Harnessing the Power of Nutrition Influencers

Consumers are more interested in nutrition and wellness than ever—but they need trusted experts to help separate fact from fiction. In this episode of Supplement Source, CRN's Jeff Ventura sits down with Stephen McCauley, president and founder of the Ginger Network, to discuss how registered dietitian nutritionists (RDNs) have become some of the most influential voices in health communications.

They explore why RDNs are uniquely positioned to educate consumers, how companies can integrate nutrition influencers into their marketing strategies, and the measurable impact these partnerships can have on awareness, credibility, and consumer engagement. Stephen also shares insights into Food Fluence, the Ginger Network's invitation-only gathering of North America's leading nutrition communicators, and explains why investing in trusted scientific voices can deliver outsized returns for brands.

Whether you're developing a new product, launching a communications campaign, or looking to build stronger consumer trust, this conversation offers practical strategies for reaching today's health-conscious audiences.

About the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) 
The Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), founded in 1973 and based in Washington, D.C., is the leading trade association representing the dietary supplement and functional food industry. Bringing together manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and service providers, CRN unites its member companies around a shared commitment to science, transparency, and responsible business practices—advancing a strong, credible marketplace that supports consumer health and industry growth.

In an increasingly complex regulatory and media environment, CRN serves as the industry’s front line—shaping science-based policy, defending market access, and countering misinformation. Through strategic advocacy, self-regulatory leadership, voluntary guidelines, and evidence-based communications, CRN ensures that responsible companies are recognized, protected, and positioned to innovate and compete. Learn more at crnusa.org and follow @CRN_Supplements on X and LinkedIn.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Please note the Council for Responsible Nutrition, CRN, does not endorse any guests appearing on this podcast or any products or services they may discuss. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of CRN. Thank you and enjoy the episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

You are listening to Supplement Source, the official podcast of the Council for Responsible Nutrition. And now your host, Jeff Ventura.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Hello, and thank you for listening to Supplement Source. My name is Jeff Ventura, and I am the Vice President of Communications here at the Council for Responsible Nutrition. I am so excited to be joined today by Stephen McCaulay, who is the president and founder of the Ginger Network and also a new associate member to CRN. Stephen, so glad to have you on the show. How are you?

SPEAKER_03 1:00

Jeff, thank you so much for inviting me to join you today. I'm thrilled to be here. Well, terrific.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Gosh, we have so much to talk about. But let's start. Since you're new to the association and you're just meeting other members, tell me a little bit about the Ginger Network.

SPEAKER_03 1:15

I'm happy to. The Ginger Network is a group of seasoned marketing communication professionals who are focused exclusively on clients who are invested in the whole food, nutrition, health, and wellness space. And we're not a traditional agency per se. Many people just lump us into that. But the fact is, we don't provide one-stop shopping and all sites of services to all businesses. Rather, we're a very specific network of best-in-class experts who specifically provide marketing communications to those in the food, nutrition, and wellness space. And we've been doing this since 2014. Started as a fun idea, but I guess it really took since we're now in 2026, so that's exciting. And we like to say that we uh ginger things up. We add more ginger to everything we do. So that conceptually means we add more pizzazz flair, spice flavor to what we do, but it also means that we provide more results. Like we're super focused on getting results for the clients we represent.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

And I think it's an important thing to note that you really have a focus that runs the gamut of the industry. So you're dealing with dietary supplements, but also functional food manufacturers and even ingredient suppliers. I mean, that's part of your sort of remit, correct?

SPEAKER_03 2:42

Absolutely. We represent all three. In fact, we've represented many of the companies within your organization, from those who are the largest brands in retail to those who are the largest supplements online, but also to multiple functional food companies and ingredient suppliers. And even, Jeff, prior to you joining CRN, we conducted a variety of strategic planning sessions for CRN. So essentially, your membership, the area that you work in, is our sweet spot.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Well, I would be remiss if I didn't remind our listeners that uh you gave a fantastic presentation uh at our Wellcoms event. I think it was it last year's? Oh, it was last year's. Yeah, I think it was last October. Yeah, yeah, last October. Uh very well received. And you you talked a little bit in that topic, in that um chat or discussion uh presentation about nutrition influencers. Um can you just recap uh a little bit of what the thesis was of your presentation?

