IHR Magazine: Canada's natural health trade magazine

• What Canada’s Shrinking Organic Farmland Means for the Organic Shelf Organic sales in Canada reached $11.88 billion in 2025 while certified organic acreage fell 16.1 per cent. IHR sets out what the gap means for origin claims, landed costs and supplier contracts, and why…
• Meehan Family Investments Moves From Vodka Soda to Brain Health Paul and Melissa Meehan built NÜTRL Vodka Soda and sold it to Labatt in 2020. Their family office has now led the seed round for PONO Wellness, a Vancouver brain-health start-up. IHR looks at…
• What Unifrutti’s New CEO Means for Canada’s Winter Fruit Supply Unifrutti, the Abu Dhabi-owned fruit group that has bought three farm businesses in Peru and Chile since 2024, has named former Camposol chief José Antonio Gómez Bazán as Group CEO. Here is what the…
• Pycnogenol® in Women With Osteopenia: What a 14-Point Pain Result Means for the Bone Aisle Half the women with osteoporosis in Canada never get a prescription, and many end up in the supplement aisle. A new German trial measured how Pycnogenol® changed their day-to-day comfort, energy and lab work.
• Cizzle Brands’ Share Consolidation Puts the Supplier Balance Sheet on the Planogram CWENCH Hydration reached more than 6,900 points of distribution while its owner's Canadian brand revenue fell 33 per cent. The 25-for-1 share consolidation that followed is a listing mechanic, but the filings behind it…
• The Password Was Today’s Date: How 700 Supermarket Freezers Were Turned Into Ovens The freezer controllers hit in France accepted a password derived from the date, a flaw reported in 2023. IHR reconstructs how freezers came to be online, why the warnings never reached store owners, and…
• Zellers Is Rebuilding in 25,000-Square-Foot Pieces, and Food Is Its Open Category Zellers opens in Cambridge on November 12 at about 25,000 square feet, one floor of a former Hudson's Bay. IHR looks at who owns the chain, why landlords want it, the food range it…
• Jungbunzlauer’s New Director Lands in the Middle of a Citric Acid Duty Fight Jungbunzlauer has added AAK chief executive Johan Westman to its board just as its Port Colborne plant faces a 16.50 per cent preliminary US subsidy duty. IHR maps which citrates the case reaches, which…
• NHP labelling Bulletin 13 turns two relabels into one reprint Health Canada's Bulletin 13 lets licence holders hold monograph-driven label edits until a new transition period ends, past June 2028. The saving is one reprint instead of two. The catch is that safety-directed warnings,…
• Health Canada Draws the Peptide Line Health Canada now lists 13 unauthorized peptides sold online. What Canadian health stores can and cannot stock, why a "research use only" label offers no cover, and why the new U.S. compounding policy stops…
• DoorDash’s US$17-Billion Instacart Deal Puts Canada’s Online Grocery Aisle in One Company’s Hands DoorDash's US$17 billion takeover of Instacart would put the delivery storefronts of most big Canadian grocers and pharmacies under one owner. What it means for commissions, shopper data and supplement ad costs, and what…
• The One-Hour Accept Rule Behind IHR Plugin’s Store Network IHR Plugin has published its service terms: one hour to accept a network order, three to ship it. At minimum wage, any order under about $19 costs the shipping store money, and stores with…
• Natural Health Trends Just Showed What a Black Friday Discount Does to a Supplement Business Natural Health Trends (NHTC) cut prices, gained 1,040 members and made no more money in its third quarter of 2026. Three checks every supplement retailer should run before a Black Friday markdown.
• Visa’s Small Merchant Rate Expansion: What It Is Worth to a Health Store Visa is opening its lower interchange rate to stores with up to $750,000 in Visa sales. Newly eligible health retailers can keep thousands a year, while stores already in the program face a 2027…
• Have That Conversation: What Canadian Health Retailers Need to Know About Kratom Kratom is unauthorized in Canada, but your customers use it, and some of what they buy from you changes how it works. What staff need to know and what to say at the till.
