HBW Insights’ Over the Counter podcast, hosted by David Ridley, helps OTC professionals navigate the fast-changing consumer health and wellness market. Featuring expert journalists and industry voices, episodes unpack regulation, innovation, marketing and retail trends. Stay ahead at https://insights.citeline.com/hbw-insight for newsletters and insight on the global self-care market each week. For any podcast feedback or queries, you can now reach us at podcasts@norstella.com.
Counting Self-Care’s Triple Win, With GSCF’s Greg Perry And Ben Carrick
The Global Self-Care Federation has updated its analysis of the health, social and economic value of self-care, using data from 155 countries.
Savings to health systems are up 21% to around $144bn a year, and for the first time the report looks in detail at self-care’s role in prevention.
GSCF director general Greg Perry and Ben Carrick, co-chair of the federation’s policy committee, join HBW Insight on the Over the Counter podcast to talk through the findings.
Carrick, who also works in global public and government affairs at Kenvue, worked on both editions of the study.
We discuss what has changed since 2022, why a single OTC pack in North America is worth around $362 in welfare gains, who should pay for self-care in poorer countries, and what GSCF wants governments, regulators and pharmacists to do next.
15 Sept 2026
Scaling Self-Care In Asia Pacific, With APSMI's Rachmadi Joesoef and Anama O'Reilly
In this episode of Over the Counter, now also in video, HBW Insight talks to Rachmadi Joesoef, APSMI chair and CEO of Indonesian manufacturer PT Konimex, and Anama O'Reilly, who co-leads APSMI's public affairs and communications committee and heads public affairs for the ASEA zone at Opella, ahead of the association's joint congress with Self-CARER and GP Farmasi Indonesia in Bali. We cover why Indonesia is hosting, what Self-CARER has actually delivered on regulatory streamlining and digital health, why e-labelling deserves more attention than it gets, and the 5am fun run closing the summit.
The congress runs 29 October to 1 November at the Paradisus by Meliá, Bali. The open conference covers the afternoon of 30 October and all day 31 October. Register at apsmibalimeeting2026.com, with standard pricing until 20 October. The 5K run on 1 November is a separate sign-up at selfcareamrunbali2026.com.
1 Sept 2026
Videocast: Making The Case For Switch, With AESGP’s Christelle Anquez-Traxler
Products like ibuprofen and loratadine are now grabbed off a pharmacy shelf without a second thought, but both started out as prescription-only medicines.
The process that moves a drug from one to the other, known as Rx-to-OTC switch, is one of the most reliable forms of innovation in self-care, and yet it happens less often than the industry would like.
In this episode of Over the Counter, now also in video, HBW Insight talks to Christelle Anquez-Traxler, senior regulatory science and strategy lead at the Association of the European Self-Care Industry, AESGP, ahead of the association’s first switch conference, taking place in Brussels on 7 October.
Anquez-Traxler argues that switch is still undervalued by regulators who tend to focus on the risks of reclassifying a medicine rather than the benefits, and that just one year of data protection in the EU, against three in the US and Japan, leaves companies with little reward for doing the work.
We talk about what makes some switches harder than others, how approaches to evidence such as the BRASS model can help close the gap, and why recent national initiatives in France, Greece and Germany might point the way forward for the rest of Europe.
19 Aug 2026
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17 Aug 2026
Building The GLP-1 Companion Category, With Beverley Law And Martina Gripp
Everyone in consumer health is talking about GLP-1s. While this new generation of weight loss drugs is firmly on the prescription-only side, industry is now thinking about how it can meet users’ needs for products that address side effects and the nutritional gaps that come with rapid weight loss. In this episode of HBW Insight’s Over the Counter, ALL Creative founder Beverley Law and consultant Martina Gripp – who has 25 years’ experience in industry including at Boehringer Ingelheim and Perrigo – unpick what a companion products category actually requires. We talk claims and the grey area around referencing a prescription brand, the difference between a product marketed for GLP-1 users and one that ends up being used by them, what a real evidence investment looks like from bibliographic data through to a clinical trial, and what OTC companies should be doing right now.
A quick update for our listeners: HBW Insight now has its own dedicated podcast channel. To stay up to date on the latest, follow HBW Insight’s Over The Counter podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcast. You'll find the link in this episode's description.
For any podcast feedback or queries, you can now reach us at podcasts@norstella.com
3 Aug 2026
Realising Growth Through Pharmacy, With Simon-Kucher’s Christian Danelund And Chris Rebholz
Consumers are turning to AI at the start of the self-care journey in growing numbers, but they do not yet trust it, the latest Better Health Report from Simon-Kucher & Partners shows.
They do trust pharmacists, who can convert that trust into sales, providing crucial sales volume growth for their consumer healthcare industry partners.
However, as Simon-Kucher’s Christian Danelund and Chris Rebholz explain in the latest episode of HBW Insight’s Over the Counter podcast – now also in video – pharmacists feels that support from industry has declined over recent years.
