What do apple cider vinegar gummies actually do? Goli’s $438 million business may or may not have the answer
Ask entrepreneur Michael Bitensky, founder of Goli Nutrition, what he considers his biggest accomplishment, and he doesn’t point to the gummy vitamin company’s hundreds of millions in annual revenue or the thousands of Target, CVS, and Walgreens stores that stock his products. Nor does he point to the company’s ranking as a perennial top seller on Amazon Prime Day, its vast network of Instagram influencers, or even the investments of A-list celebrities Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez. Instead, Bitensky points to the more than 350,000 reviews his company’s apple cider vinegar gummies have garnered on Amazon.
“It’s my trophy,” he said when he spoke to Fast Company back in September. But as to what the reviews of what the company’s best-selling product actually say, Bitensky wouldn’t repeat them, even though they’re overwhelmingly positive (4.4 out of 5 stars). Instead, he said, we’d have to read them for ourselves.
“You can look at the reviews,” he said. “We can’t talk about the benefits that are based on apple cider vinegar. But if you just read them, you’ll see a lot of people saying a whole bunch of stuff.” He paused, and added carefully: “Well, a couple of main benefits that they were seeing as well.”
That was as far as Bitensky dared to go. After all, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed more than 120 cases in the past decade on health claims made by supplements. Plus, Goli has already been smacked down three times over a period of 18 months by the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the BBB National Programs, an industry self-regulatory organization. Two of those instances related to claims about the apple cider vinegar gummies; a third, last spring, centered on another Goli gummy, which contains ashwagandha, a key herb in Ayurvedic medicine.
Goli’s health claims were also the subject of three recently settled class-action lawsuits, alleging that two of its supplements provide none of the advertised health benefits. A fourth lawsuit, a proposed class-action relating to the efficacy of its supplements, was filed in November 2022. Then in December, Goli was hit with another suit, this one from its former manufacturer, Better Nutritionals, seeking up to $900 million. Goli said it could not comment on “litigation-related matters.”
When asked about the volume of NAD rulings, Bruce Weiss, Goli’s recently installed CEO, said: “Sometimes, when you’re successful, you draw scrutiny.” He spoke to Fast Company via Zoom in September, shortly after joining Goli. He was talking from his home office, a row of the company’s products just visible on a shelf behind. Weiss had arrived at Goli from the $1.2 billion consumer-products giant Church & Dwight, which owns Arm & Hammer, OxiClean, and Trojan as well as gummy vitamin brands Vitafusion and L’il Critters. Fast Company was granted a joint interview with Bitensky and Weiss shortly after Weiss’s appointment. Then the company stopped responding to all queries for months before finally answering some select questions just before this article was published.
How did Goli and its popular Apple Cider Vinegar Gummies get so big so fast? Nutrition Business Journal estimates Goli’s 2021 sales at $438 million, a whopping 25% growth over the previous year, which “puts them in the mix with the top 25 supplement companies,” says Claire Morton, the Journal’s senior industry analyst. And with some 100,000 influencers touting its vitamins, Goli is undeniably social media famous. But very little has been written about the company that isn’t self-generated or sponsored. Critics allege that the gummies, which can retail for about $19 for a bottle of 60, are little more than overly expensive candy.
Goli’s meteoric rise shows just how powerful an army of influencers can be in the health space, whether or not those health claims are ever substantiated by scientific research.
“You see something all over your feed, and it’s hard to resist,” says Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And the idea that we can buy health in a delicious sugary package for less than $20 is very, very persuasive stuff.”
Making vinegar taste good
The genesis for Goli came about five years ago, when Bitensky’s now-wife Vanessa began taking shots of apple cider vinegar every morning. Although the legend of apple cider vinegar as a miraculous health potion has been around for years, things really took off in 2009, when a Japanese study found that those who drank a beverage containing one or two tablespoons of vinegar every day lost two to four pounds a week. So many celebrities—Katy Perry! Hilary Duff! Kim Kardashian!—got in on the apple cider vinegar trend that US Weekly inevitably did a story about stars who “swear by” the stuff.
The 2009 study’s authors say they chose apple cider vinegar because its slight sweetness makes it “preferred for drinking”—in other words, because it’s the most palatable, not because it has a better health profile than other vinegars. “The benefit of apple cider vinegar is likely due to the acetic acid, which you’ll find in any vinegar,” says Dr. Tod Cooperman, founder and president of the 24-year-old ConsumerLab, an independent research company that tests and analyzes health and nutrition products, which was not involved in the study. “It’s what makes vinegar vinegar.”
