VMS industry: vitamins, minerals and supplements

What the VMS industry is

VMS stands for vitamins, minerals and supplements, and the VMS industry is the set of manufacturers, brands and retailers selling them. It is a genuine CPG category with its own aisle, its own buyer and its own data problems, and it is larger than most people outside it assume: Nutrition Business Journal put US dietary supplement sales at $69.3 billion in 2024, growing 5.2%. The Council for Responsible Nutrition's 2024 consumer survey of 3,194 adults found 75% of Americans using dietary supplements.

The acronym is doing a lot of work, though, and the first thing to know about the VMS industry is that only two of its three letters describe most of the money.

What the category actually contains

Nutrition Business Journal splits the market by ingredient category, and vitamins are the largest slice at 27.5% of sales, growing 2.7%. Minerals, the M in the acronym, are the smallest at 5.9%. Everything between those two is the S, and the S is where the growth is: sports nutrition grew fastest at 8.4% in 2024.

Practically, a VMS set breaks into five groups that behave differently on shelf:

• Letter vitamins and multivitamins. High household penetration, low unit price, heavy private-label share. This is the traffic half of the aisle.
• Minerals. Magnesium, calcium, zinc, iron. Small in dollars, and currently the most volatile: CRN's survey has magnesium rising from 19% of supplement users in 2023 to 23% in 2024.
• Herbs and botanicals. Ashwagandha went from 2% of users in 2020 to 8% in 2024, which is the shape of nearly every botanical: nothing, then a spike, then a plateau or a collapse.
• Specialty and condition-specific. Probiotics, collagen, omega-3, melatonin (16% of users). Highest price points, highest churn.
• Sports nutrition. Protein, creatine, pre-workout. Frequently merchandised in its own set, and just as frequently mis-rolled into VMS totals, which is the single most common reason two people quote different VMS numbers.

Functional food and beverage sits outside VMS in most syndicated hierarchies and competes for the same occasion. A protein bar and a protein powder are the same shopper need and two different categories in the data, and a VMS read that ignores that will call the category flat while the demand walks to the snack aisle.

How a VMS read differs from a normal category read

Three things break the usual habits.

Form is the real segment, not ingredient. Two magnesium products in different formats sell to different shoppers at different prices and have completely different velocity profiles. Reading VMS by ingredient hides that.

SKU count is enormous relative to velocity. A mid-size VMS set carries hundreds of items where a comparable dry-grocery set carries dozens, so the tail is longer and the cut-line decision is harder.

The ingredient is an attribute, not a category. Magnesium glycinate versus citrate, vegan versus gelatin capsule, third-party tested versus not: these are tags on an item, and they only become analysable if somebody tagged them. The attribute tagging work is not optional in this category the way it nearly is in canned soup.

Worked example: one magnesium brand, read by form

Thirteen weeks at one natural-channel retailer, one brand's magnesium line, 24 items across four formats.

Gummy runs 554 units per SKU per week against capsule's 277: twice the rate, on six items instead of eleven. Run one row to check the method: 43,200 units over 6 SKUs over 13 weeks is 553.8, and $561,600 over 43,200 units is $13.00 exactly.

That single comparison is the assortment decision. Capsule carries 46% of the item count and 30% of the dollars. Gummy carries 25% of the item count and 47% of the dollars. Nothing about the ingredient changed between those two rows, and a brand reading its magnesium business at ingredient level would see a healthy $1.19 million and miss that half its shelf allocation is in the slowest form it sells.

Powder is the interesting exception and the reason not to cut on velocity alone: 190 units per SKU per week is low, but at $22.00 it carries the highest dollar rate per item in the set after gummy, so a velocity-only cut line would remove the second-best dollar earner.

Where Scout fits

Scout reads a VMS set the way it reads any other category: units, velocity, price, distribution and promoted lift, by item and by store, with the form and ingredient tags carried through so the read above is a filter rather than a weekend of spreadsheet work. Two honest limits. Scout makes no health, efficacy or regulatory claim about any supplement; it reports what sold. And POS records transactions, not people, so it will tell you that gummies outsell capsules two to one per item and cannot tell you why, which needs loyalty-linked demographics or a survey. If your VMS business runs through the natural channel, the SPINS Wellness and Beauty coverage page covers what that panel does and does not see.

The short version

• VMS means vitamins, minerals and supplements. Nutrition Business Journal put US supplement sales at $69.3 billion in 2024, up 5.2%, and CRN's 2024 survey found 75% of US adults using them.
• Vitamins are the largest ingredient slice at 27.5% and minerals the smallest at 5.9%. The S carries most of the growth, with sports nutrition fastest at 8.4%.
• Form outranks ingredient as the analytical segment. In the worked example gummy ran 554 units per SKU per week against capsule's 277.
• The tail is long and the ingredient is an attribute, so nothing is analysable until the items are tagged.
• Do not cut on velocity alone. Powder ran 190 units per SKU per week and was the second-best dollar earner in the set at $22.00 a unit.

Sources: New Hope Network, "Growing supplement market reaches $69.3B"; Council for Responsible Nutrition, 2024 Consumer Survey on Dietary Supplements.