Anastassiya Rudyy, Marketing Manager at Bombbar, Snaq Fabriq and Chikalab tells us that the thing she is feeling good about this month is simple. she's stopped trying to over-optimise everything. Let's find out more.
Three years of marketing functional nutrition brands in the UAE have shaped more than my work. Selling healthier choices for a living puts you inside the wellness industry, and over time, its thinking becomes part of your own life. My days started to look like the category I was marketing. I didn’t notice it happening. Inspired by the fitness community, the trends and results that were real, my idea of a productive day became a checklist: train, perform at work, track macros, hit my steps, work on personal development. Then do it again tomorrow.
Most of it is designed to make life better. Much of it does. But an opportunity to improve became an obligation to improve. Optimise sleep, add supplements, work on recovery. The list kept growing, one good decision at a time, until a healthy lifestyle demanded more time, planning and energy than the life it was meant to improve.
We have never had more ways to optimise. The wellness industry can now measure and improve almost every part of our lives: wearables, calorie trackers, personalised nutrition, recovery, longevity. And consumers want these solutions. The UAE wellness economy is now worth $40.8 billion, following strong growth since 2019. Somewhere in all of it, I stopped being sure that living better has to mean doing more.
Are we asking too much?
Then I noticed a similar pattern in our own work. When launching healthy-nutrition brands, our communication went where you would expect. The products were built around functional ingredients, so we spoke primarily to the fitness and wellness audience. Then the sales data showed us something else. Some of our best sellers were also the best-tasting products in the portfolio, outselling products with stronger nutritional profiles. With one complication: customers often bought them only two or three times. Meanwhile, some of our more functional products were generating stronger repeat purchase. Taste could win the first purchase. But repeat purchase seemed to need something else: a place in someone’s routine.
We had become very good at showing how our products belonged in a dedicated wellness lifestyle, yet we had spent far less time thinking about where they fit into the life our consumer already has. Regional research tells a similar story. Across the Middle East, 44% of consumers rank price among their top food-choice factors, 36% taste and 34% brand trust. Nearly half cite better taste among their top three reasons for switching brands. This is where the business insight mirrored my personal one. We weren’t just asking consumers to buy a product. In some ways, we were asking them to make room for the lifestyle we had attached to it. Their lives were already full.
The growth opportunity that already exists
So we started asking a different question: how could our products fit more naturally into routines that already exist? Our communication moved towards flavour, recipes and familiar food moments. The results were clear. For one product, monthly orders more than doubled within two months. More interestingly, orders from existing customers grew faster than orders from new ones. After the campaign ended, demand remained at almost twice its previous level. Communication wasn’t the only variable, so I wouldn’t attribute that growth to marketing alone. But the pattern reinforced something I had started to suspect: growth doesn’t always come from asking people to do more. Sometimes it comes from making what they already do better.
I’ve started applying the same thinking to myself. I still train. I still care about nutrition, performance and growth. I’ve just stopped assuming that improvement always means adding something. It’s become a filter I apply to my work too: are we asking consumers to add another behaviour, or helping them improve one they already have?
Perhaps that’s the wider opportunity in wellness: better solutions for the lives we’re already living. That’s something I genuinely feel good about this September.
Insights:
- PwC Middle East - Voice of the Consumer 2025: Middle East findings, published 16 July 2025
- Global Wellness Institute - $40.8 billion, 14.3% annual growth since 2019. The UAE report on GWI's Geography of Wellness platform, produced with Aldar and released 20 November 2025.
