Who Actually Owns Your Vitamins? (2026)
The short answer
On August 4, 2026, Procter & Gamble announced it is buying the supplement brand Thorne for $3.8 billion, from the investment firm L Catterton. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Thorne is the bottle people buy when they have decided not to trust the cheap ones. It is the brand your practitioner recommends. It costs three times the drugstore version.
The company that now owns it also makes Tide, Febreze, Vicks, Crest, Metamucil and Pepto-Bismol. Not one of those things is illegal. All of it is worth knowing before your next order.
What this guide answers
What did P&G actually buy?
Quick answer: the trust. That was the asset.
Thorne was founded in 1984 and built its name on third party testing. It went public in late 2021, was taken private by L Catterton in 2023 in a deal valued around $680 million, and has now sold for $3.8 billion. More than five times the 2023 price in about three years, and nothing in a capsule changed to justify it. What grew was the willingness of people to pay for a name they believed had not been bought yet.
Paul Gama, who runs P&G Health Care, said the quiet part in the press release: "Consumer interest in self-care, prevention, wellness, and personalized health continues to grow, and Thorne strengthens our position in premium wellness with a trusted, science-backed brand that complements our existing portfolio."
Trusted is listed there as a product feature, alongside the science. They did not buy a factory. They bought the feeling you get when you pick up the more expensive bottle.
Thorne's chief executive, Colin Watts, said P&G was "the right partner ... while staying true to the values and standards that have always defined Thorne." Every company says that on the day. Ask again in three years.
What else in your house is owned by a company you would not choose?
The free 3 minute scan goes room by room and tells you which one to deal with first, and what to use instead.
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Does the FDA approve vitamins before they are sold?
Quick answer: no. Not the ones in your cupboard, not the premium ones, not any of them.
Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, the FDA is not authorised to approve dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness before they are marketed. In many cases a company can put a supplement on sale without even telling the FDA it exists.
The responsibility to check the safety and the labelling sits with the company selling it. The FDA's role starts after the product is already in your hand, and is limited to acting against something adulterated or misbranded once it is out there.
When a bottle says the FDA has not evaluated the statement, that is not fine print. That is the arrangement. The premium brand and the drugstore brand sit under the same rule, so paying more does not move you into a different regulatory system. It moves you into a different marketing bracket.
What do the label tests actually find?
Quick answer: when independent researchers test what is in the bottle against what is on it, most of them do not match.
Melatonin
In 2023, researchers led by Pieter Cohen analysed 25 melatonin gummy products sold in the United States and published the result in JAMA. Twenty two of the twenty five were labelled inaccurately.
The actual melatonin ranged from 74% to 347% of the amount stated. One product contained no detectable melatonin at all, and 31.3 mg of CBD that was not the reason anyone bought it.
Melatonin matters here more than any other example, because it is the bottle a tired fifty something woman reaches for at eleven at night when she has decided she will not ask for another prescription.
Everything else
The same pattern turns up across categories whenever somebody runs the assay. Less of the active ingredient than claimed, or more, or something that was never on the label at all.
None of that is an accusation against Thorne, which built its reputation on exactly the third party testing these studies keep finding missing elsewhere. That reputation is what changed hands for $3.8 billion.
| The claim | What is actually true | Named authority, year | What it does NOT mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| "FDA approved" | The FDA does not approve supplements before sale. Firms can launch without notifying it | FDA, DSHEA 1994 | Not that supplements are illegal or unregulated. The FDA can act after the fact |
| The label tells you the dose | 22 of 25 melatonin gummies were inaccurately labelled, from 74% to 347% of stated | Cohen et al., JAMA, 2023 | Gummies specifically. It is not a measurement of every supplement on earth |
| Premium means better regulated | Same law, same pre-market approval, which is none | FDA, DSHEA 1994 | Not that testing is worthless. Third party testing is real, it is just voluntary |
Does being owned by a big company make a supplement worse?
Quick answer: not automatically, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Here is the fair version, because a post that argues one side is not worth reading. A larger owner can mean better supply chain control and more money for testing. P&G has not announced a single reformulation. The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and has not closed. Anyone telling you today that your Thorne bottle has changed is inventing it.
And here is the other half. The reason a brand like this gets bought for five times what it was worth three years ago is that its trust converts into sales faster than a new brand could ever build it. That premium has to be earned back. It gets earned back through volume, through shelf space, through cost per unit, and through selling the same name to many more people.
