Stand in a supplement aisle and every bottle makes the same promise. Most shoppers pick the one someone they trust told them to buy. For Thorne, that someone is usually a doctor, a dietitian, a coach or an athlete.
P&G agreed on 4 August 2026 to pay $3.8 billion for Thorne, about five and a half times the roughly $680 million L Catterton paid in 2023, for a company that Marketing Dive reports passed $500 million in annual revenue (the prices and dates are in the earlier piece on this deal). My argument is that the whole price rides on a small group of people who can tell whether the product has changed, and that P&G keeps every Thorne customer if it keeps them.
The loyalty nobody signed
Buying a restaurant buys the lease, the ovens and the chairs. It does not buy the regulars, who stay free to walk out. Loyalty is the Trojan horse in this deal. It is the reason the price is what it is, so it is the most welcome part of the purchase, and it is the one part the buyer cannot take delivery of.
Picture a friend famous for his boxed macaroni and cheese who buys a Michelin-starred restaurant. You will go, and before you sit down you will check the menu for the blue box. That is no insult to him. It is what people do when a place they love changes hands. P&G is the friend, and Thorne’s customers are already reading the menu.
A few people decide for everyone
Thorne’s own research, as Marketing Dive reports it, found consumers overwhelmed and confused by the supplement market, and found that its messages about scientific rigor mattered less to them than the company had assumed. Most buyers steer by a few visible cues: the price, the label, how the capsule agrees with them. A change nobody can see would pass them by.
The people who would notice are the minority who can verify: practitioners, athletes and heavy users. Everyone else borrows their judgment, the way a table borrows the one friend who can read the wine list. That makes them the real asset. If they keep recommending Thorne, the mass of customers never questions the bottle. If they stop, the doubt spreads through everyone who trusted them. The sources do not split revenue between the two groups, so this is my reading of how the brand works.
The fear, and the record
A Flow Space roundup of online reaction found customers split, some hoping for lower prices and wider availability, others fearing reformulation. It is the same worry recorded when P&G bought New Chapter in 2012 (Nutritional Outlook). Thorne’s chief executive, Colin Watts, has said the company will expand with P&G while keeping to its values and standards (NutraIngredients).
P&G’s record is better than the fear. After a year with New Chapter it had added staff for quality control and innovation, left the price alone and kept the brand out of mass retail despite requests, and the founder said it was keeping its promise. Marc Brush, a former editor of Nutrition Business Journal, says P&G has done a better job than most buyers of protecting brand equity in supplements. The warning comes from the same history. New Chapter’s founders left in 2018 citing “financial pressures to accelerate profits” (NutraIngredients), and Brush says a price this high requires fast growth. Pressure to grow is exactly what tempts a quiet cost cut.
How P&G wins this
P&G wins by treating the practitioners as the customer. Keep the formulas, keep the testing visible, and give the professionals who recommend Thorne a reason to keep doing it. The one recent stumble critics cite, the 2021 benzene recall of aerosol dry shampoos traced to a propellant, is a reminder that a testing brand lives or dies on its inputs.
Three things will show whether it is working once the deal closes, which Jones Day expects in the fourth quarter of 2026. The first is whether Thorne keeps its NSF Certified for Sport mark, which Thorne says covers more than 20 of its products. The second is whether prices or pack sizes change on its best sellers. The third is whether practitioners keep recommending it. My bet is that P&G, having paid this much for trust, guards it.
Prices and dates come from Thorne’s announcement and the deal record published by P&G’s counsel. The consumer reaction rests on a published roundup I could read only as a search summary, and I could not read Reddit or other forums directly, so this is not a count of posts. The argument about who decides the outcome is mine.
The prices and dates behind this deal →