Why We Made True Food® - The Future of Natural Supplements

Higher Nature began with a question, not a product.

Our original founder, Celia Wright, trained as a clinical psychologist, not a chemist, and not a formulator. That meant she came to nutrition asking a different question to most of the industry: not just "how do we make a supplement," but "why does what we take still matter for how we feel." She founded Higher Nature in 1994 on that question, and it's shaped the company's thinking ever since, a genuine curiosity about the whole picture, the food, the sourcing, the science, and the person taking it, rather than a single nutrient considered in isolation.

The problem we kept running into

"Food state" was meant to describe something specific: nutrients bound within a food matrix, the way they'd occur naturally, rather than as an isolated chemical compound alone. It's a good idea. But across the industry, it's often been applied in a way that doesn't quite live up to the name, a common approach starts with an isolated, lab-made nutrient, blends it into a food-based medium, and ferments it into something that gets marketed as "food state," even though the starting point was never actually food.

We didn't think that fully delivered on the promise. So we asked a different question: what would it take to build a range that starts from real, whole foods and marine sources as often as genuinely possible, not as a marketing description applied afterward, but as the actual starting point?

That question is where True Food® came from.

Why now, what's actually changed?

Wanting to source this way and being able to do it well are two different things, and it's worth being honest that this has become more achievable as sourcing methods and food science have developed. Extraction techniques, quality control, and supply chain infrastructure for natural sourced and marine-derived ingredients have all improved significantly in recent years, which means formulating from real, whole-food and marine sources at scale is more viable today than it would have been when "food state" first became a category.

Some of the research bears this out directly. Marine-derived calcium, sourced from mineral-rich red seaweed, has been studied in double-blind clinical research showing meaningfully greater calcium utilisation compared with standard calcium carbonate. Omega-3 in its natural triglyceride form has been shown in a well-powered, six-month clinical study to raise blood omega-3 levels significantly more than the more common ethyl ester form. This isn't marketing language, it's the kind of specific, checkable evidence that's become available as the science around natural sourcing has matured.

Why we think this is where the category is heading

We don't think True Food® is the only place this kind of thinking will end up, we think it's part of a broader shift the whole industry is moving toward, for a few reasons:

The evidence base is getting stronger, not weaker. As more research is published on natural sourced and marine-derived ingredient forms, the case for sourcing this way is built on data, not just intuition, which tends to be a durable trend, not a passing one.

Transparency is becoming the expectation, not the exception. People increasingly want to know where an ingredient comes from, not just what a front-of-pack term implies. A category built on vague claims doesn't hold up well against that expectation over time.

The technology keeps closing the gap. What was difficult or expensive to source naturally a decade ago often isn't anymore. That trajectory doesn't reverse, it's part of why we expect more of the category to move in this direction, not less.

What this looks like in practice

Every product in the True Food® range is guided by the same four principles:

• Natural source ingredients — real nutrients in their naturally complete forms
• Clinically dosed — meaningful nutrient levels, not token amounts
• Third-party tested — verified for quality, not just claimed
• Traceable sourcing — a named source behind the range's key ingredients

Where this goes next

We don't think we've finished. As sourcing methods keep improving and the research keeps developing, we expect True Food® to keep evolving with it, ingredient by ingredient, which is a more honest position than claiming to have arrived at a finished answer. The reason we think this is the future of natural sourced supplements isn't that we believe we've solved it. It's that the direction, real sources, real evidence, real transparency, is the one we think the whole category eventually has to move toward, and we'd rather help lead that shift than wait for it.

Curious what this looks like in a specific product? Explore the True Food® range.