Other studies have suggested that apple cider vinegar may help control blood sugar, which, in theory, could help with weight loss, says Dr. Edwin McDonald IV, a gastroenterologist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center (and a trained chef). There’s also a lot of fuss around the “mother,” the combination of yeast and bacteria formed during vinegar’s fermentation. The mother is technically a probiotic, notes Dr. McDonald, but its importance hasn’t been established with research.
Back to Bitensky’s wife, Vanessa, and the Goli story: It turns out, drinking vinegar is kind of gross. Vanessa would gasp or have “an unpleasant response,” Bitensky told Fast Company, but she saw “some benefits to her digestion and energy.” Still, she quit after two weeks because of the taste. Yet, Bitensky couldn’t stop thinking about the ACV, as he refers to it. He started asking people about it and was excited to find that even his Uber driver knew it had health benefits but tasted terrible. “As an entrepreneur, you always want to find a business where you can solve a fundamental issue with something that’s mass known and that can be a mass market,” he said.
Bitensky is light on specifics about his business background, but noted that he went to business school at Montreal’s Concordia University “for a week and a half, and then I had another one of my ideas, and I couldn’t sit in class.” He also mentioned founding a private-label business “with clients in Quebec, Ontario, and New York State,” as well as a “high-end” water company called Acqua Dolce that sold the beverage “in glass to high-end shops.” His LinkedIn profile, however, where he’s just “Michael B.,” lists only Goli Nutrition. (When Fast Company asked about the spelling of that water company, a Goli spokesperson said he couldn’t remember the company’s name. Eventually, through a spokesperson, Bitensky supplied the spelling and said he’d started it when he was 15, and it “had not been active for a long time.” Fast Company could find no record of the company’s existence.)
Bitensky said he asked his mother, Nicol Korner-Bitensky, now a retired professor at McGill University’s School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, to look into apple cider vinegar. “She got us from zero to one,” he said. (Korner-Bitensky didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Bitensky set out not just to mask the taste, but “to have it taste delicious,” he said. He also didn’t want the gummy to stick to teeth: “We thought that had more of a connotation of a candy than a health-food product.”
Along the way, a contact Bitensky said he met at a golf tournament introduced him to Dee Agarwal, a self-described serial entrepreneur and investor who helped him launch Goli (although nowhere, except in lawsuit filings, is Agarwal identified as a cofounder). Agarwal previously founded Choxi.com (in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile), an online retailer that raised more than $50 million in venture funding before it was forced into bankruptcy in 2016. In the bankruptcy proceedings, Agarwal and several members of his family (including Vipesh Agarwal, now Goli’s chief revenue officer) were accused of draining some $4 million from the company via doctored invoices from a contract firm allegedly controlled by the family. (Agarwal denies the allegations and the lawsuit was later dismissed with prejudice, with no concessions of liability by Agarwal or his family.) Agarwal, who does not list Goli on his LinkedIn profile or his website, did not respond to our multiple requests for comment. In a sworn declaration given last month in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings for Goli’s former manufacturer, he said he is Goli’s “cofounder and president.”
Goli Nutrition’s Apple Cider Vinegar Gummy, which a press release at the time touted as the “world’s first,” debuted in 2019. Within six months, it had “jumped to the number one selling brand in the household and health categories on Amazon”—at least, according to an email the company’s PR rep sent at the time. (A spokeswoman for Amazon was unable to confirm this.) Morton, the supplement industry analyst, says focusing on a single ingredient was a smart marketing ploy that, along with Goli’s prominent red branding, “really made the company stand out.” Some of the fast growth can also be traced back to what Bitensky cited as another one of the company’s innovations: its influencer platform.
The Goli influencer machine
Bitensky got the idea for the influencer program before he even had the idea for Goli, he said. He was analyzing how other companies did publicity, and the back-and-forth communication of “I’ll pay you X amount for three posts” was “taxing on the company,” Bitensky decided. It wasn’t a structure conducive to “micro-influencers,” who Bitensky thought had a deeper connection with their audience and would be more effective. (A micro-influencer is said to have between 10K and 100K followers; there are other categories too, including nano-influencers, with between 1K and 10K followers.) Bitensky was interested in those with a few thousand followers on Instagram or TikTok, “not 80,” he said, laughing, “like me.”
