P&G Bought Thorne: What Corporate Supplement Acquisitions Change

Written by David Roberts, MPH

Who is buying Thorne, and how big is the deal?

Procter & Gamble agreed on August 4, 2026 to acquire Thorne for $3.8 billion. [1][2] The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, pending regulatory approval. [3]

P&G is the company behind Tide, Charmin, Pampers, and Vicks. Its health care division already holds Metamucil, Align, and New Chapter. [4]

This is Thorne’s second ownership change in three years. Private equity firm L Catterton took the company private in October 2023 in a deal valued at $680 million, and is the seller here. [3]

That detail matters more than the headline number. A company that has been bought twice has been priced twice as an asset — valued on what it can return, not on what it was built to do.

Has anything about Thorne’s products changed?

No. The deal has not closed, and no reformulation, ingredient-sourcing change, or testing change has been announced.

Thorne manufactures at its own facility in South Carolina and carries NSF Certified for Sport certification on part of its line. [1] That infrastructure is a large part of what P&G is paying $3.8 billion to own.

Industry analysts covering the deal made a related point: certification systems built over decades are unlikely to be dismantled quickly, but the daily decisions that protect quality and trust get harder to defend as years pass. [5]

So the useful question is not whether something changed last month. It is what this ownership structure makes likely over the next five to ten years.

What happened the last time P&G bought a supplement brand?

P&G acquired New Chapter in 2012, and the founders left six years later. The full arc is worth knowing, because the early years looked reassuring.

New Chapter was founded in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1982 by Paul and Barbi Schulick. In a March 2013 interview one year after the sale, the incoming CEO said the existing leadership team had been kept in place and the broader team was unchanged. [6]

In July 2018, both founders left, citing essential differences in vision and strategy. [7] In interviews at the time, Paul Schulick named financial pressure to accelerate profits and said he could foresee the products losing their distinctiveness. [8]

New Chapter still exists and remains in P&G’s portfolio. The two people who wrote its formulation standards do not work there.

Six years is the number to hold onto. Nothing visible went wrong in year one, or year three.

Why does ownership change what a supplement company optimizes for?

Because inside a large public company, a supplement brand becomes one line item in a portfolio reviewed every quarter — and ingredient cost is one of the few inputs management directly controls.

Nestlé bought Atrium Innovations in 2017 for $2.3 billion, acquiring Garden of Life, Pure Encapsulations, and Douglas Laboratories. [9] By mid-2025, it had narrowed its supplement business to a short list of premium brands and moved to sell other assets from that portfolio. [10]

Clorox entered the category with Renew Life in 2016, then paid $700 million for Nutranext in 2018. [11] Unilever bought gummy maker Grüns earlier in 2026 and was reportedly outbid for Thorne. [3]

Nothing in that public record shows a formula being degraded. What it shows is that brands become assets — acquired, ranked, and divested on a schedule set by earnings, not by formulation science.

What does founder-led ownership change day to day?

It changes who has the authority to say no to a cost reduction, and what time horizon that person is judged on.

Neither structure guarantees a better product. They differ in where the decision sits when quality and margin pull against each other.

We have a stake in this argument, and it should be named plainly. Mara Labs is privately held and founder-owned. Dr. John Gildea, the molecular geneticist who solved the stabilization problem in 2017, is a co-founder and still runs formulation. We manufacture, test, and ship from one facility in Charlottesville, Virginia.

How can you check who owns the supplements you take?

The label almost never tells you. The parent company does, and it takes about five minutes to find.

• Search the brand name alongside “acquired” or “parent company” and check the date of the most recent transaction.
• Look for whether ownership has changed in the past five years, and whether the buyer was a strategic acquirer or a private equity fund.
• Check the team or about page for the original formulator. If the science founder is gone, ask who approves formulation changes now.
• Find out whether manufacturing is in-house or contracted to a third-party facility that also produces for dozens of other labels.
• Look for third-party testing published by batch or lot, not a general claim that testing occurs.

None of this makes an acquired brand a bad product. Thorne today is the same Thorne it was in July.

What ownership tells you is who will be answering the question when quality and margin finally conflict — and how long that person plans to be there. For a supplement taken daily for a decade, that is worth knowing.

Frequently Asked Questions

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult a healthcare professional before beginning any new supplement, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or managing a health condition. Individual results may vary.