Walk into a SupplySide event or a Natural Products Expo and outside of a few booths dotting the trade show floor, the preponderance of faces are white. Step into the boardrooms and C-Suite offices of the companies that make up the nutrition industry and the picture may get even whiter.

There are companies trying to make a difference and all agree both that progress could be slow and that such progress needs to happen. The part of the message that sometimes gets lost in such discussions is that progress isn’t just good for the industry’s image, it’s good for the industry’s future.

NBJ had no notable record of looking at that image and that future until 2020. The February issue featured Q&As with three Black supplement industry entrepreneurs who spoke not just about the challenges of doing business in an overwhelmingly white industry but also about opportunities the industry is ignoring. In our Raw Material issue, we spoke to experts and entrepreneurs about how suppliers and brands can do a better job of making the supply chain more diverse after the ingredients come ashore or source more ingredients from more producers and farmers of color.

In each of those stories, we called out not just the moral duty of making such changes but also the very real prospect of expanding the base for the products. As one Black founder told us, people of color need to see people who look like them not only using the products but standing behind the products as well. Another explained how BIPOC communities suffer a troubling rate of chronic health needs that are nutrition related and questioned why the supplement industry has not done a better job of getting in front of those communities.

We have a long way to go to make the needed changes. NBJ wants to be part of the conversation that will drive them. We need the rest of the industry to have that conversation too.

Click here to read “Funding Change” from our July Finance Issue about how the investment community could do a better job of finding and funding such entrepreneurs and diversifying the organizational chart with executives who can see opportunities that a monocultural board might miss.