Inside BENEO’s new pulse plant: pioneering sustainable protein from faba beans
Sajeev Nair, Founder and Chairman of Vieroots Wellness Solutions
Personalised wellness and preventive healthcare are becoming increasingly relevant in India’s evolving nutrition and health landscape. With advances in areas like genetics, biohacking, and lifestyle medicine, the focus is gradually shifting from treatment to prevention. As consumers show growing interest in tailored health solutions, discussions around integrating science, technology, and wellness are gaining ground. In this context, NuFFoodSSpectrum spoke with Sajeev Nair, Founder and Chairman of Vieroots Wellness Solutions, to understand the current trends, opportunities, and challenges in the field of personalised health and nutrition. The conversation explores broader industry developments, including the role of awareness, accessibility, and regulation in shaping the future of preventive care in India. This interview sheds light on how scientific insights and emerging technologies are influencing consumer behaviour, product innovation, and health outcomes in the country’s rapidly expanding wellness sector.
What are the primary growth drivers in the global nutraceutical market, and how can companies leverage them for strategic expansion?
The primary growth driver in the global nutraceutical market is consumers starting to take charge of their health, rather than leaving things to destiny. Instead of waiting for lifestyle diseases to develop, to start acting, they are getting proactive about doing whatever it takes to prevent lifestyle diseases. In this pursuit, consumers are waking up to the infinite possibilities of personalisation, which is an equally important growth driver for nutraceuticals. Companies can leverage both these drivers only if they move up the rung to serve this discerning class of consumers. Our personalised genomic solution, Eplimo, is capable of detecting genetic risks for developing any among hundreds of lifestyle diseases, years or decades before they hit, and is also capable of suggesting personalised lifestyle changes to keep such risks at bay. Supplementation by way of nutraceuticals plays a key role in deploying such solutions.
Which emerging innovations are shaping the processing and packaging technologies in the nutraceutical industry?
Nutraceuticals as an industry is now witnessing a major new trend, which is often termed as a ‘shift to pharma’ mode. While this entails a new focus on therapeutic nutraceuticals, targeted at specific diseases and conditions, much like how pharma companies do, it also involves better processing and packaging technologies, like in the pharmaceutical sector. We go even one step further, and process and package our products and solutions even better than pharma brands. One reason for this is our primary nature as a direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand. We don’t have distributors, wholesalers or retailers pushing our products, nor do we advertise heavily, so it all boils down to how good our products are, so that our clients do voluntary word-of-mouth publicity. Hence, we take care to not only employ state-of-the-art processing methods but also world-class packaging for a total, superb and world-class customer experience. For instance, we went through many painstaking iterations in processing methods to arrive at the perfect way to formulate Curcumin Latte, a blend of Curcumin and MCT Powder, and its resounding reception in the market proved our efforts were worthwhile. Similarly, the packaging of our flagship Eplimo home testing kit is as per world-class standards and perfectly in sync with its enormous and life-transformative health benefits.
What are the challenges and opportunities in personalised nutrition? How are personalised nutrition and digital health trends shaping the future of nutraceutical product offerings?
With too much competition coming from pharma companies, pure-play nutraceutical firms have to invariably focus on value addition. We tackled it successfully through truly personalised products and solutions. A successful D2C nutraceutical brand will have to identify unmet consumer needs and undertake real R&D to develop effective, safe and personalised formulations to meet such needs. This is what we consistently do at Vieroots, and the reason why we could scale our D2C formulations within a short span of less than 5 years. Also, being a platform-based health-tech startup, our primary platform being our genomic test, we are equipped to meet diverse consumer needs with our nutraceuticals. We follow this approach in Eplimo, where each client’s combined genetic and metabolic analysis decides the nutrients that will help him or her immensely. Digital wearables also play a major role in our value addition, as our AI-based Trigr super app, smart ring, and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) provide round-the-clock monitoring of health metrics so that complete life transformation is possible.
What distinguishes your product offerings, such as Nutrivie and Natural C, in terms of formulation and targeted health benefits?
We don’t want to be an also-ran nutraceutical brand. The focus remains on superior value addition that differentiates our products from the rest of the market offerings. Take, for instance, the market for protein powders and meal replacements. Our product here is Nutrivie, which differentiates itself from others due to its inclusion of both fast-release and slow-release whey proteins that ensure a sustained flow of amino acids. It is also fortified with 24 vitamins and minerals for wholesome health by way of energy, strength, vitality and longevity, in a deliciously flavoured formulation. Similarly, Natural C is a unique Vitamin C supplement made from 100 per cent natural actives like fresh Amla fruit extract. The result is that Natural C delivers the myriad benefits of Vitamin C, including immunity boost, collagen formation, antioxidant action, anti-inflammatory action, stress relief, gut health and anti-ageing.
How is the company strengthening its presence in the nutraceuticals market?
We strengthen our position by thinking from the customer’s point of view. For instance, there were well-entrenched players for fish oil capsules, whereas we entered the market with Vieroots Krill Oil, which is a more bioavailable source for Omega-3s, and hence has been experiencing great traction. Secondly, we also offer comprehensive nutraceutical solutions rather than single products. For example, we offer various health stacks like for longevity, immunity, energy, cognition, heart, gut health, stress relief and sound sleep. They contain between 2 to 5 separate products, like how Mito Complex and Nad Complex make up our Longevity Stack. But most importantly, we are diversifying into institutional sales, where we are meeting the unmet needs of whole organisations. We are entering the executive health check-up domain, as we are pretty confident that our genomic solution Eplimo can provide immense value to such corporate programs by focusing on prevention and performance, whereas most of the existing offerings deliver only by way of late stage reactive treatments and with no focus at all on improving individual and workforce level productivity.
Any new product launches in 2025?
Yes, we are planning to bring out a series of nutraceutical products, mainly in the nootropics market. Nootropics are aimed at enhancing cognitive functions like focus, memory, alertness, stress management etc. It is a fast-growing domain globally as mental health issues have become a major concern everywhere.
How much revenue was generated during FY 24-25? How much growth is expected this fiscal?
We generated Rs 7.1 crore in revenue during the last fiscal. Considering that we are still a bootstrapped startup, this is a strong performance. We are planning to do more than Rs 10 crore in this current fiscal year.
Manbeena Chawla