They're Building India's First Candyceutical Brand - Nikita Naterwalla & Dr. Shefali Thakkar, Arelang Naturals

q01Was there a specific moment when you decided the supplement industry needed to change?

Nikita: I don't think it was one moment. It was following a pattern. Years back I was diagnosed with perimenopause and a whole host of supplements were recommended. None of it felt natural. None of it felt connected to my body. It just felt clinical and forced.

When we did our market research before starting, we saw the same pattern at scale. People knew they needed supplements, knew they should be consistent, but the problem was always the same. They'd start, stop, forget. The whole drawer of expired bottles. The market was solving long-term health with solutions people didn't enjoy or stick to. So if something is genuinely good for your body, why does it have to feel like a chore? Formulation came second. Consistency was the real failure.

q02What's the biggest misconception about the term "candyceutical"?

Shefali: Even after these years in the market, two or three calls a day still come with the same misconception. The moment they hear candyceutical, they assume candy means sugary, fun, and therefore not effective. They expect zero efficacy. We've spent every single day trying to undo that assumption. The body actually responds better when you enjoy what you eat. The digestive process starts at the taste buds. There's research behind that.

Nikita: A lot of brands have tried chocolate-based supplements and made them taste like cardboard, so consumers walked into our category already disappointed. We have to clear that hurdle first. Once they actually try the product and feel the effect, the format question disappears. That's when consistency kicks in. So our biggest single challenge is just getting the first try.

q03What's the hardest part of building a candyceutical brand? Efficacy, taste, or commercial viability?

Nikita: Honestly, it's honesty. Efficacy is a science problem. Science can solve it. Commercial viability is a strategy problem. Strategy can solve it. But honesty is a value system. That's the hardest part because it shows up at every step. Formulation, sourcing, vendor negotiation, marketing claims. You're saying no to so many shortcuts to keep the brand honest.

Shefali: For me it's the product. Nikita comes up with wild ideas while reading something at midnight. Then I have to make sense of those ideas while passing through a very strict checklist. We don't compromise on any of those checklist points. It has to pass through all of them and still come out with flying colors. That's the hardest part of formulation.

q04Sleep was the most iterative product you built. What did it take?

Nikita: Sleep, easily. We went back and forth so many times. The non-negotiable from day one was zero melatonin. We aren't using it. Period.

Shefali: Most sleep products in market today rely on melatonin. Melatonin is a timekeeper. It tells your body it's time to sleep. That's it. It doesn't actually relax you, calm you, or push you into deep sleep. Sleep is a process. You need GABA, you need the cycles, you need the body to actually shut down. We had to build for the entire process.

Nikita: We use a natural tryptophan extracted from walnuts. 1,000 kilos of walnut gives us about 10 kilos of walnut extract. From those 10 kilos, we isolate around 500 to 600 grams of natural tryptophan. Once in a while, with a great crop, we get up to 800. That's the potency we ship. We never use synthetic tryptophan. The product gives knockout sleep in 30 minutes and our users wake up actually rested. Quality over quantity is the entire bet.

q05You're working on Thaifi for hypothyroidism. Why a clinical trial route?

Shefali: Thaifi is a different category for us. It's not over the counter. It's available through chemists and doctors. We've already cleared an in-house pilot trial, then a 150 patient randomized controlled trial that was registered on the Clinical Trial Registry of India. It cleared with flying colors. We're now in our third trial, slowly tapering down the dose of existing synthetic thyroid medication for the patients in the trial. The end goal is full reversal of hypothyroidism, with regulatory backing.

Nikita: This is the level of rigor we think the wellness industry should be defaulted to. We're not running ads with celebrities saying "feel better." We're running registered clinical trials with documented patient outcomes. That's why a tool like AI can be so misleading. When we asked AI about Thaifi, it confidently said our product was fairy dust. There was no prior research data on what we were doing because we're trying something genuinely new. AI can only tell you about the past.

q06What should consumers actually look for on a supplement label?

Shefali: First, ignore the front. The front is marketing. Flip it. Look at the ingredient list and the nutrition facts. Look at the dose. Was that dose actually studied in a clinical trial? If not, the ingredient is decorative. Look at the claims. You cannot legally make disease claims like PCOS support or hormone imbalance support on a supplement label. If the label is making those claims, be skeptical. Look at herbal extracts. FSSAI just announced two days back that the leaf extract of ashwagandha is banned because of liver toxicity. Only the root extract is safe. Most consumers have no idea the law just changed under their feet.

Nikita: Then the nutrition panel. The ingredient list might say "no added sugar" but if there's date and jaggery in there, the nutrition panel will show you the truth. Total sugar tells the real story.

q07Why does the protein industry get away with so much mislabeling?