SPEAKER_03 3:41

Yeah, happy to. You know, there's no question, and I'm sure your clients have all the data to support this, that consumers are super interested in wellness. Uh huge, huge market opportunity, and consumers are interested in better health, fitness, appearance, sleep, mindfulness, et cetera. All the things that are within the portfolio of what CRN members work on. But at the same time, they really are a little bit clueless about nutrition. They want to be better nourished, they want to optimize their nutrition, but they don't know what it really means. So we work with nutrition influencers. Our focus, the our sweet spot when it comes to the target audiences that we leverage every day, are nutrition influencers, specifically registered dietitian nutritionists who are the evidence-based experts with the motivation and the platforms to reach audiences with the kind of educational messages that the CRN membership needs. And that runs across the board. There's dietitians who work in every area where your members are working, whether it's sports nutrition, uh cognitive health, healthy aging, menopause, cardiovascular. It's like it doesn't matter, fill in the blank, diabetes. There are dietitians in all of those areas, and they are an army of advocates who are ready, willing, and very able to help CRM membership communicate their messages better.

SPEAKER_02 5:20

What I have found in the three years that I've been here, or three and a half years now, is you always see uh obviously RDs within a lot of our member companies, but I think it's interesting that what you're talking about is really looking at RDs that have built brands for themselves, and in doing so, they have followers and sort of an impact that can be leveraged.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

I look at them in two groups, Jeff. I look at them, we call them like the rank and file dietitians who are working in clinics, in hospitals, in food service operations, who are rolling up their sleeves with the actual clients slash patients. And then we look at the group who are the media elite, those who have the media platforms. So if you look at the total universe, there's about 113, 114,000 registered dietitians in the U.S. That's a nice army of advocates that we could be tapping into. Among them, there's 7,500, according to my last TalkWalker report, 7,500 who specifically focus on communications. So they're the ones who are writing the latest Substack newsletters, they're the ones with the blogs, they're the ones with the social media platforms, whether it be TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, fill in the blank. They're the ones who are writing books, you know, writing the latest food, nutrition, even cookbooks, lots of cookbooks. They're the ones who are on the speaking platforms going to other health professional conferences and sharing their knowledge with other RDNs, with other nurse practitioners, with other physicians. They're the ones who are really out there shaping the health and wellness corporate programs. You know, all these big companies like Google, Microsoft, et cetera, they have health and wellness teams who are there not just to help their employees and get better insurance rates, but also developing content for their media platforms. So those dietitian jobs have the greatest ROI when it comes to a marketing campaign for the kind of campaigns that CRN members want to bring new science, new product messaging, new mechanisms of action to consumers.

SPEAKER_02 7:46

Well, and when we talk about influence, I mean they are also inevitably influencing buying purchasing habits of consumers who are downstream of they're the ones who are watching the TikToks, watching the Instagram. They might have their favorite dietitian that they tune into that content constantly. And uh and they are really uh being informed by that with regard to their outlook on certain ingredients, their outlook on what they should be giving their kids and their family. I mean, it it really is kind of an entire uh ecosystem of the influencer affecting shopping trends, et cetera, correct?

SPEAKER_03 8:26

You are so right. And as a marketing geek, I'm very excited to apply our marketing tools to demonstrate that kind of stuff. So, for example, with many of our clients, when we start a project, we do side-by-side research with consumers and with dietitians to say what do consumers know about this subject area and what do dietitians know about this subject area. And most of the time, unless it's like totally new emerging science, most of the time, dietitians know a heck of a lot more than the consumers do. And so we implement strategies that tap into that savvy, that know-how, and we kind of stroke the dietitian to say, you guys are so smart, because you already know that this you know ingredient has A, B, C, and D. But guess what? Your followers, your consumers don't. And look at this big gap that we can prove in research. And that motivates them to go out and do something about it. And then, like a year later, sometimes two years later, depending on budgets and implementation, we go back and recast that research, and we see not only our sales increasing, but the knowledge about why consumers need a particular ingredient or particular food dramatically increases too. So we track the awareness, the attitudes, and the behavior, and we can see increases in all three of them repeatedly with campaigns that use dietitians as messengers.