You already know how that story ends, because you have watched it happen to every small brand you ever loved.
P&G is not a stranger in this house either. It makes Tide and Febreze, and in 2021 it recalled aerosol products over benzene, which we went through in detail in the spray deodorant recall. That is the same corporate parent now standing behind the bottle you take for your health.
What should a woman over forty do about it?
Quick answer: stop asking which bottle is best and start asking why you need the bottle.
You are tired in a way that sleep does not fix, your joints are loud in the morning, and somebody has told you it is just your age. So you built a shelf.
Magnesium for the sleep. Something for the joints. A B complex because a magazine said so. Melatonin for the nights the magnesium does not touch. Collagen because everyone your age is on it. Four hundred dollars a year, easily, and no honest way to tell whether any of it is doing a thing.
That shelf is not a failure of discipline. It is what happens when a woman is handed a list of symptoms and no explanation, then sold one bottle per symptom by an industry that never had to prove any of them work.
You were not gullible. You were thorough, in a system that rewards thoroughness with more purchases.
What replaces the shelf?
Quick answer: food you can trace, from somebody whose name you know.
I will not tell you to read the label. The label is the thing the researchers keep finding is wrong, and no amount of careful reading fixes a number that was never accurate.
Four things, in order:
- Write down what is actually on your shelf, and what each one is for. Not to throw anything out. Most women have never seen the whole list in one place, and the list is the argument.
- Find a local farm and go meet the farmer. Eggs, meat, butter, from a person who will tell you what the animals eat. Real food carries what is in those bottles in a form your body has recognised for a hundred thousand years, and there is no assay to fail.
- Change one meal, and give it a month. Breakfast, because it repeats every day. A month is long enough to notice the three o'clock and short enough that you will actually finish.
- Ask who owns it before you reorder anything. Thirty seconds and the name of the parent company. You will be surprised how often it is one of four.
Shannon's Advice
Straight talk from ShannonI do not call them grocery stores. They are poison centers meant to do you and your family harm. It is not just the brands who are doing the harm, it is the stores themselves. They allow these toxic products on their shelves. People are sick and dying. This is a very serious matter. How can we ever trust them again?
We can't trust them. That is where Switch to America comes in. We are a new supply chain, built on family values, trust and affordability.
You do not have to take my word for it. The proof is in my blog posts, the recalls, the lawsuits and the fines, and in the app I built called The Family Home Toxic Scorecard. Also, inside my Switch Circle private community, we talk about real solutions.
Women come to me exhausted, in pain, stressed out, and on a list of prescriptions they never wanted. I have spent over 20 years helping women get off prescription medications. I help families reclaim their health.
We cannot stop them. I have stopped expecting to. However, we can stop walking into their stores. We are linking arms and together taking our control back. Control of our health and our finances.
Start by clicking the link below and taking the SCAN.
The receipts
- P&G to acquire Thorne for $3.8 billion, announced August 2026, expected to close in Q4 2026 subject to regulatory approvals.
- FDA: dietary supplements are not approved for safety or effectiveness before marketing, the arrangement set by DSHEA in 1994.
- Cohen et al., JAMA 2023: 22 of 25 melatonin gummy products carried inaccurate labels, ranging from 74% to 347% of the stated quantity.
- FDA 101 on dietary supplements, the agency's own plain language explanation of where its authority begins.
- The 2021 benzene aerosol recall, involving the same corporate parent now buying a supplement brand.
Find out what is actually costing you
Three minutes, room by room, and you will know which one to fix first and what to use instead.
Take the free home scanWhat else do people ask?
Has the P&G deal actually closed? Not yet. It was announced in early August 2026 and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. Until then Thorne operates as it did.
Has anything about the product changed? Nothing has been announced. This article is about who owns the brand and what that has historically meant, not about a reformulation, because there has not been one.
Should I throw my vitamins out? No. Write the list down first. Most of the decisions get easy once you can see the whole shelf on one page and say out loud what each one was supposed to fix.
Who you become
You become the woman who asks who owns it before she asks what is in it. That question does more work than any ingredient list, because ownership tells you whose interests the next reformulation will serve.
And then you go and buy eggs from somebody whose name you know, and you notice that nobody had to test them to tell you what was inside.