P&G Bought Thorne. Here’s Why I’d Start Looking Elsewhere
I’ve used Thorne supplements for years, and I still think they’ve been a very good company. Their reputation was earned through strong formulations, quality standards, testing, and credibility with health professionals.
But this week, Procter & Gamble agreed to acquire Thorne for $3.8 billion.
That acquisition is worth paying attention to.
In 2023, private-equity firm L Catterton purchased Thorne for approximately $680 million and took the company private. Less than three years later, it’s being sold to P&G for $3.8 billion. During that time, Thorne has continued growing, with sales reportedly expected to reach roughly $650 million this year.
In other words, P&G isn’t buying a struggling supplement company that needs to be fixed.
It’s buying a successful premium wellness brand.
And arguably, the most valuable thing it’s buying isn’t the capsules in the bottles. It’s the credibility Thorne spent decades building.
That’s becoming increasingly valuable to companies like P&G as consumers spend more money on health, prevention, supplements, and premium wellness products. Rather than building that trust from scratch, a large consumer company can simply acquire a brand that already has it. P&G already owns supplement and wellness brands including New Chapter, Align and Metamucil, and the Thorne acquisition represents a much larger push into the category.
The problem is that ownership transfers immediately. Trust doesn’t.
Nothing about this acquisition means the Thorne products sitting on the shelf suddenly became worse. And there’s currently no evidence that P&G has plans to reduce ingredient quality, changed formulations, or lower Thorne’s manufacturing standards.
My concern is what happens over time.
When a company spends $3.8 billion on an acquisition, that investment eventually has to produce a return. Growth, margins, distribution, manufacturing costs, ingredient costs and product profitability all become part of the equation.
That doesn’t guarantee Thorne’s quality will decline. But it does change the incentives surrounding the brand.
And when the reason I was willing to pay a premium for Thorne in the first place was its reputation for quality, that’s enough for me to start considering alternatives rather than waiting to find out what changes under new ownership.
So, What Should You Look For Instead?
If you decide to move away from Thorne, the goal should be to find a company that still prioritizes the same things that made Thorne worth using in the first place: quality ingredients, strong formulations, reliable manufacturing, and meaningful testing.
That’s one reason I’ve used NutriDyn alongside Thorne for years.
NutriDyn is a smaller, pharmacedical grade, practitioner-focused supplement company with a strong emphasis on formulation, manufacturing standards, ingredient quality, and third-party testing. More importantly, they already make alternatives to many of the Thorne products I’ve commonly used and recommended.
So rather than telling people to stop using Thorne without giving them somewhere to go, I put together a simple Thorne → NutriDyn replacement guide with comparable options for many of Thorne’s most popular supplements.
“N/A” means there is no direct NutriDyn replacement listed in this guide. Products marked “consider” are alternatives rather than exact matches.