14 Jul 2026
The Dos And Don’ts Of Health Literacy, With Self-Care Forum’s Trevor Gore
Health literacy is a phrase you hear a lot in consumer health at the moment, but it's not always clear what people mean by it, or what a company is actually supposed to do about it. In this episode of Over the Counter, HBW Insight talks to Trevor Gore, a trustee of the Self-Care Forum who spent more than two decades at Reckitt and now looks at healthcare through behavioural science. Gore's argument is that most companies treat health literacy as a readability job, making labels and leaflets easier to follow, when the harder work is changing what people do: helping them recognize symptoms, understand risk and act on it. We discuss the three levels of health literacy, the gap between what people intend to do and what they actually do, the line between educating and promoting, and why awareness on its own buys you almost nothing.
Timestamps
3:00 – Introductions
5:00 – What is health literacy?
7:00 – What has health literacy become so important?
15:30 – What are CHC companies doing well?
25:00 – The role of behavioural science
29:00 – What do you need to do now?
29 Jun 2026
The Economic and Social Value Of Probiotics, With IPA Europe’s Rosanna Pecere
The science around the microbiome is moving fast, consumers are clearly interested, and yet the category still runs into some long-standing problems in the European Union, not least the inconsistent way the word “probiotic” itself is treated across the region.
In this episode of HBW Insight’s Over the Counter podcast, we talk to Rosanna Pecere, Executive Director of IPA Europe, the European office of the International Probiotics Association. Rosanna tells us about a socioeconomic assessment that the association has recently published, which tries to put a figure on what probiotics are actually worth to society.
According to the report, round €10bn could be potentially saved with probiotic use, which Pecere says is probably on the conservative side. We talk about where that value comes from, from digestive and respiratory health through to mental wellbeing, and why the regulatory gap in the EU is holding so much of it back.
Timestamps
2:30 – Introductions
4:00 – IPA Europe’s Socio Economic Impact Assessment
5:50 – Key Findings
8:20 – Why are probiotics so valuable?
10:00 – What is holding probiotics back?
11:00 – What would a different regulatory approach look like?
12:00 – Why should consumers care?
13:00 – What’s next?
15 Jun 2026
The Socio-Economic Case For Prevention, With Deloitte’s Elizabeth Hampson
Prevention has moved to the centre of UK health policy, with the NHS 10-year plan promising a decisive shift away from treatment. The financial case for getting there is less widely understood. In this episode of the Over the Counter Podcast, HBW Insight's David Ridley speaks to Liz Hampson, life sciences and health innovation advisory partner at Deloitte, about the firm's recent work on the socioeconomic value of prevention. Hampson explains why every pound invested in prevention returns an estimated £9.20, why early intervention pays off most, and how rising out-of-pocket spending risks creating a two-tier system. The conversation also covers the gender health gap in prevention, the underused role of community pharmacy, and Hampson's argument that health literacy is where consumer health companies can make the greatest difference.
26 May 2026
How Agentic AI Changes the OTC Marketing Playbook, With IQVIA CH’s Volker Spitzer
In the second part of HBW Insight’s interview with IQVIA Consumer Health’s Volker Spitzer, we turn to the commercial implications of agentic AI, and what they mean for how consumer health brands compete, communicate, and manage risk.
Spitzer – vice-president, global R&D/RWE services at IQVIA Consumer Health – argues that as AI agents increasingly mediate product discovery and purchase decisions, the traditional marketing model faces a structural shift.
Visibility, emotional storytelling, and share of voice do not disappear, but their influence moves upstream, into the evidence packages, product data, and formulation transparency that AI systems use to evaluate and rank products. Brands, in effect, will need to become legible to machines as well as consumers.
We also chat about the uneven state of industry preparedness, the accountability questions that arise when AI recommendations cause harm, and whether the scale of current AI investment warrants caution.
Spitzer closes with a realistic assessment of timelines, suggesting the full agentic model in consumer health is most likely a five-to-10-year transition, but one that companies would be unwise to treat as distant.
11 May 2026
How Agentic AI Could Reshape Consumer Health, With IQVIA’s Volker Spitzer
In the latest episode of HBW Insight's Over the Counter podcast, Volker Spitzer, vice-president, global R&D/RWE services at IQVIA Consumer Health, returns to examine the implications of agentic AI for the consumer health industry – a topic he and colleagues explore in a recently published white paper.
Unlike the large language models now familiar to most consumers, agentic AI operates with persistent memory, cross-platform autonomy, and the ability to act on a user's behalf over time, functioning less like a search tool and more like a continuous personal health advisor.
In the first of this two-part conversation, we discuss important questions, such as: Can AI systems can yet be trusted to guide health decisions reliably? What is the role of the pharmacist in this evolution of health information technology? Is the existing product-focused regulatory framework equipped to govern a technology that operates as a dynamic, personalized recommendation engine rather than a fixed promotional claim?
Part two – published in two weeks’ time on HBW Insight – will address the commercial implications, including what the rise of agentic AI means for marketing strategy, industry readiness, and brand risk.
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