SPEAKER_02 9:54

Well, and um I guess you would say, this is shifting gear a little, but I guess you would say uh given that, uh it's it's a good thing that the that HHS has basically come out with a idea or proposal to have medical training, uh medical schools actually teach nutrition training uh to doctors. I uh you know, I imagine that really uh is something that you agree with, uh given the power of the and the influence that you've seen firsthand coming from RDs.

SPEAKER_03 10:29

Well, Jeff, as someone who has spent my entire career championing nutrition literacy, I applaud every and any attempt to educate our entire population, including doctors, because doctors notoriously do not have nutrition training. They fix something later on, they're not the people who are doing the proactive education on how to avoid things early on. So great idea. Let's give doctors more nutrition education, and down the road that's going to be helpful. But right this minute, we have a whole career field. We have 113,000 people who've already spent their entire education getting a master's degree in science nutrition, getting more than 1,000 hours of supervised clinical practice with patients, who already passed a national uh registration exam for dietetics, who've already got their ongoing licensure in their state, who are already doing continuo education credits to 75 uh credits, 75 hours of study every three years. So they're already there. They're there like your specialist, like your ophthalmologist, like your cardiologist, like your, you know, any specialist you go to, they already exist. So great, let's educate the doctors more. But let's not forget, we already have a whole profession of people who can help us right this minute.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

Right, right. And it seems like, I mean, the nutrition's star is rising. Uh, you know, uh, I'm I'm not gonna give all the credit to this administration, but certainly there's been a renewed interest in what are we eating, what's on the label, what are our kids eating. And I think that people are tuning in more than ever to that expertise that you're talking about. They may not even know to what extent RDs are trained, but it is reassuring that there is a body of professionals that uh can really answer some of these questions on a scientific level. Um, let me let me just change change gears a little bit because I you know when we talk about RDs and and then and uh the rising uh profile of them, I think we probably have CRN members who are like, geez, we should probably figure out what we're doing to leverage our expertise around RDs uh and uh and RDNs. Tell me about that. What what what should a company do to ensure that they are maximizing this phenomenon happening?

SPEAKER_03 12:55

Well, in our opinion, we think the most important thing you can start to do is to include the RDN community in every step of your marketing plan. So I referred to some of the research the pre-market research before. Um, but also I think you need to have very specific strategies that target your appropriate uh registered dietitian influencer as one of your key audiences. Develop very specific messaging and tools for them, turnkey tools that they can be using to educate their audiences, to motivate their audiences, to bring them into the fold. There's so many tactics that we develop for clients to reach that specific audience. Again, going back to whether they're focused on diabetes or cardiovascular or sports and nutrition, there's so many different conferences, professional meetings, magazines, you know, media platforms, listservs that we can tap into to share those tools and messages with them. Beyond that, I think just like we do with every other part of our marketing mix, we've got to measure it every step of the way to say, like, what is this delivering? Is it delivering ROI? In our experience, this audience can deliver incredible ROI for clients. It's just a question of figuring out how to tap into it best.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

And you may have done that with Food Fluence, right? Tell me about that, because you really I mean, that's a real pairing up of some of the top nutrition communicators. What is that all about and uh why is it unique?

