Amway said on the 7th that it will roll out a new probiotic product in Korea in the second half of this year. The product features two exclusive strains secured from large-scale data reflecting Koreans' eating habits and living environments. The company emphasizes that, beyond simply supplementing strains, it selected them by verifying how they function in the actual gut environment.
The new product applies two strains: one related to the production of the short-chain fatty acid "butyrate," and another that tends to be lacking in environments with reduced gut microbial diversity.
The basis for selecting these strains was disclosed at the 2026 International Symposium and Annual Meeting of the Korean Society of Food Science and Technology held at the Daejeon Convention Center. On the 2nd, Matthew Runyon, Ph.D., a research lead at Amway Global R&D, presented gut health research results using gastrointestinal models and human Organoids in the session "Beyond microbiome modulation."
The differentiator Amway highlights is the implementation of the "actual gut environment." Nutrients ingested orally change during digestion, and it was difficult to confirm this with conventional single-cell-based analyses. The research team combined gastrointestinal models with human intestinal Organoids to build a research platform that can evaluate, in a human-like manner, how nutrients act in the actual gut environment after digestion. A human Organoid is an "artificial mini-organ" that faithfully mimics the function and structure of human organs by culturing a patient's stem cells or tissue cells in three dimensions.
Using this platform, the team evaluated how combinations of phytonutrients and probiotics affect indicators related to barrier function in the gut. The combination was found to produce positive results in the expression of proteins related to barrier function and in barrier-related indicators. It also appeared to help create a gut environment conducive to robust butyrate production. The company said this shows research is advancing beyond simply supplementing probiotics to considering both the gut environment and barrier function together.
The study was designed based on large-scale data reflecting Koreans' eating habits and living environments. In 2022, Amway Korea partnered with microbiome specialist HEM Pharma to launch the personalized solution miLab and has analyzed the gut microbiome using its patented PMAS technology, building more than 110,000 databases to date. Noting that even when people consume the same ingredients, effects differ because gut microbial compositions vary by individual, the team compared and analyzed strains from environments with high butyrate production and from environments with low diversity. From a library of 3,428 strains built this way, the team conducted large-scale screening to secure two exclusive licenses, which will be applied to the Newtree Probiotics product to be launched domestically in the second half of this year.
This was influenced by growing social interest in healthy life expectancy. According to the Ministry of Data and Statistics (MODS), Koreans' life expectancy was 83.5 years as of 2020, while healthy life expectancy was 70.9 years. That means an average of 12.6 years spent in illness. As gut health gains attention as a gateway that governs overall health, the market has expanded. A Korea Health Supplements Association survey found that last year the domestic probiotics market surpassed about 720 billion won, ranking second after red ginseng in the overall health supplements market (5.963 trillion won).
Amway said it will continue to focus on developing innovative solutions that help extend healthy life expectancy across consumers' entire life cycles, based on convergence with advanced bio technologies.