In The Room With Katerina Schneider and Ritual

Bringing transparency and innovation to transform wellness with Katerina Schneider and Ritual

Welcome back to another new season of The Room Podcast! Season 10 kicks off with an exploration into the world of health and wellness entrepreneurship featuring Katerina Schneider, the innovative founder and CEO of Ritual. Join us as we uncover the story behind Ritual, a company that revolutionized the supplement industry. Dive into Katerina’s journey, her insights on transparency, and how Ritual’s approach is reshaping the way we view vitamins. It’s an episode filled with inspiration and a closer look at the visionary mind behind this wellness sensation.

Key topics in this episode include; challenging traditional norms in an industry, the importance of transparency in wellness products, and developing products that reflect a commitment to consumers.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify now.

Theme 1: Challenging traditional norms in an industry

The wellness & supplement industries have exploded in popularity and number of product offerings over the past three decades. With 90,000 supplements on the market, consumers have an overwhelming amount of choice. Kat deeply understands the health-conscious consumer from her childhood with health-obsessed parents.

Her father pressed juices (before it was cool!) and opted for herbs rather than any traditionally-marketed supplements. From this background, Kat understands the hesitance health-conscious consumers often felt around supplements.

When it came time for her to take a prenatal vitamin herself, Kat realized she wanted to create a product unlike the existent players — completely traceable, fully backed by legitimate science.

She focused her attention on premium-level ingredients often out of reach for larger, established players because of their price point pressure.

Kat has reinvented the supplement industry itself, receiving rare USP certification and IP protection for Ritual’s delivery technology. Ritual has gained so much traction through insisting on quality in every ingredient and turning consumers into lifelong customers with an expanded range of products.

Theme 2: The importance of transparency in wellness products

Kat identifies two key terms that Ritual believes should have stricter FDA standards and oversight: 1) the term “clinically studied” on packaging and 2) transparency around the concentration and types of heavy metals.

In the prenatal vitamin market, women require accessible, straightforward information about their nutritional supplements. Ritual initially launched their 18+ women’s multivitamin, then consciously expanded into their prenatal vitamin product line. By gaining their customers’ trust with the multivitamin first, Ritual has been able to become the trusted supplement brand for women across their lifetimes.

Kat’s vision for Ritual is to not only promise human clinical studies for every Ritual product by 2030, but to actively contribute to advocacy around clearly defining FDA standards for clinical testing.

Current supplements on the market are also not required by the FDA to list the concentration of heavy metals their products are exposed to as part of the supply chain. Ritual’s website lists the trace heavy metals in their products, prioritizing transparency about every element a consumer is consuming as part of taking their vitamins. Rather than raising alarm — trace heavy metals are present in the water supply and many other parts of daily life — Kat sees these informational efforts on Ritual’s website as another way of gaining their customer’s complete trust.

Theme 3: Developing and digitizing products that reflect a commitment to consumers

Ritual’s direct connection to their consumer was made possible by their launch as a direct-to-consumer, digitally native brand. Ritual’s DTC approach allows for a digital experience that allows customers to trace ingredients- differentiating them from products only sold at a retail store, where very little information is available to consumers about sourcing, effective use, or the company’s values.

Kat explains that customers can browse the full detail of their ingredient sourcing, compare product lines, and even see the emissions produced by each of their products. By first partnering with Whole Foods in their retail roll-out, Kat hopes to maintain this accessible information by informing staff in a dedicated aisle on the details of Ritual’s products offered at that location.