In October, ESSNA spoke to Hylobates Consulting’s Managing Director and ESSNA Officer, Luca Bucchini, about how they support clients to stay compliant and competitive in complex markets. As well as discussing what the future holds for sports nutrition.

Hi Luca can you tell us a bit about Hylobates Consulting…
We are a scientific and regulatory affairs consulting firm, based in the EU. We are a team of 17 people, and have been advising food and food supplement businesses for almost 20 years, in Europe and elsewhere. Our main office is in Rome, Italy. In short, what we do is help companies bring food and supplements legally to the market – we check compliance of labels, advertising and registrations so they can focus on making their brands, or their new ingredients, grow and succeed.

“Our crystal ball shows more sustainability, new protein sources replacing some animal foods and a rapid pace of change in the sports nutrition sector”

What about something Hylobates is doing which is innovative…

We are working hard to help brands expand across the EU and the world by devising methods and strategies to be compliant, control costs and be competitive in diverse markets. You can’t have a label or a formula for each country, but difficult rules make it hard to have the same successful and complex product across markets. But we are also very committed to compliant green claims and packaging labelling, and we have a team looking after this evolving market. And a third strand of innovation is actually tradition outside Europe, which is innovation in our corner of the world; we have grown quite expert in the area of traditional foods from outside the Old Continent.

And what does the future hold for Hylobates..

Our crystal ball shows more sustainability, new protein sources replacing some animal foods, a rapid pace of change in the sports nutrition sector, and more. Our aim is to grow together with the food, food supplement and sports nutrition industry as we face together these challenges. Internally, we are implementing more effective ways to do our regulatory work, through a mix of new skills and people, new processes and new IT solutions – we are becoming younger but wiser, apparently.

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The Member of the Month initiative interviews one ESSNA member company every month, highlighting projects, events and innovation in the sports and active nutrition industry. This is an exclusive opportunity for ESSNA members to showcase their work directly to the industry and create potential new business and customer leads. 

If you are interested in your company being Member of the Month in the next few months or if you have any questions, please contact the Secretariat by emailing [email protected]