SPEAKER_03 14:30

Absolutely. So Food Fluence is a wonderful example of like the best tactic for bringing the RDN, elite RDN communicators into the fold. We call Food Fluence the Davos of Food and Nutrition Thought Leadership. It's a conference that the Ginger Network created that seats the top 30 nutrition communicators in North America every year. We have an algorithm that we use on a daily basis for all of our clients to identify who the best nutrition influencer is for them. But once a year, we scrub that or use that algorithm to identify who are the top 30 voices out there today. And that changes dynamically every single year based on who's got the latest book out, who's got the best social media platform right now, who might be taking time off because they just had a baby and they're not so visible. You know, it changes dramatically from year to year. We target those top 30 each year and we invite them to a conference that has no agenda. And we say, as part of your registration, tell us what are the top three topics you want to learn most about this year. And then we consolidate those uh top three topics from the top 30, prioritize them, and put them into a prospectus and go out and look for speakers who are experts in those areas and sponsors who have a business reason for that area of science to be highlighted in the current year for their uh business. And we put them all together to come up with a very intimate conference where those top topics are talked about. On average, we have about eight to twelve sessions at the conference, and they're in-depth sessions, and we sequester our folks for four days in a pretty wowie zowie place so they don't complain about being sequestered. Right. The the delegates, the food fluencers, agree to come to every single session no matter what. And while there's no quid pro quo to say you must use information from these sessions, the fact is, since these nutrition leaders have asked for this information, and we're providing some of the latest and greatest science and top-notch speakers to them, they organically use that information throughout the year. And we see the information they use. We don't we used to call them media placements, but now we call them outcomes because they're way bigger than just media placements. There's a lot of traditional media, there's a lot of social media, there's a lot of you know, uh blogs, newsletters, etc. But they we also see them using information in the books that they're writing. We see them using information in the speeches that they're making at other conferences, we see them using the information in all sorts of ways. One great example is two years ago, we had one of your members give us a presentation on postbiotics, and one of the food fluencers was developing a relationship with a food manufacturer where they wanted her to be a spokesperson, and she said, you know, your product would be way better if it included something like this postbiotic. She put the two together, and now that particular member is an ingredient supplier for that food company, which wouldn't have happened without that food fluencer putting them together. Similarly, um, if we just look at not the business relationship media ones, we had one particular sponsor come to us two years ago, and they changed nothing in their marketing mix except for participating in Food Fluence. And they monitored their media year to year, and their year-on-year media impressions jumped in their first year participating with us from 3.7 billion to 8.8 billion, more than double their media impressions, and nothing changed in their marketing mix except for coming to Food Fluence. So they did it again, and then their media impressions jumped to 197 billion. So 3.3 or 3.7 to 8.8 year one, 8.8 to 197.4 the next year. Like the the amount of reach that you can gain from messaging and interacting and developing relationships with the top nutrition communicators can be insanely powerful.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

Right. Especially if you bring something uh to the mix that that's unique and compelling, that bringing a story to these influencers that they feel is compelling to take to their audiences, you're really looking at maximizing that network in a way that you simply couldn't do as one-offs, right? You're in a sort of special kind of environment there where you've got such, to your point, intimate access to these folks.

SPEAKER_03 19:27

Right. Right, exactly. And and if you do it in advance so that they feel like they've got the inside scoop. So let's say you're planning a product launch nine months from now, a year from now, and you come this year and you give them the inside scoop, or you introduce them to a world-class speaker, like we've had the father of probiotics with us in the room when at a time when people didn't know that much about probiotics, and they were like, holy Toledo, I don't get I can't believe I'm meeting with such a distinguished speaker, and they get to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the guy. Um, that kind of relationship building lasts for years because they can pick up a phone at any time then and have access to someone who they've just gotten to know really well.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

Well, and it's it's it's heartening to know that you are an associate member of CRN. So our members uh can reach out to you right through uh their membership. They can kind of go into our directory and find you and email you or contact me to reach you. So um it's it's a it's a nice uh resource for them to be aware of and to to have access to. It's a you you are a benefit of membership uh just as uh they are also a benefit of membership to you. So uh it's a it's a nice uh two-way street.

SPEAKER_03 20:46

That's the nicest thing anyone said to me today.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

Well, we we we we we really do thank you, uh Steven, for taking the time out today to be on our little podcast. Uh we really appreciate it. Um and we would love to have you have you back when you have a little uh extra time in the future.

SPEAKER_03 21:06

Well, thanks so much for including me, Jeff. Best to you.

SPEAKER_02 21:10

Thank you, Steve McCauley, president and founder of the Ginger Network. Uh thank you for being on the show.