Nikita: Half the time it's not blatant fraud, it's expertise gap. The Indian nutraceutical industry is genuinely young. Regulations are evolving every quarter. FSSAI puts out a new format every three months. Most founders aren't from a science background. So mislabeling sometimes comes from confusion, sometimes from cost cutting, occasionally from spiking. Spiking is the unpardonable case. The honest brands have nothing to hide. The dishonest ones know exactly what they're doing.

Shefali: And after the recent peer-reviewed study showed more than half of Indian protein supplements were mislabeled, none of those brands were taken off the shelves. People are still buying them. So the consumer has to be the regulator until the regulator catches up.

q08What's an ingredient you'd never use in a daily supplement?

Nikita: Anything that's a potent herbal extract. They are actives, not casual food. Ashwagandha, shilajit, all the rage ingredients of the year, they are powerful and they're not meant for daily unsupervised consumption. Especially in a protein supplement that you're taking every day, why are you adding herbal extracts? They have a place but it's not in a daily food format.

Shefali: And nobody's having a conversation about ingredient interactions. Drugs interact. Herbal extracts interact. Food ingredients interact. All three interact with each other. The wellness industry has merged categories that should be treated separately.

q09What advice do you have for someone choosing a wellness brand to trust?

Nikita: Look for radical transparency. Look for clinical evidence. Look for ingredient lists that actually disclose dosages. Look at how the brand talks to its consumers when there's bad news, like a regulatory change. Most brands disappear. The brands that double down on education are the ones to bet on.

Shefali: And listen to your body. The chocolate or capsule won't lie if you're paying attention. After two weeks of consistent use, you should feel something. If you don't, the formulation is decorative. Switch.

q10Where does AI actually help you in this business?

Shefali: Content. Presentations. Polish. Putting together a deck that summarizes a research paper for a B2B partner. We don't trust AI for formulation, never. We don't trust it for research validation. The Thaifi-as-fairy-dust moment was the proof point. AI summarizes existing data. Anything genuinely novel is invisible to it.

Nikita: I'd add that AI is good for ordering thoughts. As a solo founder with too much in your head, dumping context into a model and getting structure back is genuinely useful. But never the science. We verify everything ourselves.

q11What's the one thing consumers are finally getting right about wellness?

Nikita: That chemicals don't need to be in your body. That wellness isn't a one-month sprint. That the ingredient should make sense, not just sound good. They're getting that there are no shortcuts. That's the cultural shift that's making brands like ours possible.

Shefali: And that more is not better. The "merrier is better" model where people stack 10 supplements is finally being questioned. The right potency of the right ingredient does more than five products at half-strength.

q12Where do you want Arelang to be five years from now?

Nikita: I want people to say Arelang played a part in changing how they see supplementation. That it became a part of their daily life. That they're consistent for the first time. We're not against other formulations. We just want our brand to be the one that took them back to letting their body work the way it was meant to work.

Shefali: And I want them to need fewer supplements over time. Not more. The goal is for diet and lifestyle to do the heavy lifting, with supplementation as the supplement. Not as a replacement.

q13One word for the wellness market today?

Shefali: Emerging.

Final Thoughts: Make the Body Want the Supplement

The bottom line: Arelang is one of the few Indian wellness brands willing to be category-creators rather than category-followers. Reimagining supplements as chocolates and gummies could have been a marketing trick. They turned it into a five-year R&D process. The walnut-to-tryptophan math behind their sleep product, the registered clinical trial behind Thaifi, the explicit refusal to use melatonin or herbal stacks, are all signals of a brand more interested in compound trust than compound interest.

For founders building in any high-trust category, the lesson is the same. The hardest competition isn't another brand. It's the consumer's own skepticism, earned over years of being misled. Earning trust is slow. Losing it is one mislabeled batch. The brands that win the next decade in Indian wellness will look more like Arelang and less like the celebrity-backed launches that disappear after the first marketing cycle.

For everyone watching the wellness category, two trends matter. Format innovation, where supplements look like food, is real and not going away. And clinical rigor, where brands actually run trials, will become table stakes. The brands that get both right are the ones building the next generation of Indian healthcare, not just the next D2C exit.

q14How can people connect with you and learn more about Arelang Naturals?

Nikita: Visit our website to read the full ingredient breakdown, the science of each formulation, and the way each product interacts with the body. Every step is documented. Follow us on Instagram for the day-to-day updates. If you have a question on a specific product, write to us. We respond personally because right now every customer conversation teaches us something new.