. Everything's a chemical. We like to categorise. I think, you know, we all can, you know, use social media to have our rant and, you know, and for some people, it's a vehicle to just letting it all out there. And that's okay. You know, that's the world that we live in now. I suppose from a positive perspective, thinking about some of the things we talked about earlier, got health and fibre and all of those positive things, is there anything that you feel is on the horizon from that in terms of where social media will actually really be a catalyst for helping to educate our consumers better? So think of the viral noise being a positive. Anything in particular? I think, I hope, and I do think that fibre will be the big thing that people could do in a similar way that we talked about protein is because we're at such a saturation point now where everything, you walk through supermarkets, everything's high protein. And it's not, it's just written on the label that it's high protein. Just make some sourdough bread. There you go. It's 10% protein. Done. I think fibre can do this, though, but it's a rebrand that needs to be done socially. I think we touched on that several times today. Yeah, definitely. To go hand in hand with gut health. And the nuances that you spoke about around gut health and this wider piece around it, it's not as simple as just here's one thing that is like a solution for that. But also for people to challenge ingredients. We make gummies. So you need a heat stable, colony forming unit that is not going to be multiple strains but can help create multiple strains, as does really well clinically studied. Just throw that out there. The gut brain muscle axis is a really interesting one. So increase in physical capabilities, muscle generation because of the gut, that's a new piece of research that's interesting. Okay, we're going to have a whole topic on that next time. Thanks for that tip, Jo. Jessica. Yeah, I think I mean the idea would be right that fibre knocks protein off the number one spot. Do I actually think that's going to be the case soon? No, if I'm honest. Do I think it should be yes? But again, it just, it really, I keep saying it does just go back to the education piece and I do think it starts at a much younger age. I mean I said about universities, I have also been going into schools to try and encourage kids to care about what they eat because it's actually so sad that they just don't get that education. That's a complete topic for another day but I don't think it's going to be we're going to walk into the supermarket in six months times and everything will be high fibre and everyone will be buying it. I could be completely incorrect but I think sort of from a fuel perspective it's just shining a light on the good things rather than concentrating on everything else. So shining a light on the fibre, shining a light on all the vitamins and minerals explained to consumers, what that actually means on a label and just I think with nutrition there's always such a narrative of what to reduce or what to cut out but actually it should just be shining a light on all the positive things or the things that you can add to your diet and that's where I'd really like the shift to go just in terms of nutrition cons, it's just all the benefits. I mean I'm a nutritionist because I absolutely love food. And they do say variety is the spice of life. I mean it's a long standing statement and it sounds a bit cringe to say it but at the heart of it variety is what's going to give us longevity. Yeah bring that love back again because there's so many good things. That word is our longevity. Obviously it's growing at the moment and we talk about a lot and we've seen a lot more around cellular health and anti-oxidant support and around astratantin, around anything that's a precursor to NAD+ and stuff. So if we can kind of clear up that which is quite a myth-defined space and we can blame Andrew Huberman for kind of doing all in a good way, right, for talking about those sorts of things and then creating this bus but trying to nail down some really high quality products in that area with science to help. I'm going to open it up to the floor. I'm conscious we've got about five minutes. Some of the things that you're doing are really very helpful in the market to unpick some other things. And I have two general questions just to ask. One to each of you. From a fuel point of view, could you ever see a world where a fuel would get behind the whole food and support it to drive it in the marketplace for people to consume it? So would fuel ever support quinoa or buckwheat, an actual whole food that isn't fully composed and in a bottle that has nutritional value? That's one to consider. And my question on this side is there's clearly a space between regulation, science, what's approved and what isn't. And I'm interested in your opinion on is it appropriate to use ingredients that don't have health claims to advertise in front of pack to sell products. Great. Both questions which Jeff's going to go first. Good news is we do have a product range called our hot and savoury line which uses ingredients just like quinoa, a lot of high fiber ingredients. So for example we have, there's always going to be a type of people that are not going to have the powder, they're not going to have the bottles. So we have lunch meals that are rice-based, grain-based, noodle-based, just basically just full of vitamins and minerals, like whole vegetables, grains, top it up with some hot water and your lunch is ready to go. So yes, we have started moving into that space as well. Thanks. And if we're just out of interest, where can you get them at the moment? Are they launched or are they in the MP pipeline? Yeah, all direct to consumer on the website at the moment. I'd love to see a world that that, it would make my life a hell of a lot easier. Ashwagandha Gummi is the best selling Ashwagandha Gummi on Amazon in the UK sort of thing and you just literally just rely on customers knowing that. I'd love to, but we have to and we must advocate for regulation. Not in regulation but testing. If you look at the first, if you look at like the first full page of Amazon results for creating gummies, I would put a significant amount of money that two of those have got any creatine in at all. I'll put money in it because I've tested quite a few of them and it's been quite a big, it was one because we did call another brand out on that and we did it actively on social media and we got a lot of backlash initially before everybody went, oh, hang on a minute, they're right. So that was good. That was nice. They've got, it starts with the manufacturer. The manufacturer has to make a good quality product. A brand has to want to make a good quality product and to test that product from the manufacturer if it's used in that way is genuine and real and the retailer should do that. You know, even retailers like Holland and Barrett do not test. They just say, you know, give us your COAs, give us all of this great data beforehand. Great, we'll list that product. They don't actually test. So, and then also that test isn't standardized around the world. So you could go to five different Eurofins labs and have five different, slightly different test results. But yeah, so testing would be my key message. Brilliant. Great questions. Thank you. Okay, will we wrap it up then? Fantastic. Just to say thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast. Before you go, we've got some exciting news to share about more live events this year. We're heading to Ascot in October and Dublin in November. And for the first time, we're hosting an event in mainland Europe. In September 2025, we'll be in Rotterdam. Join us as we inspire the future of food. Learn more and sign up at FoodMattersLive.com.