Playing cat and mouse: How US dietary supplement firms moved between categories to escape the FDA

Regulatory categorization is a complex process that is critical for firm survival and market development, but often gets overshadowed by market categorization in extant literature. This paper extends the recent stream of studies that view categorization as an endogenous process to the examination of the emergence and evolution of regulatory categories by asking, how do firms shape their regulatory environment to move their products into a more favorable regulatory category? We use archival data from the US dietary supplement industry to tell the account of how dietary supplement makers moved their products between categories and finally into a new category in the 90’s, which largely fuelled their 1000% growth as an industry in the subsequent decade. Our findings provide a multi-faceted account of the regulatory categorization process with a particular attention to the various stakeholders and their strategies to enable/disable institutional change in their environment. Our story answers previous calls to move beyond tracing the evolution of category labels and provides a step towards bridging our knowledge of categories and corporate political strategy.