BBODY's Jill Cnudde on Absorption, Authenticity and Why She Will Not Fake a Result
Ingestible beauty is competing for the same shopper, and increasingly the same shelf, as topical skincare. One Belgian founder is betting that what wins there is not better content but a result you can point at.
On the last day of Beautyworld Middle East, Jill Cnudde was still on her stand, having been to a hot pilates class at seven that morning. She is 28, a mother to a three year old, and has been building BBODY since 2018, a Belgian natural supplement brand that now sits in more than 5,000 selling points across Belgium and the Netherlands, has launched into Holland and Barrett, and holds the title of Best Natural Wellness Brand 2025 for the Benelux. The company says it has helped more than 100,000 people.
For a beauty buyer the interesting thing is not the supplement. It is the adjacency. Beauty-from-within has moved out of the pharmacy aisle and onto beauty shelves, where it competes for the same budget as a serum while making a different kind of promise: that the active arrives from the inside rather than the surface. That promise is harder to photograph and harder to prove, which is precisely why the brands doing well in the category are the ones that can show their working.
Cnudde's answer to that problem is a single word she returns to repeatedly.
Absorption as the whole argument
Standing on a fair floor where the neighbouring stand also sells collagen, differentiation is not an abstract question. Cnudde's is narrow and technical.
“I think absorption of supplements and... products has to be 100% or 90%,” she says. “Because if a product is not good in absorption, then... it's nothing and you're just wasting money.”
The brand microencapsulates its supplements, sources its matcha from Japan, and builds around ingredients she describes as difficult to copy, including a mangosteen vinegar she is happy to talk about and unwilling to explain. “It's like the secret ingredient, like Coca-Cola, so we don't have to give it away.”
Whether microencapsulation delivers the absorption gains the category claims for it is a live question, and one the supplement industry has not settled. What is commercially clear is that Cnudde has picked a single, testable-sounding axis and put everything behind it, in a category where most brands compete on ingredient lists and price. For a retailer deciding between two collagen brands, a claim about delivery is a more useful conversation than another list of actives.
She is also deliberately not premium. “We are very economical good, economical prices, so not too expensive,” she says, framing the range as something a younger customer worried about acne and an older one worried about deep wrinkles can both start with. “It's never too late to start with a supplement,” she adds. “It's always important that you start as a precursor.”
The founder as the marketing
The second pillar is Cnudde herself, and she is unusually blunt about treating that as a strategy.
“I also post my whole life, actually,” she says, “because I think when an owner shows the face, people would love to buy that. They'd rather buy from an owner than only a very nice aesthetic profile with products.”
She describes her working style with a metaphor she has clearly used before. “I am like a wild horse and he's a cowboy who needs to keep me in check,” she says of her husband, who works in the business. The energy is genuine and, she implies, needs managing. She reads studies, tracks what doctors and influencers are posting on TikTok, and spent two months living in Los Angeles scouting what was appearing on shelves there.
That instinct is not costless. Chasing every innovation is how supplement ranges become incoherent, and the reins she credits her husband with holding are doing real work. She does not present it as a weakness so much as a division of labour, which is itself a useful answer for any founder-led brand wondering how to stay fast without becoming scattered.
What it cost, and what it produced
The most revealing product in the range did not come from a trend report. It came from watching her mother go through menopause.
“It was mad house,” Cnudde says. “She had a lot of sweating. She was feeling so tippy-toe. I was always tippy-toeing around her.” She worked with the brand's scientists on a formulation aimed at serotonin and hormonal balance, and then documented the whole thing publicly, as she documents most things.
It is a small story that explains the model. The product exists because of a problem in her own house, and the marketing is the record of that problem being solved. It also explains why she is so resistant to generating imagery she has not earned: in a brand where the proof and the promotion are the same asset, a fabricated result is not a shortcut, it is a hole in the argument.
Where she draws the line on AI
Cnudde's position on AI is more precise than the industry's usual for-or-against, and worth quoting at length because the distinction she draws is the one the new transparency rules are also drawing.
“If I see brands using it for real results, that's not something that I like, of course, because it's not real,” she says. “It's generated content. So I rather like authentic content.”
But she is not against the tools. “Even if it's a launch and you create an AI billboard in New York City, then it's okay. Then I think that's nice, and it's good for your conversion on Instagram and social media.”
The line she draws is between atmosphere and evidence. A stylised launch image is a mood, and nobody is misled. An image that stands in for what the product does to a body is a claim.
About results and about what a product does, AI, that's something I think that's a little bit of a scam.
She is also careful not to moralise about brands with smaller budgets. “I am aware that not all brands can do that, and also starting brands need to do that. So I'm not judging that.”
That distinction, between AI used for tone and AI used as proof, is close to where European regulators have landed. Since 2 August 2026, transparency obligations under Article 50 of the EU AI Act require certain AI-generated or manipulated content to be labelled, and a photorealistic image standing in for a real result is far closer to that line than a stylised launch visual. Cnudde arrived at the same boundary from commercial instinct rather than legal advice, which suggests the rule is tracking something the market already understood.
What a beauty buyer should take from it
Three things travel out of this conversation and into any beauty category, not just supplements.
A claim that sounds testable beats a longer ingredient list. Absorption may or may not be provable, but it gives a buyer something to interrogate, and interrogation is engagement.
Founder presence is a distribution channel, not a vanity project, and it is cheapest for exactly the brands that can least afford media.
And the brands most exposed by the new AI transparency rules are not the ones using AI most. They are the ones whose entire pitch rests on results, and who have quietly started illustrating those results rather than photographing them.
“We always have to take care of our body before we are in the hospital,” Cnudde says. “That's my vision.” It is also, accidentally, a decent description of how she treats her brand's credibility.
Founder of BBODY, a Belgian natural wellness supplement brand established in 2018 with her husband and focused on anti-ageing, biohacking and absorption. The brand reports more than 5,000 selling points across Belgium and the Netherlands, more than 100,000 customers, a launch into Holland and Barrett, and the title of Best Natural Wellness Brand 2025 for the Benelux. Cnudde exhibited at Beautyworld Middle East ahead of a push into the UAE.