New behavioral data offers a rarely measured look at how consumers choose dietary supplements — a market where retail figures show what sells, but not how buyers decide. The dataset, published by independent supplement research app GoodSupp, covers 9,038 barcode scans and 5,693 product searches by 1,001 app users during 2026.
The clearest pattern: shoppers compare, they don’t just look things up. Nearly half of scanning sessions — 46% — involved checking three or more products within minutes, a shopper standing in the aisle comparing bottles side by side. The average session covered 4.2 products.
Key findings
- Sunday is the single biggest day for supplement scanning, and weekend days run about 32% busier than weekdays.
- Magnesium is the most-searched supplement in the dataset, ahead of creatine — and it isn’t close once its forms are counted together.
- Nature’s Bounty, Nature Made and Sports Research are the three most-scanned brands — statistically too close together to rank, and clearly ahead of the rest.
- Plain vitamins account for 37.3% of all category browsing — ahead of fish oil, collagen and probiotics combined.
“The supplement industry knows exactly what sells, but almost nothing about how people decide,” said Ryan Johnson, lead researcher on the study. “Almost half of scanning sessions are someone checking three, four, five bottles within minutes of each other. People are comparing in the aisle the way they’d comparison-shop a laptop.”
Methodology and limitations
All figures are anonymized event counts from an iOS app, collected during 2026 — 1,001 users, 9,038 scans, 5,693 searches, 2,177 scanning sessions (scans grouped with gaps under 15 minutes). Users are self-selected supplement-app installers, not a representative sample of the general public; roughly 88% of activity originates in the United States and Canada. The dataset begins in 2026, so no year-over-year trends are claimed. Underlying counts and queries are available to journalists on request. The full dataset and methodology are published at goodsupp.app/statistics/.
About GoodSupp
GoodSupp is an independent supplement research app for iOS that lets shoppers scan supplement barcodes and compare products. It is free, takes no money from supplement brands, and is not affiliated with any manufacturer.