A Health, Nutrition & Care story
Korea Eundan is a market leader in the Dietary Supplements segment. Until recently, its product portfolio included omega-3 supplements derived from fish oil. Despite promotion, sales of these products were stagnating due to lack of differentiation in a highly competitive and saturated market. While South Korean consumers generally recognize the many benefits of omega-3 supplements, they are concerned with the problem of marine contamination and the associated potential accumulation of heavy metals in marine-sourced materials. Our customer perceived this as an opportunity to exchange their fish-oil based omega-3 products for a microalgal-based alternative, using Health, Nutrition & Care (HNC) as their strategic end-to-end partner.
Conceiving an elevated product
Korea Eundan saw a chance to better meet the expectations of South Korea’s sophisticated, environmentally conscious, health-savvy consumers. This would involve replacing the company’s entire line of fish-oil-based omega-3 products with an elevated omega-3 product line. The new offering would be a vegan, microalgal-based alternative, entirely free of the risk of heavy metal contamination, and whose production had no impact on marine ecosystems. The switch was to be fully completed before the end of 2024.
Leveraging our end-to-end capabilities
Central to success were our capabilities as a true end-to-end partner, providing evidence-based, expert-powered solutions that are high quality, better-tasting, and higher-performing than the products they replace. We do this by leveraging the breadth of our world-class innovation portfolio, our manufacturing and processing expertise, our consumer and marketing insights, and our expanded capabilities in masking and taste solutions, including our expansive palette of flavors. During our meetings with Korea Eundan, we sought to understand their market objectives and carefully assessed the challenges associated with shifting their line of omega-3 soft gel capsules from fish oil to micro-algal.
After consultation, we set up an agile, cross-functional project team within dsm-firmenich to regularly track progress to ensure speed and efficiency. This included sales, regulatory, application, sensory, quality, and production, together with our Asia-Pacific regional and global innovation teams, who worked closely with Korea Eundan’s knowledgeable brand and product experts. As the newest addition to HNC’s powerful cadre of experts, our taste team played an essential role in solving the important sensory challenges presented by the planned portfolio transition.
An exclusive creation
Korea Eundan has a long history of using our ingredient trademarks both on-pack and in consumer communications to support their Vitamin C and multivitamin brands’ value proposition. Continuing this practice, we signed an exclusive agreement for the on-pack use of the life’s®OMEGA Ultra trademark to help differentiate the new product. We created a product exclusively for them: the trademarked, high-quality, highly concentrated algal omega-3, life’s®OMEGA o77 rTG, which has an effective 75% concentration of both EPA and DHA.
Our portfolio of life’s®OMEGA products comprises 100% algal-based omega-3, extracted directly from microalgae without the use of organic solvents. This omega-3 is produced in enclosed facilities that preclude external contamination, ensuring safety from marine pollution while having no impact on marine ecosystems. Next, we collaborated with Korea Eundan and their manufacturing partner to improve processing and quality of the finished soft gel capsules to manage oxidation stability.
Delivering the optimal flavor tonality
We worked together to ensure their exclusive life’s®OMEGA soft gel line offered a pleasant experience. Although less fishy in flavor than fish oils, algal oils have a unique ‘marine’ taste that some find unpleasant. This can lead to decreased compliance following purchase. Delivering a good-tasting product is critical to an algal product’s success in the market. Despite already having another longstanding flavor supplier, Korea Eundan worked exclusively with us to devise the optimal taste solution and application solution for this product line.
Owing to HNC’s global sales and innovation leadership and over 20 years of extensive algal omega-3 research, our dedicated HNC Taste organization has proven its ability in tackling the unique sensory challenges posed by algal oils in recent years. Our flavor experts (with additional support from our Taste, Texture & Health Taste organization) helped to neutralize any odors and create the highest-performing sensory solution.
While Korea Eundan originally wanted a citrus flavor in the oil itself, our taste and application teams understood this addition might increase oxidation, negatively impacting the sensory profile. Instead, we proposed the optimal flavor tonality for the product. We also recommended this tonality should be delivered via the shell of the soft gel capsule itself, thereby greatly reducing the risk of introducing additional oxidation during the manufacturing process.
Completion on time and in full
This partnership showed how we can deliver differentiating customer solutions by drawing on our powerful cross-business synergies. Prior to the 2023 merger, we lacked the flavor samples and expertise to create an innovative application method that would minimize any impact on active ingredients. Thanks to this expertise available within HNC, the entire development process was simplified and we brought the product to market much quicker.
In fact, thanks to the efforts of Korea Eundan’s experts working closely alongside our project team, we fully optimized our end-to-end solutions capabilities to support the transition from fish-to microalgal omega-3 within a year, easily meeting our customer’s 2024 deadline.
Our partnership with dsm-firmenich has revolutionized our omega-3 product line, delivering unmatched quality, sustainability, and consumer satisfaction. We look forward to continuing this collaboration to adapt swiftly to evolving market needs.
