Brand acquisition allows Bioniq to expand its reach within the personalised nutrition market in Europe 

With scalability and business growth being an important aspect of business development, companies are often faced with different strategy paths to follow in order to achieve their goal. For this podcast episode, we learn more about Bioniq, a personalised nutrition brand that recently acquired LOWEI, a personalised supplements brand. 

Tune in to hear more about: 

• What is personalised nutrition and why is it an important topic for the nutraceutical industry
• The steps and lessons learnt from Bioniq acquisition of LOWEI, a personalised nutrition supplement brand 
• The role LOWEI’s acquisition plays in Bioniq’s scalability plans 
• Next steps for Bioniq and the personalised nutrition market 

Guest: Vadim Fedotov, CEO and co-founder of Bioniq

Vadim is the CEO and co-founder of the biohacking platform and personalised health-support system bioniq. Former CEO of Gazprom Media Technologies and ex-CEO of Groupon Eastern Europe. Former professional athlete, was part of the German national basketball team.  

Want to learn more about LOWEI? Listen to our podcast interview with them here: https://www.vitafoodsinsights.com/personalised-nutrition/totally-personalised-supplementspodcast 

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Welcome to the Vitafoods Insights Podcast. Join us as we explore the latest science and innovation, helping the global health & nutrition industry connect, develop and progress. Today's host is Natalia Franca Rocha, content and conference manager.

Hello, and welcome to another Vitafoods Insights Podcast episode. Today we will be talking about personalised nutrition. I'm delighted to be joined by Vadim Fedotov, who's CEO and co-founder of Bioniq and also a former professional athlete who was part of the German national basketball team. Thanks for joining me today Vadim.

Hi Natalia, nice to be here.

To get as it started, can you explain to our listeners what is personalised nutrition and why is it an important topic for the nutraceutical industry?

Personalised nutrition is based on whatever requirements needs or deficiencies your body has. It's important that we need to understand that one size does not fit all when it comes to all things in life, including nutrition. We all absorb things differently. We all have a different lifestyle. We all need different things at different moments. So personalised nutrition is based on bio data that companies receive, like Bioniq, receive from people, from its client base, to better understand the needs that the person currently has at this given moment. So we can add, number one, safely and number two, efficiently, make sure to improve the aerosol unnecessary and once we improve and eliminate the deficiencies to actually overperform and improve the performance, cognitive and physical of those people through personalised nutrition.

Perfect. Thank you for the explanation. Now, how does Bioniq's solution differ from other personalised nutrition solutions readily available in the market?

The idea, the foundation of Bioniq has always been in clinical trials and in medical publications. So our medical team has been doing trials in this area for over 10 years now mostly in Switzerland. And we have over 27 Medical publications confirming the efficiency of personalised nutrition, how can it impact your cognitive function, how can impact your physical functions. By being personalised, increase the absorption levels because we know what to give to personnel at any given moment in time, because we have constant results. So in terms of the data collection aspect, the amount of blood parameters that we take, and the historic data that has been researched, we are probably one of the leading organisations on bio data and personal solutions in the market.

That's great to hear Bioniq is embedded and backed by science and clinical trial research, as you've mentioned. I also know that Bioniq has recently announced the acquisition of LOEWI, a personalised nutrition supplement brand. Can you share more about the lessons learned about setting up your own business and insights on how did you decide to acquire LOEWI? I mean, what were the steps involved in such a collaboration?

