Diagnostics as a Service for supplement and wellness brands at scale

Supplement and wellness brands all get the same question from their customers, and it is the shortest one they ever get, because the customer simply wants to know whether the product is working for them.

It is a reasonable question to ask, but in Europe it is one you are not permitted to answer.

The European Union keeps a register of the health claims a food or supplement is allowed to make, and that register holds 2,337 entries of which only 269 are authorised.¹ In the category a supplement brand actually wants, meaning claims about reducing the risk of a disease, the whole of the European Union permits fifteen.

So your customer asks whether the product is doing anything for them, the law bars you from telling them that it is, and you have no way of showing them whether it did.

What you have instead is the ingredient story, which is the sourcing, the studies behind each compound and the reason the dose is what it is. All of that is true, but none of it answers the question, because the question was about the customer while the answer is about the product.

What you are actually selling is belief

Once you cannot demonstrate an effect, the thing keeping a customer with you is their belief that the product is helping them. That is not a criticism of the category, because it is the structural position that European law leaves you in.

The dangerous property of belief is that it fades without any event to mark the moment. Nothing goes wrong that anybody can point to, nobody complains and no support ticket is ever raised. The customer simply stops noticing a difference, and one month they do not renew.

You will not see that coming either, because every signal you collect measures belief rather than the person holding it.

• Reviews tell you what your happiest and angriest customers felt like writing.
• Surveys tell you what people believe they experienced over the period.
• Repeat purchase tells you only that they have not stopped yet.
• Support tickets tell you about the customers who are already unhappy.

Not one of those signals tells you whether anything measurable changed in anybody, so churn reaches you as a number after the fact. You cannot separate the customers the product was helping from the customers it was not.

The one answer the law does not block

The restriction on what you may say comes from Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006,² and in Germany the Heilmittelwerbegesetz adds further limits on advertising anything health-related.³ Between them they close off nearly every sentence a brand would want to write about what its product does to a person.

What they do not close off is showing somebody their own measurement.

A measurement is not a claim about your product, because the result describes the customer, it belongs to them, and nobody has to assert anything at all for it to be useful. That distinction is the whole reason measurement is available to a European brand when assertion is not. It also changes what you are able to know, because a measurement is the first signal on the list above that is about the person rather than about their mood.

Measurement is becoming the ground the category competes on

The reason this matters now, rather than in five years, is that customer expectations have already changed.

The weight-loss market is the clearest case of that. Medicines with an effect a person can see on a scale have been hard on every product that competed on effort and belief. The parts of that market still growing are the parts that come with a clinical measure attached.

The same lesson applies well beyond weight loss, because once somebody has used a product that proved itself to them, an unmeasured product feels like a weaker offer and a premium price is harder to defend.

There is a second effect here, and it is the commercially interesting one. A customer with a baseline measurement has an unfinished piece of business with you, because they want to know what the second reading says. That is a reason to come back which does not depend on how enthusiastic they feel this month, and it is the only such reason this category has ever found.

Which markers are worth measuring for a wellness brand

Not all of them are worth measuring, and choosing badly is worse than never starting.

A marker earns its place in your panel if it responds on a timescale a subscription can use and the customer can do something about it. Markers like that give you five things a survey never will.

• A baseline that every later reading is measured against, which makes each customer's own history something only you hold.
• A real reason for a second test, meaning an open question the customer wants closed rather than a marketing prompt.
• Personalisation that is genuinely personal, because recommending something on the basis of a value in someone's blood is a different conversation from recommending it on the basis of a quiz.
• A defensible reason to charge more, since a measured programme is a different product from a monthly box.
• First-party data that nobody else holds, and physiological data about your own customers rather than the behavioural data every brand has.

The caveat matters as much as the list does. Some ingredients have no marker worth retesting at all, and some have one that will not move inside a subscription cycle. Testing around those is theatre, customers work that out for themselves, and you have spent money teaching them to distrust you. Build the panel around what genuinely responds and say plainly what it does not cover. Our biomarker directory sets out what each marker shows, and we went through the same question for supplement brands in an earlier article on which markers a retest can move.

Two things will go wrong, so decide them now

Both of the following happen eventually, and both are much cheaper to handle if you have already made the decision.

A retest will show no change at all. The customer takes a first measurement, follows the plan for a few months, then retests and finds that the number has not moved. Brands that handle this well treat the result as information and offer a next step, while brands that handle it badly go quiet and let the customer conclude that the product does not work. Write that message before you need it.

A result will come back that nobody in your company can answer. A worrying value reaches you eventually, and there is probably no clinician on your payroll to interpret it. Decide now who contacts the customer, how quickly they do it, what that person is allowed to say, and where somebody goes for real medical advice the same evening. The responsibility belongs to whoever sold the test, so it belongs to you.

Both of those are reasons to work with a partner who has dealt with them before, on their own systems, rather than to discover the answers on your own customers.

