A Lowcountry nutritional supplements business is apparently being shopped around at a healthy markup by the investment firm that bought it three years ago.
According to multiple media reports, the potential pursuers of the former Thorne HealthTech is British multinational Unilever, the owner of multiple consumer beauty and wellness brands ranging from Dove to Vaseline.
The possibility of a sale was first reported by The Financial Times, citing sources familiar with the deal who stressed that no decisions had been finalized. The London news outlet said Unilever, which has declined to comment, was exploring a $4 billion valuation for the business, now known simply as Thorne.
Reuters noted that another possible bidder is a lesser-known British company that makes Advil, TheraFlu and the Centrum line of vitamins: Haleon, which was spun off from global drugmakers Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline a few years ago, said it doesn’t comment on market rumors.
Thorne itself hasn’t publicly addressed the speculation
Private-equity investor L Catteron acquired the business for $680 million in 2023, six years after the dietary supplement and wellness brand moved most of its operations to the Summerville area.
The legacy life-sciences firm cut its teeth in the Seattle area in the mid-1980s before heading inland to northern Idaho. In 2017, it announced it was relocating most of its key operations to coastal South Carolina after outgrowing its headquarters and factory near the Washington state border.
The move to Berkeley County included a $35 million capital investment commitment and the creation of at least 350 jobs.
Thorne moved most of its operations to Summerville (above) from Idaho in 2018.
File/Staff
During the pandemic, the rise in telehealth services, online shopping and self-health-awareness prompted the company to add a 360,320-square-foot warehouse in Omni Industrial Campus off Interstate 26 to give it more room to store and process materials for the roughly 250 products it makes. The business has since grown to a payroll of more than 800 workers and a worldwide customer base of seven million.
Thorne was a publicly traded Nasdaq-listed company for about two years, before going private again in the sale to L Catterton, which targets mostly consumer businesses, such as Birkenstock and Mexican street-food chain Bartaco. The Greenwich, Conn.-based buyout shop in turn is owned by French conglomerate LMVH, the parent of retailer Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Tiffany & Co. and other luxury labels.
L Catterton said shortly after the acquisition that it had admired Thorne “for many years given its uncompromising approach” to clinical science and innovation.
Grand View Research has estimated the size of the U.S. dietary supplements market would nearly double to $132 billion by 2033, from about $69 billion last year.
Based on those lofty numbers, Thorne is still scratching the surface of the highly fragmented industry. CNBC reported in April that the company’s sales could hit $650 million in 2026 from about $500 million last year — and from $229 million in 2022 — driven by health-conscious Gen Z and millennial buyers.
“Our expectation is this is going to be a billion-dollar brand over the next few years,” Thorne CEO Colin Watts, who was chief executive of The Vitamin Shoppe retail chain from 2015 to 2018, told the cable business news network.