Neal Cavalier-Smith, HMT’s Director of Consulting has returned from the Developing & Reformulating Healthy Ageing Products in F&B Conference in Amsterdam with his insights and a copy of his presentation.

Every F&B company remains fascinated by the ageing successfully opportunity yet no company has yet cracked it.

Danone Actimel have tested a 50+ proposition in one country and it doesn’t seem to have gone further.

Perhaps this is because people don’t want to be talked to as OLD (we ALWAYS think old was 15 yrs older than we are).

Clearly the opportunity for brands is to EMPOWER consumers to go on living the life they love (rather than try to sell them cures for being old).

At the conference a number of F&B companies were talking about the “45+ market”. Marketeers always want to target younger consumers and wider ranges of age, but at 45 consumers are not yet ready to think about ageing! The magic number for women is 51.4 (average menopause age) and 51.7 for men (average age of first reporting erectile dysfunction). So… target us in our mid fifties and we become ready to accept that change is enevitable… even ready to embrace the move from giving birth to the next generation to being re-born into, and optimising the second half of our life!

51+ is where to start – success will come to those who wait!

You can view Neal’s full presentation below.