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

Most supplements feel like a task. You buy them with good intentions, maybe a doctor's recommendation, and then they slowly disappear into a drawer. Most of us have a drawer full of half-empty supplement jars that expired before they got finished. Honestly, taking supplements feels like homework.

What if it didn't? What if a supplement felt like a treat at the end of the day, but still did the science? That's exactly what makes today's conversation interesting.

Nikita Naterwalla is the founder of Arelang Naturals, India's first self-described candyceutical brand, reimagining supplementation as chocolates and gummies. Dr. Shefali Thakkar leads science and R&D at Arelang, with the credentials and clinical trial discipline to back the format. Together they've spent five years on research, four years in market, and reformulated more times than they can count.

Their hero product, a sleep formulation that delivers knockout sleep in 30 minutes without any melatonin, is built on a process that converts 1,000 kilos of walnuts into 600 grams of tryptophan. Their thyroid product, Thaifi, is mid-way through its third clinical trial, registered on the Clinical Trial Registry of India, and is currently testing whether it can taper users off existing thyroid medication entirely.

This conversation is about what it actually takes to build a science-backed supplement brand in India in 2026 when the chocolate format is a credibility liability, the regulators move every quarter, and AI told them their best product was "fairy dust" before the trials proved otherwise.

Key Takeaways: Reinventing the Supplement Category as Food

The Category:

• Candyceutical is the term Nikita coined for supplements delivered in formats people actually look forward to consuming
• The bigger bet isn't taste, it's consistency. The best formulation in the world fails if no one takes it for two weeks
• Five years of research, four years in market, and almost every product has been reformulated multiple times before launch

The Science:

• Their sleep product uses no melatonin. Melatonin is a timekeeper, not a sleep solution. They use a walnut-derived natural tryptophan extract instead
• 1,000 kg of walnuts → 10 kg of walnut extract → 500 to 600 grams of natural tryptophan. Every batch is a brutal yield-to-input ratio
• Thaifi, their thyroid product, has cleared a 150-patient randomized controlled trial registered on CTRI and is testing if it can actually reduce dependence on synthetic thyroid medication

The AI Reality:

• AI was useful for content cleanup and presentation polish, but completely unreliable for novel formulations and category-creating products
• When asked about Thaifi, AI confidently called the formulation "fairy dust" because no prior research existed in its training data
• The lesson: AI summarizes the past well. It can't validate the future, especially in regulated, science-driven categories

Q: Was 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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most supplement founders compete on ingredients. Nikita figured out the real competition is human behavior. The best protein in the world is useless if it sits in a drawer. Consistency is the moat, and consistency is what palatability buys you.

Q: What'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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: "Looks like food, works like medicine" is a brutal positioning to defend. Half your audience assumes you cheated on the science. The other half assumes you cheated on the taste. The only way out is to be ruthless on both. Arelang's category bet is that the next decade of wellness moves toward food formats, not capsules.

Q: What'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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: A brand's hardest constraint is rarely science or money. It's the founder's willingness to keep saying no when shortcuts are obvious. Nikita's framing is the most useful definition of brand integrity I've heard from a wellness founder.

Q: Sleep 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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most sleep brands sell speed of falling asleep. Arelang sells the actual cycle. The brutal walnut-to-tryptophan math is why nobody else has copied this product. The supply chain is its own moat.

Q: You'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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The most under-discussed risk of AI in wellness is overconfidence. AI is fluent. AI is wrong. A category-creating product looks like nonsense to a model trained on what the market already shipped. Founders who rely on AI for science validation will end up shipping the average. Arelang did the opposite. They ran the trial.

Q: What 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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The label is a contract. Most Indian supplement consumers were never taught how to read it. The brands gaming the front of the pack with hot trends and the back of the pack with banned actives are betting that consumers won't flip the bottle. Brands like Arelang win when consumers learn to read.

Q: Why 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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The supplement market is structurally Indian-consumer-led discipline. The label exists. The regulators exist. The mislabeled products exist on the same shelf with the clean ones. The only thing that actually moves brands toward honesty is consumers learning to read and paying 10% more for the brand that does the work.

Q: What'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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: "Herbal" is a marketing word that the industry uses to bypass scrutiny. Herbs are bioactive. Herbs interact with medication. Herbs need supervision. Indian wellness has a serious literacy gap on what daily safe consumption actually looks like.

Q: What 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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Two weeks is the honest test. No formulation should need a 90-day "loading phase" to show effect on a healthy adult. If a brand asks for 90 days before any benefit, the brand is buying time, not delivering science.

Q: Where 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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The right way to use AI in wellness is "second brain, never first source." It compresses operations. It doesn't validate biology. The founders who get this confused will ship the wrong product confidently, and AI will sound very convincing while they do it.

Q: What'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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: The Indian wellness consumer is graduating. They're moving from quantity to clarity. The brands losing the most in this shift are the ones who built their whole strategy on attaching the maximum number of bottles per family.

Q: Where 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.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: A wellness brand whose stated goal is for you to need fewer of its products eventually is doing something that the rest of the industry refuses to do. That alone is a brand position worth paying for.

Q: One word for the wellness market today?

Shefali: Emerging.

ChaiNet's Hot Take: Emerging is a polite way of saying half the industry is still figuring out the basics. The next five years will sort the serious operators from the marketers. Arelang is betting it ends up on the right side of that sorting.

Final Thoughts: Make the Body Want the Supplement

Nikita's reframe: "We're not just working with the ingredients. We're also working with how that translates inside the body."

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.

Q: How 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.

Final words: A wellness brand can sell you a product that fills a drawer, or it can sell you a product that you actually finish. Arelang is betting the second one is the only durable category. If you're a consumer, flip the bottle. Read the label. Listen to your body for two weeks. If you're a founder, formulate to be finished, not just formulated to be bought. The drawer of half-empty supplements is the real failure of the industry. The next decade belongs to the brands that close that drawer.

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