Procter & Gamble is buying the supplement maker Thorne for $3.8 billion in cash. Chief executive Shailesh Jejurikar disclosed the deal on CNBC Tuesday morning, ahead of the companies’ own announcements; L Catterton, the LVMH-backed firm selling it, expects to close in the fourth quarter.
Thorne has been around since 1984 and sells the unglamorous middle of the wellness aisle — creatine, prenatal vitamins, magnesium, the things people buy on a subscription and keep buying. Revenue passed $500 million in 2025 and is tracking toward about $650 million this year. That makes the check roughly 5.8 times this year’s sales.
Consumer staples companies do not pay 5.8 times sales. They pay two, maybe three, and they complain about it. P&G trades at a bit over three times its own revenue. It just agreed to pay nearly double its own multiple for a business one-hundred-and-thirtieth its size.
The seller made $3.1 billion in three years
L Catterton took Thorne private in 2023 at $10.20 a share, valuing it at about $680 million. Selling at $3.8 billion is roughly 5.6 times the entry price and a gross gain north of $3 billion, on a hold of about three years. Whatever else this deal is, it is a reminder that the best consumer private-equity returns of this cycle did not come from cost cuts. They came from owning a category that grew faster than anyone underwriting it in 2023 assumed it would.
P&G already owns supplements. Metamucil, Align, New Chapter and Vicks all sit inside the personal health care business, and that business worked this year: organic sales there rose mid-single digits in fiscal 2026, driven by pricing and, unusually for P&G right now, actual volume. It is the exception on a report card that otherwise looked like this — fourth-quarter net sales of $21.2 billion, organic sales unchanged from a year earlier, volume neutral, pricing neutral, mix neutral, core EPS down 3% to $1.43, and a fiscal 2027 guide of 1–3% growth.
Our take: A company with zero organic growth has two ways to produce growth for shareholders. It can take price, which P&G has run out of room to do — consumers traded down and the volume line went flat. Or it can buy revenue that is already growing and bolt it onto a distribution machine that reaches nearly every shelf on earth. The 5.8x is not P&G overpaying for a vitamin brand. It is P&G pricing what it thinks Thorne becomes once it is not a direct-to-consumer and specialty business anymore. If Thorne’s $650 million turns into $1.5 billion inside three years on P&G shelf space, the multiple looks cheap in hindsight. If it doesn’t, this is the most expensive admission of a growth problem the sector has made this year.
The distribution argument is the whole thesis, and it is not a crazy one. Thorne sells where informed buyers already are — practitioners, athletes, its own site. P&G sells where everyone else is. The company has done exactly this before with New Chapter, and the wellness shelf has since become one of the few places in the store where volume still grows because the customer is buying more, not because the price went up.
The risk is that supplements are not detergent. Trust in a brand like Thorne is built on third-party testing, formulation credibility and a certain distance from mass retail. That is a fragile asset to hand to a company whose core competence is scale. Plenty of premium consumer brands have been bought for their halo and then had the halo optimized away.
What to watch
- Whether P&G says what Thorne earns. A revenue multiple got disclosed on television. The EBITDA multiple did not. That number will tell you whether this was 5.8x sales on a 25% margin or on a 12% one — two completely different deals.
- The next bid. If the read is that staples must buy wellness growth, the remaining independent supplement and functional-nutrition brands just got repriced. Watch who moves within a quarter.
- Fiscal 2027 organic guidance. P&G guided 1–3% before this deal. Acquisitions are excluded from organic sales, so Thorne cannot rescue that line — it can only make the headline number look better while the underlying problem stays put.
- Where Thorne shows up. The first mass-retail planogram featuring Thorne is the real test. Mass distribution is the entire reason for the price, and it is also the fastest way to break what made the brand worth the price.