Why sports nutrition in Mexico is a "do or die market"
From its preliminary, latest data update, we can see that a “whopping” 35% of Mexican ‘best-selling’ sports nutrition products have been taken off the online shelves between Q3 2018 and March 2019, Tom Morgan, Senior Market Analyst at Lumina Intelligence, reveals.
Market data provider Lumina Intelligence analyses available product data on the best-selling sports nutrition products and compares this to the number of product reviews and star ratings.
In Mexico, “review growth has been massive,” Morgan said, with remaining products witnessing a clean 200% increase in the number of reviews. Relaying that “the market is still very small”, it does however, signify “a mass consolidation in the online channel for sports nutrition in Mexico”. The country, at present, is a “do-or-die market”.
Home-Grown Products Signal Opportunity
The main opportunities available to emerging or growing sports nutrition companies in Mexico centre around price and innovation as these are key decision making factors for Mexican consumers.
Most of the sports nutrition products found online are imported, so a home-grown product has the potential to do well, Morgan states.
Pricing is high in Mexico when compared to the average wage of workers. Along with the potential inaccessibility by consumers who cannot afford the products or perceive that there lacks value for money, the biggest threat to products’ survival is on the physical shelves.
Fighting to Stay on the Shelves
For those brands that have been fortunate enough to not be removed from shelves entirely, not all of them have seen their product portfolios remain visible to consumers. A number of retailers carrying their brands have dropped certain products. Lumina Intelligence’s data reveals that this is largely an approach adopted by national retailers, rather than multinational companies.
Sharing insights on possible market challenges in Mexico, Morgan speculates that while it is impossible to know for certain, “the ongoing political ping-pong with Trump in the US may be a reason for so many product drops”.
Risk plays a key role throughout Latin America in terms of what we can expect from the sports nutrition market in the second half of 2019. Those players in the “online sphere are substantially different to the offline one in LATAM” and so growth during the remainder of 2019 will depend on how “safe” they operate.