One thing nobody in this category can prove

Before you build a business case on retention, you should know that nobody has actually demonstrated it.

Several large consumer brands have added a testing layer in the past two years, but not one of them has published what it did to repeat purchase, to customer lifetime value or to payback. The figures in circulation are marketing rather than evidence.

So treat a retention improvement as a hypothesis for now. Run a measured cohort against an unmeasured one and look at what happens over a few months, which gives you better information than the whole category has. It is also information about your own customers rather than about somebody else's.

There is an opportunity in that gap as well, because the first brand to publish a real cohort comparison sets the terms of the argument for everyone who follows it.

How Aniva delivers Diagnostics as a Service for wellness brands

You do not need to become a diagnostics company in order to answer the question your customers are asking.

• One contract covers the laboratory, the collection and the logistics, together with the software and all of the compliance paperwork.
• Everything the customer sees stays yours, which means your brand on the dashboard, on the report and on your own sub-domain if you want one.
• Aniva owns its blood draw network across Germany, so collection is our responsibility and not a subcontractor's.
• Panels are configurable, so you measure what your product actually affects instead of buying a standard panel and hoping.
• Diagnostics as a Service, or DaaS, is available to partners across Europe, and we are in active conversations with brands in many European countries.
• Four weeks from a signed contract to your first customer draw.

If you want to test the retention question properly then a small measured cohort is a sensible way to start, and we will help you design it. If you would rather begin smaller still, our guide to a first launch sets out how to run a paid cohort of fifty customers.

Book a 30-minute demo whenever it suits you, or send your engineers to the API documentation first.

A summary of the main points

• Your customers ask whether the product is working, and European law authorises 269 health claims out of 2,337, with fifteen in the category you want.
• What that leaves you with is belief, and belief fades without any event to warn you first.
• Reviews, surveys, repeat purchase and support tickets all measure belief rather than the person holding it.
• Showing a customer their own measurement is not a claim, which is why it remains available when assertion is not.
• Choose markers that genuinely respond, write the no-change message in advance, and settle who handles a worrying result before you launch.
• Nobody has proved that this improves retention, so run a cohort and find out about your own customers.

Questions we are asked most often

Why can a wellness brand not simply say its product works?

European law restricts health claims about foods and supplements to an authorised list, and that list is short. The EU register holds 2,337 entries with 269 authorised, and only fifteen of those are authorised claims about reducing the risk of a disease.¹ German advertising law adds further restrictions on top of that.³ Showing a customer their own measurement is not a claim about the product, which is why measurement remains available to you.

Which blood markers are worth testing for a wellness product?

The ones worth testing respond on a timescale a subscription can use and the customer can act on them. Some ingredients have no such marker at all, and testing around those costs money while teaching customers to distrust you. Build the panel around what genuinely responds and be clear about what it does not cover.

Does adding blood testing improve retention?

Nobody has published independent evidence that it does. Several large brands have added a testing layer in recent years, but none of them has published the effect on repeat purchase or on lifetime value. Run a measured cohort against an unmeasured one and you will know more about this than the category does.

What do we tell a customer whose retest shows no change?

Decide the answer before you launch rather than in the moment. Treat the result as information, explain what it means for that customer, and offer them a next step. Going quiet is what makes a customer conclude that the product does not work.

Who is responsible when a result is worrying?

The responsibility belongs to whoever sold the test, so the escalation path has to exist before you launch. Write down who contacts the customer, how quickly they do it, what they are allowed to say, and where the customer goes for medical advice. Interpretation of an individual result belongs with a treating clinician.

Do we have to build a diagnostics operation to do this?

You do not have to build anything, because the laboratory, the collection, the logistics, the software and the compliance paperwork can all belong to a partner while everything the customer sees stays yours. What it costs to build the same thing yourself is set out in our article on running blood testing in-house.

Notes and sources

1. EU Register of nutrition and health claims, European Commission. Counted 21 August 2026: 2,337 entries, of which 269 authorised, 2,067 not authorised and 1 revoked. Article 14(1)(a) disease risk reduction claims: 15 authorised, 31 not authorised. The Commission publishes no last-updated date for the register. food.ec.europa.eu
2. Regulation (EC) No 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims made on foods. EUR-Lex
3. Gesetz über die Werbung auf dem Gebiete des Heilwesens (Heilmittelwerbegesetz, HWG). gesetze-im-internet.de
4. European Food Safety Authority on Article 13 health claims: member states supplied over 44,000 claims, consolidated by the Commission to 4,637, of which EFSA was asked to evaluate 2,758 and published 341 opinions. Figures date from the 2011 completion of that assessment. efsa.europa.eu

This article is general information for consumer health brands considering a measurement layer. It is not legal, regulatory or medical advice, and health claims rules should be checked with a local advisor. Interpretation of any individual result remains with a treating clinician.