• Blood-Sugar Botanicals Have a Dose Problem Fenugreek lowers fasting glucose in trials only at 5 g a day of seed. Curcumin's headline result came from one nano-micelle product. Cinnamon splits the meta-analyses, yet cassia holds a Health Canada glucose claim…
• Jamieson Shareholders Approve Kirin Takeover, With 29.5% Opposed The resolution passed with 70.51 per cent support, a few points over the two-thirds threshold. IHR looks at why so many investors resisted the price, what Canadian retailers lose when Jamieson stops reporting, and…
• Sobeys Can No Longer Block the Pharmacy Next Door. The Paperwork Hasn’t Caught Up. IHR read the Competition Tribunal consent agreement behind Empire's property controls deal. Pharmacies and supplement-led health stores are protected, but only for food, only on request, and full-line natural grocers get far less. Four…
• Pycnogenol® and the New Brain-Health Shopper: What the Research Shows at Every Life Stage Brain health has split into four customers: students, working professionals, older adults and parents. Pycnogenol® has published cognitive research at every stage. IHR shows retailers where each customer shops and how to handle the…
• What a networked order actually pays an independent retailer When an IHR order is fulfilled by a store that did not sell it, the retailer margin splits 60/40: 60% to the store that packs and ships, 40% to the store that took the…
• Ubiquinol Just Won a Healthspan Award. Here Is How to Use It on a Canadian Shelf Kaneka Ubiquinol has been named Healthspan Ingredient of the Year, and shoppers are arriving at the CoQ10 bay with questions about mitochondria. IHR follows one of those conversations to show Canadian health retailers what…
• The Under-Fuelled Athlete Is a Real Customer. REDs Is Not a Category Relative energy deficiency is well documented in Canadian athletes and almost entirely absent from Canadian shelf strategy. The sections being built to serve it are pointed at the slowest-growing products in the store. Athlete…
• CHFA Launch Pad 2026 : deux finalistes québécois, et ni l’un ni l’autre n’a besoin d’une licence de Santé Canada Deux des huit finalistes du CHFA Launch Pad 2026 sont québécois : Laboratoire Abieze et Les Produits Mooz. Cinq finalistes vendent des aliments, deux des soins personnels, et une seule marque détient un numéro…
• CHFA Launch Pad 2026: Canada’s Innovation Pipeline Has Left the Supplement Aisle Eight emerging Canadian brands pitch for Most Innovative Product at CHFA NOW Toronto on September 25. Five sell food, two sell personal care, and only one carries a natural health product licence. IHR reads…
• Trading Places: What Shifting US and Canada Supplement Regulations Actually Cost Health Canada proposed $542 a year for the right to keep one product on the market, and $20,035 a year to be an importer. Neither fee is in force; neither has been withdrawn. Meanwhile…
• Canada’s Biggest Supplement Brand Was Priced as an Export Asset Kirin is paying roughly C$2.5 billion for Jamieson Wellness, and the growth behind that price is in China and the United States rather than Canada. An independent read on the segment split, the Investment…
• The T Is Back: What Loblaw’s Tariff Labels and Ottawa’s Counter-Tariff List Mean for Natural Health Loblaw revives its T symbol as Canada's Sept. 8 counter-tariffs reach whey protein, honey and personal care. What natural health retailers need to know.
• Sport Certification Is Moving Into the Prenatal Aisle A sport-doping certification just landed on prenatal vitamins. That move signals how the entire category will compete next—and which brand managers will be left behind.   Prenatal vitamins have a new competitive standard. In…
• Retailers Want Inventory AI. Almost None Have It. New research from inFlow Inventory measures an inventory AI gap that falls hardest on the independents least able to absorb the cost. What is the inventory AI adoption gap? It is the distance between…
• AI Agents Now Shop at Scale: What Agentic Commerce Means for Natural Health Retail A new NielsenIQ report shows AI agents transacting at consumer scale in China while North American shoppers still refuse to hand over the checkout. IHR’s independent read: the battleground for natural health is the…