Yeah, I mean, setting up as these two questions, setting up your own business is something where if you go first, after graduating, if you first go into a corporate world, you will find out that corporate development, corporate cultures, what works, what doesn't work with our best practices, and at some point, maybe, you will decide to create something of your own. So my previous three, obviously, I was CEO of different various international companies, where I realised that I wanted to create something of value in the health space. I came to this realisation when I had my own experience when going to a traditional doctor, I did not receive the feedback or input that I would expect. And this was like my AHA moment. So the moment you have an AHA moment, where you realise there's something out there that doesn't serve or you solve my needs, you should look into something that I can create to find a solution and this solution is scalable, because there's enough other people who are interested in it. So this is where Bioniq started, almost four years ago, when I realised that the answer to my question, how can I improve myself was not answered by traditional medicine, so I needed to find suitable different solutions. So when we started Bioniq out of London, in the UK, we kept growing internationally. And then end of 2021 we started looking closer and closer and talking to the founders of LOWEI, which are based in Munich, Germany, and are serving the German, Austrian, Swiss and Netherlands. And we realised that there was a huge potential for us, because the idea of personalised nutrition, the mission of making things personalised to improve people's performance was the backbone for both of companies, so we saw a very big synergy here. There's the reason we decided to acquire LOWEI to make health more accessible and also be more present via Bioniq in more markets. So it was a very interesting journey, how you can grow organically yourself, but also grow through acquisition with other companies that are on synergy levels complementary to your business.

Thank you, Vadim, for sharing more about your experience and LOWEI's acquisition with us, it's great to hear about how new alternative solutions can provide consumers with alternatives when it comes to their health care. Now expanding more on business growth that you touched upon, what role does this acquisition plays in your scalability plans?

This was very interesting. And it's a very important step for us. Bioniq was not present prior in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands. So we have now entered the market, we have increased our footprint in the European market, we see a great scalability to other markets in Europe, France, Spain, that we can also be offering our services to in the near future. So this acquisition was a great step for us into, you know, Central Western Europe to develop on going forward. But also, of course, whenever you acquire a business, you look at the processes, you look at their best practices, and you find out what were you doing right or wrong prior? What are they doing that you something maybe could improve on? So this was a great learning curve for us. In terms of scalability, of course, it just opened up the growth in Europe for us much faster, so we expect to be in more countries in Europe already by the end of this year.

It does sounds like that is an exciting journey ahead of you. On that note, building upon our last question, what's next for you and the market of personalised nutrition?

So for next for us is we understand that there's more and more demand from customers to understand better what goes on inside of them. So we have recently announced several partnerships with tracking companies, tracking wearable Solutions, and also have integrated opportunities for people to give more often feedback not just every two, three months via the blood test, but also on a functional level on a, you know, questionnaire level. So our next step is to give more people better understanding what goes inside of them and provide personalised solutions that are more accessible to them worldwide. We have just recently announced a new product called Bioniq Go, which is our first global product that takes advantage of those, you know, over 3 million data points that we have collected to provide the most personalised experience. And so the next step for us is increasing the customer feedback loop in terms of the frequency while offering a global product.

Consumers nowadays definitely want to be more involved and take more of an active role with what companies are offering them, so that's really great to hear that you're implementing and ensuring this feedback loop with consumers to keep the communication open with them. Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today Vadim, before we end the show, do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to share with our listeners?

The only thing I want to share is that I think we're in this day and age where people start thinking more and more of what they put inside of their body. I think that's a great, great progress. One of the main things that I say is we're now at this point where we, as consumers, we know so much about the things we buy, you know, we know the screen size of iPhones, we know how much storage it has, you know how many gigabytes it has, we know when there's a new update is our favourite app. We know how many filters are on Instagram but most of us don't even know our own blood type. So people are in this place where you know so much about things that are just temporarily part of your life, but don't really know what goes on inside of them.

Knowledge is power right? Thankfully, consumers are becoming more aware about their health and taking a further interest in how ingredients can optimise their health and well being. Especially having gone through COVID pandemic, we are seeing consumers globally across the nutraceutical industry are taking more of an active learning their education approaches. So that's a great way of ending the show. Once again, Vadim, thank you for joining us today.

Nice to be here.

Thank you also to our listeners for tuning in. If you're interested in learning more about Bioniq make sure to check the hyperlinks available in the show notes. Thank you again and see you next time.

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