The Bloat Industrial Complex
What the next wave of digestive supplements will get right
Notes from someone who has spent way too long reading every label on the shelf — and is genuinely excited about where this category is going.
I was in one of my favorite wellness shops in Soho a few weeks ago, the kind of place where you can lose an hour going through supplements, ingredient lists... I counted 20+ digestive supplements. Each one thoughtfully formulated, beautifully designed, addressing some version of the same family of concerns: bloating, irregularity, sluggish digestion, post-meal heaviness. I picked up four. Read every label. Bought one.
I’ve been doing this exercise in stores around the world for months now. And what I want to share isn’t a list of brands to buy or avoid. I love the wellness industry. I’m a customer in it. The brands building in digestive health have done something extraordinary over the last decade: they’ve taken a topic people used to whisper about and made it part of normal, sophisticated conversation. That’s a real gift, and I don’t think it gets credited enough.
After enough time spent in the labels and the literature, I’ve started to see where this category is going next. The current wave got so much right. The next wave is going to get a few more things right too, and I think the brands that nail those things are going to define the next decade of gut health.
Here’s where I see the conversation moving.
The first shift is toward radical label transparency.
For a long time, the standard format for a herbal supplement has been the “proprietary blend” — a single milligram number covering several ingredients, without a breakdown of how much of each you’re actually getting. This was inherited from the broader supplement industry, which inherited it from the pharmaceutical industry before that. It’s just how things were done.
But the clinical research on most of the popular digestive botanicals — dandelion root, ginger, fennel, peppermint — uses specific doses. The studies showing efficacy use 320mg here, 600mg there. Once you start paying attention to those numbers, you start wanting to see them on the label.
The most forward-thinking brands in this category are already moving toward full transparency: every ingredient, every dose, no proprietary screens. Seed has done this beautifully on the probiotic side. I think within five years it will feel as outdated to not show your full formulation as it currently feels to not list your sourcing. It’s just where the customer is going.
The second shift is toward foundational thinking before bacterial thinking.
The probiotic conversation has been one of the great gifts of the last fifteen years of wellness. Real research, real products, a fundamentally new way of thinking about the gut as an ecosystem rather than a tube. I’m a huge fan of a well-formulated probiotic.
What we’re learning, though is that bacteria need an environment to do their work in. They need adequate stomach acid upstream. They need enzymatic capacity breaking food down into substrates they can actually use. They need the right fibers and prebiotics. They need motility that keeps the system flowing.
The next wave of digestive products is going to take this foundational layer more seriously. Ritual's Synbiotic+ is one of the brands already building this way — pairing a probiotic with the prebiotic fibers those strains actually need to feed on.
I think probiotics are wonderful — but as an honest acknowledgment that for a lot of people, the missing piece isn't more bacteria. It's the environment those bacteria are being asked to thrive in.
The third shift is away from single ingredient supplements.
Digestion happens in stages — mouth, stomach, small intestine, large intestine. A problem at any one of them creates the symptoms this category exists to address. If you scan a typical digestive aisle right now what you mostly see is products built around a single mechanism. Probiotic-only. Enzyme-only (HUM's Flatter Me is a popular example here — a well-formulated digestive enzyme, but designed to solve one piece of the puzzle, not all of it). And then a whole wall of single-ingredient herbals: aloe vera capsules, ginger capsules, peppermint capsules, each one in its own bottle, each one solving for one thing.
Which means if you actually want to address bloating in a real, multi-pathway way, you’re looking at taking five or six separate ingredients a day, from five or six different brands and hoping the doses stack appropriately. That’s a part-time job.
What I see coming is products that pair enzymatic support with botanicals for gut motility. It’s a more ambitious approach to formulation, and it requires more discipline. But the science is increasingly there to support it, and the customer is ready for it.
The fourth shift — and this is the one I’m most personally excited about — is the return of elimination as a serious topic.
This part is going to sound traditional, and that’s because it is. The eliminative side of digestion — what comes out, on what timeline, in what form — has been central to every classical health system humans have ever built. Ayurveda treats it as foundational. Traditional Chinese Medicine maps it across multiple organ systems. The Western naturopathic tradition for ex Norman Walker has been writing carefully about elimination for the better part of a century.
The modern supplement industry, for various reasons of language and aesthetics and marketing, has been slower to fold this conversation into its formulations. Most products focus on processing — getting food broken down and absorbed. Far fewer are designed around the question of what happens after that, on the exit side of the system.
I think this is changing. Brands are starting to build formulations that take elimination seriously. Not as harsh, dependence-creating laxative support, but as the gentle, daily, work-with-the-body kind that supports the eliminative organs and the body’s own natural transit rhythm.
The fifth shift is about principles, design, and formulation in harmony.
This category has produced some of the most beautiful brand work in modern wellness. The packaging, the founder stories, the visual identities — genuinely exceptional, and a real elevation of how we talk about health. Moon Juice has set a standard for what a wellness brand can feel like, what kind of world it can build. And the formulations behind those brands have, in many cases, been excellent too.
Where I see the next wave going is brands with principles ingrained end-to-end. What a company actually believes — about food, lifestyle, the body, wellness industry — visible in everything from the design to the language to what's in the bottle. Not better marketed. More complete.
So this is what I’m watching for, both as someone who reads every label and as someone who genuinely loves this category and wants to see it keep getting better.
Full transparency on dosing. Foundational support that respects what bacteria actually need in order to do their work. Whole-cascade formulations that take the digestive system seriously as a system. The return of elimination as a real topic, drawing on traditions that have been telling us about it for thousands of years. And the integration of beautiful brand and rigorous formulation, rooted in principles
A handful of products on the current shelf hit some of these. Very few hit all of them. But that’s the exciting part. When you can see clearly where a category is going, you can also see who’s most likely to get there first.
P.S. — Hit reply and tell me which digestive supplement has actually changed something for you. I’m building a private list from real people seeing real results. I want to compare notes.