Whelan, the consumer science professor, says going the influencer route was a savvy business move. “For not a lot of money, you get lots of people talking about your products, and it seems a whole lot more legit,” she says. And as it turned out, the timing of Goli’s Partner Program, as its influencer platform is called, was incredibly fortuitous.
Within months of Goli’s founding, the pandemic closed brick-and-mortar retailers and shut down in-person events. Brands raced to embrace influencers, many of whom were already used to filming content videos from home. And for Goli, it didn’t hurt that wellness was top of mind at the time. Suddenly, the company’s red bottle of Apple Cider Vinegar Gummies was popping up in everyone’s feeds. Even celebrities were discussing the gummy vitamins. In one Instagram Live from March 17, 2020, the earliest days of the pandemic, singer Demi Lovato showed her “cleaning table” to her friend Miley Cyrus—it was where she made hand sanitizer and kept her immunity-boosting products. “Apple cider vinegar to me is too hard to stomach, so this is really good,” Lovato said, turning around the Goli gummies bottle so it could be seen more clearly.
Anyone can go to Goli’s Partner Program and sign up, get a personalized promo code, download a list of dos and don’ts for posting (the warnings about health claims are extensive), and check sales. Payment comes via Paypal and can arrive as soon as an influencer reaches $10 in commission—even if that’s on day one, said Bitensky.
The platform also includes glowing testimonials from influencers—all of them with fewer than 30,000 followers, and some with little more than 3,000.
“This program has blessed me financially beyond my wildest dreams,” says @Mistydurkee, who has around 3,200 followers on Instagram and is shown holding a bottle of Goli Apple Cider Vinegar Gummies and carrying a Louis Vuitton tote bag. (She did not respond to Fast Company’s requests for an interview.)
Fast Company contacted more than two dozen Goli influencers about their experience with the platform. We heard back from two, offering more endorsements of the product.
One was Roussie Jean Honore, who has some 3,000 followers on Instagram. “Their gummies are so yummy and really effective,” she wrote, adding that she likes Goli’s partnerships with Eden Reforestation Projects and Vitamin Angels that plant a tree and donate vitamins to children in need for every purchase. “If I have to say everything I like about this brand I should write a book hahaha.”
Meanwhile, Melissa Friesen, who has nearly 13,000 followers on Instagram, said she liked them because she hates swallowing pills. “Love chewy candies, and they taste delicious,” she wrote.
Bitensky said the company’s influencer community, which now numbers more than 100,000, grew organically. “We didn’t spend money acquiring influencers. There was no marketing push for influencers,” he said. “I like to say we influence the influencers.”
But some say they were approached by the brand. Vicki Duong, an influencer with about 10,000 followers, claims Goli contacted her with an offer (50% off the product in exchange for a post), which she turned down because it didn’t seem worth her time. But eventually, the product became so “insta-hyped,” as she puts it, that she bought it herself and reviewed it. (Asked to clarify whether the company ever approached influencers, Goli acknowledged that it has, but insisted “the vast majority” are organic.)
Why do so many influencers flock to the product? Duong suggests that being associated with Goli’s other influencers—including celebrities—can be appealing for newbies and micro-influencers; but mostly, that associating with a company in the wellness space can be good for business.
“Once you do [gummy vitamins], you’re kind of opening the idea like, maybe I also do lifestyle/fitness,” she says. “It makes you seem like a bit of an authority on health and fitness, which, if your audience will pick up on that, it can be very profitable.”
Goli’s system makes it easy for aspiring influencers to get started, says Whelan. “Let’s say I’ve got a couple thousand followers and I’m curious to see where I can take it,” she says. “Goli has a really low barrier to entry.”
So what’s in the gummies?
Once upon a time, the drugstore vitamins aisle was a sea of pills, the dominant format. “Now there’s so many gummies,” says Morton, Nutrition Business Journal’s industry analyst.
In 2016, the gummy vitamin industry was 10% of the vitamin market; by 2021, it had more than doubled to 21%, according to NBJ’s 2022 Delivery Format Report. In the 52 weeks ending October 30, 2022, gummy vitamin sales reached nearly $2.7 billion, according to data firm Spins. “From a quality perspective, gummies aren’t the most efficacious format,” says Morton, “but they’re what consumers prefer.” How does the format change the quality? The high heat involved in making a gummy can cause the vitamin ingredients to degrade, says ConsumerLab’s Dr. Cooperman, suggesting that the quantity and quality of the ingredients can sometimes vary widely from what’s listed on the packaging.
