Over the past five years, nutritional gummies, chews, gels, and powders have proliferated in the aisles of supermarkets and health food stores across the United States. Officially called “nutrient delivery systems” or “formats” in industry jargon, these shelf-stable concoctions were originally designed to transport doses of micro or macro nutrients — like Vitamin-C or omega-3 — to consumers’ bodies.
But today, a growing number of U.S. consumers are purchasing not iron or calcium but so-called superfoods in these super-processed forms — an ashwagandha or sea moss gummy, a soda with lion’s mane mushroom extract, or a powder labeled “smart greens” to add to a morning smoothie.
“Superfood” is not a scientifically recognized term; rather, it is a marketing strategy that proclaims a food item’s curative or health enhancing effects, such as increased longevity, stress regulation, or immunity, well beyond what we expect from regular foods. Introduced in the 1990s and used across the food industry, food media, and diet influencers alike, the term has given new value to familiar unprocessed or lightly processed foods like blueberries, yogurt, spinach, and apple cider vinegar, as well as introduced novel ingredients — such as açaí, quinoa, chia, and moringa — to Americans’ palates.
In the U.S. alone, industry research suggests a market size of $61 billion for the superfoods category in 2026, with expected growth to at least $85 billion in the next decade.
The superfood label generates a kind of “health halo” around a food, creating a vague but powerful sense of its goodness even in cases with little scientific evidence to back up claims. Superfoods fit within a family of concepts that have circulated in alternative health circles for decades. Functional foods, nutraceuticals, and probiotics are adjacent categories, all occupying the space constructed between food and medicine.
Grounded in the idea that specific foods possess unusual salutary powers, superfoods have until recently sat comfortably alongside popular health advice to eat whole, authentic, natural, and real foods. In the U.S. alone, industry research suggests a market size of $61 billion for the superfoods category in 2026, with expected growth to at least $85 billion in the next decade. At the same time, much recent dietary advice is nutrient-focused; for example, it advocates eating more protein or fiber, not whole foods.
Superfoods are more than simply an increasingly pervasive marketing strategy or sham, as some critics argue. They are what anthropologists call a folk category, a way people classify the world around them, and in this case foods. The growing presence of items marketed as superfoods underscores the concept’s salience for consumers and its ability to evolve to meet new and changing values around food, health, and science. Superfoods serve as modern day totems that symbolize authenticity, alternative medicine, traditional knowledge, and now even nutrition-maxxing. Poignantly, they also signal personal and individualized redemption from the perceived consequences of less healthy dietary choices.
The realities of super-processed superfoods often bear little cultural or nutritional resemblance to how these foods are consumed at their source.
More than two decades ago, anthropologist Carole Counihan wrote that food trends serve as a prism that both reflects and refracts, as well as unites different cultural phenomena. Considering the contradictions around super-processed superfoods, as well as understanding the motivations of those who produce and consume them, can shed light on our current moment, when Americans are questioning what healthy eating even means and having to make choices within a modern-day food system built around delivering shelf-stable, ultra-processed foods.
We note that the rise of highly processed superfood gummies, chews, powders, sodas, and the like focuses Americans’ attention away from the real and deeply rooted constraints many consumers face around food and eating, such as access, time, and disillusionment with traditional nutritional and health authorities. And, ironically, while being sold as real food and not as medicine, these items more resemble candy or junk food than what we otherwise think of as healthy or so-called real food.
Superfoods Offer an Alternative Story About Health Wisdom
The superfood concept has grown in prominence over the last few decades. Today, the range of products marketed as superfoods is truly massive: from blueberries and yogurt to açaí and chia to ashwagandha, camu camu, and sea buckthorn. Because the superfood concept is so flexible, undefined, and unmeasurable, many nutrition scientists find the term frustrating.
But its flexibility also makes it compelling for marketers and alluring for many consumers, who learn about superfoods from social media, friends, and alternative health podcasts — spaces where credentials, study quality, or even biotechnical facts matter less than charisma, convincing anecdotes, or the crunch of the algorithm. Superfoods are a potent manifestation of the eroding trust in traditional nutritional authorities and scientific institutions broadly.
Nutritional primitivism attracts the growing number of consumers who have become increasingly critical of industrial food systems.
The realities of super-processed superfoods often bear little cultural or nutritional resemblance to how these foods are consumed at their source. For example, take açaí. Anthropologist Eduardo Brondizio’s research found an inverse relationship between the amount of actual açaí fruit in a product and the degree to which açai was emphasized on the label.
