P&G Just Bought Thorne for $3.8 Billion — Here's Why the Tide Maker Is Chasing Your Vitamin Cabinet
P&G is buying supplement brand Thorne for $3.8 billion. Here's why the Tide maker is chasing the wellness boom — and what it means for you.
CEO Shailesh Jejurikar broke the news himself on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" before the formal announcement, calling Thorne "a really well-run operation" that has "been around for a long time." The market barely blinked: Reuters reported P&G shares up about 1% in afternoon trading, while CNBC clocked them trading up less than 1% in the morning. A quiet shrug for a deal that says a great deal about where big consumer brands think growth now lives.
What exactly did P&G buy?
Thorne is not a household name like Tide or Pampers, and that's precisely the point. Founded in 1984, the Summerville, South Carolina company built its reputation the slow way — selling clinically formulated supplements through doctors, clinics and professional sports teams rather than blaring TV ads. It holds NSF Certified for Sport certification on more than 100 products, a badge that tells elite athletes a bottle is screened for banned substances and actually contains what the label claims.
That credibility turned into serious money. Thorne's annual revenue surpassed $500 million in 2025 and is on pace to reach $650 million this year, according to CNBC, with the company compounding revenue at more than 30% a year since 2023. Crucially, about 60% of that revenue comes from shoppers under 40 — the millennial and Gen Z buyers legacy brands struggle to reach. As Thorne CEO Colin Watts put it, "today's market is a Gen Z, millennial market," and younger customers "don't think about supplementation as prevention. They think about it as performance."
Thorne joins a P&G health portfolio that already includes Metamucil, Align Probiotic and New Chapter vitamins, alongside Oral-B and Vicks. The deal is expected to close later in 2026, pending regulatory approval.
Why now? Follow the growth
P&G is a giant with a growth problem. Its latest results showed flat organic sales, and its health-care segment — home to Oral-B and Vicks — was the worst performer: Quartz reported the division posted the steepest volume drop of any P&G segment in fiscal Q4 2026, down 3%, as oral-care sales softened in North America and Greater China. When your core business of detergent and toothpaste is barely moving, you buy your way into faster lanes.
And supplements are a fast lane. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global vitamins and supplements market was worth $164.4 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $174.45 billion in 2026 and $284.26 billion by 2034 — a 6.29% compound annual rate that comfortably outpaces household staples. Jay Woods, chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets, told Reuters the health and wellness sector was "expanding much faster than P&G's household staples" and offered a way to reach younger consumers.
Three tailwinds are supercharging demand. First, the "Make America Healthy Again" movement led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has thrown a political spotlight on supplements; Kennedy has said his own vitamin regimen is so extensive he can't name everything he takes. Second, the explosion of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound has sent users hunting for protein and muscle-preserving nutrients as they shed pounds. Third, younger buyers increasingly treat supplements as performance tools — for sleep, energy and focus — rather than as old-fashioned insurance against deficiency.
The bidding war and the price tag
P&G didn't get Thorne cheap, and it didn't get it uncontested. A Financial Times report in June valued the brand at up to $4 billion, and consumer-health company Haleon had also made a bid, Reuters reported. Jejurikar declined to say whether P&G had won an intense bidding war.
For the seller, LVMH-backed private equity firm L Catterton, the deal is a triumph. It took Thorne private in 2023 for approximately $680 million — a price that, per Thorne's SEC filing at the time, represented a 94% premium to the stock's unaffected closing price. Selling for $3.8 billion barely three years later hands L Catterton a return of more than $3 billion. At $3.8 billion on roughly $650 million of projected sales, P&G is paying about six times revenue, according to Finimize — the kind of multiple reserved for brands buyers believe can keep growing for years.
Jejurikar defended the price. "The price is a good price for the growth rates they have," he told CNBC. "It's kind of in line with the industry benchmarks we've seen."
A land grab across the industry
P&G is far from alone. Rival Unilever agreed in April to buy gummy-supplement maker Grüns, adding to a wellness stable that already includes Liquid I.V., Nutrafol and Olly. Nestlé, meanwhile, is running a strategic review of its lower-margin vitamin brands like Nature's Bounty. The consultancy PwC found in its US Deals 2026 Midyear Outlook that CPG deal value more than doubled year over year in the first quarter of 2026 — with three transactions alone (Kimberly-Clark/Kenvue, McCormick/Unilever and Keurig Dr Pepper/JDE Peet's) accounting for close to $120 billion in combined value.
The logic is consistent: legacy consumer giants are paying premiums for brands that own a direct relationship with young, loyal, subscription-happy customers — and for the first-party data that comes with them. Thorne even offers an AI-powered wellness advisor called Taia, trained on 40 years of research, that nudges shoppers toward personalized recommendations.
What it means for you
If you buy Thorne, the near-term answer is: probably nothing changes fast. Deals like this take months to close, and P&G says it wants to keep what made the brand successful. The longer-term question is whether P&G's mass-market muscle — its genius for making products cheaper and putting them everywhere — can scale Thorne without eroding the premium, trust-driven aura that made it worth $3.8 billion in the first place. Big consumer companies have not always resisted that temptation.
For investors, the signal is louder than the price. When the maker of Tide decides your vitamin shelf is where the growth is, the wellness boom has officially graduated from trend to strategy.