If the vitamin industry has come under fire for the amount of sugar in gummy vitamins and their less effective delivery, you wouldn’t know it from the vitamin aisle. The popularity of Goli’s ACV Gummies has spawned a whole gummy vitamin sector. Other vitamin brands selling ACV gummies include Nature’s Craft, Hum, Nature’s Truth, WellPath, and Up & Up, Target’s in-house brand. Target’s gummies are on the shelf next to Goli’s, also in a red bottle, except theirs reads, “Compare to Goli Gummies.” (Target’s are roughly 40% cheaper, with similar amounts of sugar.)
According to the nutritional information on the bottle, each Goli ACV Gummy contains 2 grams of sugar. The recommended dosage: “Take 1-2 gummies, 3 times daily.” That means, the maximum daily dose of 6 ACV Gummies has the equivalent of 12 grams of sugar. For comparison, the American Heart Association advises that women should consume no more than 25 grams of added sugar a day. Also worth noting, 6 ACV Gummies total 75 calories (each one is 12.5 calories). With these numbers, many experts allege that Goli gummies offer little health benefit.
In March 2021, regarding Goli ACV Gummies, NAD recommended that Goli discontinue its skin health claims and modify its claims about energy production; in January 2022, the advertising watchdog again recommended that Goli “discontinue or modify its advertising to avoid conveying the unsupported message that the amount of ACV contained in its gummies is associated with the health benefits of traditional liquid ACV.” (The company disagreed with the rulings, it said in a statement, but complied.)
When CEO Weiss spoke to Fast Company, he put a positive spin on all this, saying that skin and energy benefits were not the main selling points of the product. “[It’s] not the core of why people are buying,” he said. “You’re going to get the benefits of apple cider vinegar, and we make it tasty.”
While there is some evidence suggesting that a slug of apple cider vinegar could reduce or slow the increase of blood sugar levels after you eat, which may lead to weight loss, it’s up for debate as to whether you can get that same benefit (and others) from popping ACV gummies. The weight-loss company GOLO has sued Goli for false advertising claims (as well as trademark infringement). One allegation in GOLO’s 95-page complaint is that you’d need to eat 30 Goli gummies to get the benefits of apple cider vinegar. “We feel very strongly about our positions,” says Keith Walter, GOLO’s general counsel. (Goli would not comment on the litigation.)
Dr. Cooperman says that you’d actually need to eat more like 40 Goli gummies (or two-thirds of a $19 bottle). That’s because any benefits of apple cider vinegar have been associated with 800 milligrams of acetic acid, or the amount in roughly a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. ConsumerLabs’ 2020 analysis of Goli ACV Gummies found that they had just 20.2 milligrams apiece, even less than the 25 milligrams indicated on the label. “I wouldn’t buy it,” Dr. Cooperman says of Goli.
When asked about the claim that you’d need to eat hundreds of ACV Gummies to get health benefits, Bitensky’s only response was, “They’re doing the math wrong.”
Mounting lawsuits
Meanwhile, the hype around Goli has continued to grow. In 2021, Goli further raised its profile when it partnered with Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez. Lucky for Goli, Rodriguez announced the deal with a post on his Instagram featuring the then-couple exactly at a time when celebrity magazines were scouring every available source trying to work out whether they were still together. In a 2021 video released by the company, Lopez—hair up and dressed in a pale pink halter top—is a surprise guest on a Zoom all-hands at Goli. “We always say we’re not in the show business or the entertainment business, we’re in the history-making business, and there’s just so much we can do together,” says Lopez, who has also appeared in commercials for the company. Representatives for Lopez and Rodriguez did not respond to Fast Company’s requests for comment. Since the summer of 2021, shortly after Lopez and Rodriguez publicly called off their engagement, Lopez does not appear to have continued promoting the company. Rodriguez talked up both the Apple Cider Vinegar and Supergreens Gummies in an October 2022 video; and Goli still appears among his portfolio on his business site.
Goli also raised funding in 2021 from private equity firm VMG Partners, which has previously invested in Kind Snacks, Mighty Leaf Tea, and Pirate’s Booty. Bitensky declined to say how much the company raised, although the lawsuit brought by Better Nutritionals (Goli’s former manufacturer) claims that VMG invested $100 million, giving it two seats on the board.