This funhouse mirror effect exists because pure, high-density açaí pulp is expensive to harvest, process, and transport from the Amazon estuary to Western consumers via refrigerated global supply chains. But acai extract is cheap and shelf stable. So, food manufacturers routinely blend açaí extract into juices, water, or other bases such as energy drinks, teas, and snacks to keep the ingredient on the label even while using just incremental amounts.
Emulsifying, pasteurizing, and diluting açaí pulp converts a calorie-dense, savory staple eaten fresh with fish or beans into a sweetened energy drink sold at fast casual restaurants, snack bars, and gas stations. The transformation is both material and symbolic; producers use rainforest imagery and phrases such as “Amazonian secrets” to turn a natural fruit into a manufactured boost, as well as to imply that the fruit and the energy drink are one in the same.
Food researchers Jessica Loyer and Christine McKnight call such marketing strategies “nutritional primitivism.” Non-Western cultural practices and indigenous food traditions, which the public also perceives as exotic, are invoked to conjure a sense of ancient yet timeless nutritional wisdom. These food traditions stand in contrast to modern production and consumption logics.
While voices from across the political spectrum encourage us to “eat real food,” structural conditions continue to make following this advice extremely difficult.
For example, Andean superfoods such as quinoa, chia, and maca are packaged to emphasize the mythology of ancient Incan strength and warrior endurance. The trendy Golden Milk Latte relies on vague references to “ancient Eastern wisdom” and Ayurvedic home remedies. Icelandic skyr yogurt is pitched primarily to suburban Americans as “what sustained the Vikings.”
Such nutritional primitivism attracts the growing number of consumers who have become increasingly critical of industrial food systems. Superfoods can offer a fantasy of health and wellness associated with ancient peoples, place-based traditions, and magical curatives. By underscoring those associations, companies can effectively expand sales by pitching products with unclear nutritional accolades or scientifically proven value as superfoods.
In turn, superfoods seem to offer consumers a potential way out of a dilemma: How to eat well despite constraints on their time, access, and money.
Contradictions for Consumers
Consumers in the U.S. today face real and systemic contradictions around eating. While voices from across the political spectrum encourage us to “eat real food,” structural conditions continue to make following this advice extremely difficult.
With consensus that is unlike almost any other issue in public life, Americans largely aspire to diets comprised of dishes and meals based in fresh, whole ingredients. Across sustainable agriculture proponents, Make America Healthy Again political figures, wellness influencers, non-partisan nutrition scientists, and the general public, bipartisan and nonpartisan agreement has emerged about the idea that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are harmful. The potential perils of UPFs are enumerated in the new 2025 Dietary Guidelines and consumer-focused educational initiatives like the American Journal of Public Health’s Fed UP!.
But while these efforts critique a corporatized food system, they ultimately frame diet as an individual responsibility, leaving consumers to bear the burden of navigating flawed food environments without changing the actual possibilities of their daily lives.
Telling people UPFs are bad for them and, at a population level, increasing the amount, availability, and quality of so-called real food in people’s diets are different matters.
For one thing, food sociologists and scholars of inequality have frequently demonstrated that systemic barriers — including geography, social class, gender dynamics, and generational pressures — render the act of sourcing and preparing regular and nutritious home-cooked meals a nearly impossible feat for many American households. In addition to costs, perhaps the largest obstacle for most people to procuring, preparing, and cooking food to eat at home is time.
The socioeconomic reality of dysfunctional food environments persists, where the least healthy options, which have been engineered to drive cravings, tend to be the most affordable and accessible.
For institutional settings such as schools, correctional facilities, and hospitals to genuinely adhere to emerging real food directives, they would require massive capital investments to overhaul their storage and culinary infrastructure.
Furthermore, the socioeconomic reality of dysfunctional food environments persists, where the least healthy options, which have been engineered to drive cravings, tend to be the most affordable and accessible, a legacy of a century of federal legislation and corporate concentration at all levels of the grocery supply chain. Reversing these trends would necessitate levels of bipartisan policy support and fiscal commitment at all levels of government that currently seems out of reach.
One major allure of super-processed superfoods, we argue, thus stems from their ostensible promise to resolve the tension between directives to consume real foods with a landscape that renders such choices unattainable. Further, enhanced gummies, beverages, and powders represent the reality that more and more meals are eaten quickly, alone, or both. They also indicate the extent to which the promise of health drives sales and new product innovation.
In this present-day environment, consumers are encouraged to think about food through individualistic logics of diet optimization. As the recent biohacking and protein-maxxing trends pushed by social media influencers show, food is not currently viewed as a way to connect with others or feel a sense of collective belonging, but simply as a vehicle for acquiring nutrients — or in the case of super-processed superfoods, getting supposedly whole foods into one’s body.
