The Business Lesson I Didn't Expect
Alastair Jessel is the Founder & CEO of The Postbiotic Company Ltd (AYA BIOME™) and Director of Battersea Park Clinic, London. He writes The Postbiotic Dispatch, an evidence-led newsletter on gut health, longevity, and the science behind postbiotic supplementation.
Early on in building The Postbiotic Company, my Japanese supplier asked me a question that changed how I think about this entire industry: “Do you want to be a brand, or do you want to be a company?” I didn't understand the distinction at first. Surely a brand is a company. It took me a few minutes to realise how wrong that assumption was and how much of the supplement industry is built on exactly that confusion. He put me right, and so we set out to plot out how we would take on growing an entire new category of supplements.
The catalogue model
Here's something most consumers never learn, and something I wish someone had explained to me before I started: you can launch a supplement brand without ever touching a laboratory, employing a scientist, or formulating a single product. A handful of contract manufacturers maintain catalogues of pre-built formulations, probiotic blends, vitamin stacks, and protein powders that already exist, fully tested, sitting on a shelf waiting for a logo.
You choose a formula. You pick a bottle. You supply your brand name. Weeks later, you have a “clinically formulated” supplement to sell, manufactured in a facility that is simultaneously producing the near-identical product for a dozen other brands, at every price point from budget to premium.
This isn't a scandal, exactly. It's a legitimate, well-established manufacturing model, and there's nothing illegal about it. But it creates a strange economic reality, an entire category of founders competing on brand narrative and price positioning, while the underlying product, the thing the customer is actually paying for, barely differs between them. I found this quietly unsettling when I first understood it properly. Then I found it clarifying.
The choice every founder in a commodity category faces
Once you see how the supply chain actually works, you're left with a decision that I think generalises well beyond supplements. You can compete on story, or you can compete on substance, and the market often rewards story more efficiently in the short term.
Building the narrative is faster. It's cheaper. It doesn't require patents, clinical trials, or exclusive supply agreements with obscure research institutes. Most founders, understandably, take that route. I don't think that makes them dishonest. I think it makes them rational actors in a system that doesn't currently demand anything more.
But I made a different bet, and it's worth explaining why, not as a pitch for my own company, but as a case study in a decision I suspect a lot of founders reading this will eventually face in their own categories. When everyone around you is optimising for the same shortcut, is the harder path actually a competitive advantage, or just an expensive form of stubbornness?
What actually differentiates a product, and what just sounds like it does
The honest answer is that most of what reads as scientific differentiation in this industry is language, not substance. “Clinically studied strains” is a technically true sentence that tells you almost nothing, because it doesn't specify whether the study involved your product, at your dose, in a population anything like you.
What I've come to respect, watching this market closely, are the rare companies doing something upstream that can't be bought off a catalogue, a proprietary strain developed through years of university research, a delivery mechanism validated by independent comparative trials, a single well-characterised ingredient with a genuine clinical evidence base attached to that exact designation. These companies are a minority. They also tend to be the most transparent about their manufacturing because transparency only costs you something if you have nothing underneath the story.
That correlation–genuine differentiation and willingness to be transparent–was the single most useful pattern I took from studying this market. It's become something close to a filter I now apply to my own decisions. If I wouldn't want to name the manufacturer, disclose the exact ingredient origin, or point to the specific patent behind a claim, that's usually a sign the claim is doing more work than the product.
Building the harder version on purpose
We chose to fight our category on the boring metrics, naming our manufacturer, publishing our patent reference, sourcing an ingredient, fermented Bhutanese turmeric, that required an actual research partnership rather than a purchase order. It's slower. It's more expensive. It closes off the fastest path to market that most of our competitors took without a second thought.
I won't pretend that's purely a virtue. Plenty of particularly good, very ethical founders build brand-first businesses on catalogue formulations, disclose nothing wrong, and serve their customers perfectly well. The point isn't that the shortcut is illegitimate. It's that founders rarely stop to ask which game they're actually playing, brand-building or product-building, until something forces the question.
For me, that question came from watching how invisible the supply chain is to the very consumers who most want to trust it. If your customers can't tell the difference between substance and story, the only thing enforcing the distinction is your own decision about which one to build.
The wider lesson
I'd guess most industries have a version of this same catalogue economy hiding somewhere upstream, a place where the visible competition is mostly branding, and the real differentiation, when it exists at all, sits quietly in a part of the business nobody photographs for the website. Worth asking, wherever you operate, if a customer traced your product all the way back to its source, would what they find match what you're telling them at the point of sale? That's not a comfortable question. It wasn't for me either. But it's the one that actually built the company.
I go deep on the supply chain data behind this–the manufacturers, the ingredient suppliers, the regulatory gaps–in two companion pieces on my Substack, The Postbiotic Dispatch, one covering the UK market, one covering the US.
Our fermented turmeric postbiotic is not currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and therefore is not yet available, but it will be soon. For all our readers in the US, you can follow us on our website.
Read more from Alastair Jessel
Alastair Jessel, Founder, CEO & Director of The Postbiotic Company Ltd
Alastair Jessel is the Founder & CEO of The Postbiotic Company Ltd, the maker of AYA BIOME™, a premium postbiotic supplement range built on clinically studied fermented ingredients. He is also Director of Battersea Park Clinic, an integrative wellness centre in London offering therapies from hyperbaric oxygen to red light and Energy Enhancement Systems. Alastair writes The Postbiotic Dispatch, a Substack newsletter known for its forensic, evidence-led take on the supplement and wellness industry - one that holds his own products to the same scrutiny as everyone else’s. His work sits at the intersection of product development, regulatory compliance, and public education on the emerging science of postbiotics.