In recent months, Goli has installed a new executive team, including a chief financial officer and Weiss, a 30-year veteran of the consumer-products industry. The company announced in February it had been awarded B-Corp certification status for its social and environmental programs. Goli now has 15 products, including a couple of gummy multivitamins, a probiotics gummy, a melatonin-based gummy called Dreamy Sleep, a few Milky Way-bar-esque chocolate-coated supplement “bites,” and its Ashwagandha Gummies, the last of which were the subject of the NAD’s third ruling on the company. (The NAD ruling came after a challenge from competitor Church & Dwight, where Goli’s current CEO Weiss had been head of the health and well-being division, which included vitamins.) The organization recommended that Goli modify, among other things, claims relating to sexual function and weight loss. As it did with the ACV gummies recommendations, Goli said it disagreed with some of the findings but has made changes. Goli’s Ashwagandha Gummies were also the subject of a class-action suit, filed in the Southern District of New York in September, claiming that the supplement does not provide the advertised health benefits. The case has since been settled.
Better Nutritionals, Goli’s former manufacturer, which filed for bankruptcy in December, also filed a lawsuit against Goli, claiming that the supplement company inflated sales projections and then left the contract manufacturer with millions of bottles of expiring unsold inventory—this after Better Nutritionals vastly expanded its manufacturing capacity to keep up. The inflated sales figures, the lawsuit alleged, weren’t some poor projections; they were fraudulently set so high to win investment capital. (The suit, which included Bitensky, Agarwal, and VMG as defendants, also claimed it was Better Nutritionals that came up with the way to make Goli taste good.)
Goli responded with a separate lawsuit filed in March, in which it said, “As all of Goli’s purchase orders and forecasts were nonbinding, it was always understood that the amount of product Goli ordered could be adjusted.” The countersuit also accused Sharon Hoffman, CEO of Better Nutritionals, of which Goli owns a 25% stake, of taking “millions in distributions and improper fringe benefits to the exclusion of Goli.” A lawyer for Better Nutritionals did not respond to requests for comment. Last week, Better Nutritionals withdrew its lawsuit, but as of this writing, Goli’s countersuit remains active.
Despite the legal distractions, Goli has continued to launch new products. Weiss said in September that his focus was on expansion—that with relatively few products, there was plenty of runway for Goli’s “secret sauce,” as he called it: taking high-functioning single ingredients, explaining them to consumers, and making them tasty. In the past six weeks alone, Goli has rolled out four new gummies, including a “beets cardio” gummy this month. Goli’s website claims that two of these launches, a women’s PMS relief gummy and an “extra-strength” sleep gummy, are already sold out. This year, the company also debuted a marketing campaign called, Taste Your Goals, “strategically developed on telling the story of not overpromising unattainable images of what goals should look like, but rather to celebrate the little daily moments of self-care that anyone can accomplish,” according to a company press release.
It is ideas like these that make products from companies like Goli so seductive, says Whelan, the consumer science professor. “When people put their money toward this, what they’re trying to do is make a credible commitment to live a better life,” she says. “When we do it, we feel like we’ve done something positive. Of course, we think it’s working. If you can do something healthy that feels like you’re eating candy, that is the holy grail of behavior change.”
Meanwhile, the federal government seems to be paying more attention to how health and wellness brands are marketing their products online. The FTC recently issued the first major update in 25 years to its guidelines for marketing health products. The new guidelines warn companies about making unsubstantiated health claims via social media and influencer marketing in addition to traditional ads.
“The idea that we are still falling for this stuff in 2023 is amazing,” says Whelan, “but I don’t see any signs of it stopping.” The only way it ends, she says, is when you acknowledge that if something has the power to transform your life for the better, it may also have the power to do the opposite. Gummy supplements are pricey, she says, “and they may be distracting you from doing things that could actually have a real impact on your health.”
Eating up to six gummies a day may be good for Goli and its army of influencers. But whether ACV gummies offer any health benefits or are just a tasty distraction—that’s the $438 million question.
Correction, April 27, 2023: An earlier version of this article misidentified the parent organization of the National Advertising Division. It is part of BBB National Programs, which is independent from the Better Business Bureau. This article has also been updated to correct Choxi’s founding date in 2010 and reflect that the Choxi bankruptcy lawsuit against Dee Agarwal and his family was dismissed with prejudice.
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