One Person’s Food Is Another’s Nutrient Delivery System
From an industry perspective, nutrient delivery systems like gummies, gels, powders, and sodas solve practical supply chain challenges. They allow food and supplement companies to anticipate and moderate buyer tastes, offering consumers a version of the superfood while circumventing its perishability and sensory qualities, such as a strong, unpleasing flavors.
These companies often create a hyper-palatable, shelf-stable delivery system first, and then scan the horizon for health anxieties (often driven by influencers) and superfood trends from content creators to attach it to. The item is distilled via concentrates and extracts and reconstituted through premixes — typically by what are called “contract development and manufacturing organizations” (CDMOs) and often at factories outside the U.S. Then, it is sold to the manufacturers who process it further into now-familiar genres — sweet bite-sized gummies or soft chews, benign powders easily disguised in a smoothie, or refreshing sodas whose colorful packages we see on store shelves.
Many of the unfamiliar ingredients now or soon-to-be marketed as superfoods are not easily incorporated into existing categories, nor would Americans necessarily like their taste or know how — or have the time — to prepare them in their unprocessed forms.
This process creates an immense variety of products that have little in common with their raw form or with each other, except for the superfood moniker on their packaging.
Ashwagandha, meaning “horse smell” in Sanskrit because its roots emanate that distinct scent, transforms from the roots of a small, woody shrub into a sweet gummy.
Camu camu, a perishable Amazonian berry that is extremely high in vitamin C and has a corresponding intensely bitter taste, becomes a neutral powder to mix into oatmeal or yogurt. (It is also being introduced into face lotions.)
Superfood powders and gels often mix multiple ingredients that don’t make sense together at a culinary level. For example, Ancient Nutrition’s bestselling SuperGreens boasts a lengthy ingredients list of the buzziest superfoods: Alfalfa Grass Juice, Beet Root, Oat Grass Juice, Spirulina, Wild Blueberry, Goji Berry, Matcha, Organic Pomegranate Fruit, Kale Leaf, Acai Berry, Organic Elderberry, Noni Fruit and more.
This list collapses these diverse foods into the simple fetish object — the superfood, fully alienated even from the individual ingredients jockeying for superfood status.
In other words, these objects are not foods in the vernacular sense, but “food delivery formats,” as one industry insider called it in an interview with one of the authors.
They also solve a categorical principle of “substitutability.” As renowned anthropologist Sidney Mintz and others have pointed out, incorporating a new kind of food into a people’s diet relies on it fitting into an established dietary category.
Quinoa, for instance, owes some of its success among wealthy health-conscious consumers to its substitutability for rice or other grains, while substitutability remains a major challenge for companies currently seeking to incorporate insect protein into American diets.
Many of the unfamiliar ingredients now or soon-to-be marketed as superfoods are not easily incorporated into existing categories, nor would Americans necessarily like their taste or know how — or have the time — to prepare them in their unprocessed forms.
We see super-processed superfoods as a compelling folk category that brings together intricate intersections among modern corporate branding, lifestyle-driven wellness initiatives, and the shifting narratives of advocacy for real food.
These new formats allow us to incorporate superfoods into our diets and bodies — or at least feel like we are — without needing to learn really anything about the food or its original uses. Complex cultural objects become flattened, often with the support of social media influencers, into simplified and exoticized health benefits.
This ease, too, solves a problem for super-processed superfoods’ promoters, who care about attaching them to symbolic value systems of authenticity, realness, and wellness. At the Spring 2026 Natural Products Expo West — a massive annual trade show drawing 65,000 attendees — the shift from food as a product of farmers and agriculture to one of engineering and product design was on full display. Thousands of industry members and multi-national white-label manufacturers — many operating out of massive facilities outside the U.S. — shilled their novel creations, technical innovations, and product logistics systems. (TikTok also had its own booth.)
Indeed, the demand for new superfood formats is exploding, something industry researchers attribute in part to consumers’ pill fatigue and desires for more food-like and even fun ways to consume nutritional supplements, regardless of any findings from clinical trials about their ostensible benefits.
We therefore see super-processed superfoods as a compelling folk category that brings together intricate intersections among modern corporate branding, lifestyle-driven wellness initiatives, and the shifting narratives of advocacy for real food.
They illuminate a central paradox in what healthy eating means: Adversarial opposition to ultra-processed foods can, in practice, lead some consumers to embrace industrial manufacturing, distribution, and promotional techniques. Multi-national companies and suppliers — not to mention content producers on TikTok and Instagram — have become increasingly visible in shaping the solution to the problem of people not eating real food. Yet, their very involvement further shows how easily the push for real food can be incorporated, even co-opted, into an incumbent system built to benefit the status quo.
