L Catterton Bought Thorne for $680 Million. Now It Wants $4 Billion.

The weird number in this story isn't the headline price. It's the gap between what Thorne cost and what it now costs to leave.

L Catterton - the LVMH-backed private equity firm that sits at the intersection of consumer brands and institutional capital - took Thorne HealthTech private in August 2023 for $680 million. As of June 2026, L Catterton has put Thorne up for sale with an asking price near $4 billion. That is roughly a 5.9x multiple in three years. The kind of return that makes a flagship fund's partners write thank-you notes to their limited partners.

P&G was mentioned by trade accounts as being "in the mix" alongside Haleon and Unilever, but Reuters later reported that sources said Unilever did not bid, and the only buyer Axios said was "nearing a deal" was Haleon - the GSK spin-off that makes Advil and Centrum. The deal is, to the best available reporting, still open. But the plumbing underneath is worth looking at regardless of who ends up writing the check.

The simplest model is this: a supplement company that L Catterton found trading at roughly three times revenue has been run to roughly $650 million in expected annual sales, and is now being offered to strategic buyers at a multiple of about six times revenue. The question isn't whether Thorne is growing. The question is whether a CPG company paying six times revenue for magnesium and omega-3 is buying growth, demographic positioning, or just the story that Gen Z thinks about supplements as performance rather than prevention.

Thorne's CEO Colin Watts, the former head of The Vitamin Shoppe, told CNBC the brand is on pace for $650 million in sales this year, up from $229 million in 2022. Revenue more than doubled in three years. About 60 percent of Thorne's revenue now comes from shoppers under 40, who spend roughly 1.5 times more than their parents did on wellness. Direct-to-consumer subscribers grew from about 4 million at the end of 2023 to roughly 7 million. The brand has sustained a compound annual growth rate exceeding 30 percent since L Catterton's acquisition.

None of that is fabricated. The growth is real. The question is whether the buyer is paying for growth that's already happening or growth that has to keep happening for a long time to justify the multiple.

This is basically the same machine as the Dollar Shave Club deal, viewed from the other side of the ledger. Unilever paid $1 billion for Dollar Shave Club in 2016 and never successfully integrated it, eventually offloading it seven years later. Graze, another Unilever acquisition of a challenger brand, never turned a profit during its time in the portfolio. Unilever's pursuit of DTC wellness brands has been mixed at best. The difference here is that Thorne has discipline - consistent pricing, no high-low promotion games, and a subscription model that actually works because the brand doesn't undercut itself on Amazon - and its growth has outpaced the category.

But the multiples in this deal are doing a lot of work. At $4 billion on roughly $650 million in expected revenue, the implied multiple is about 6x. The U.S. dietary supplements market sits somewhere between $69 billion and $125 billion depending on how you define it, and is projected to grow 11 percent by 2027. That sounds like tailwind, but a 6x revenue multiple for a supplement brand means the buyer is assuming Thorne will either hit a billion dollars in revenue quickly or that its margins will stay high enough to make the payback period reasonable. In the supplement business, margins can be good, but they're not software-good. Ingredients, manufacturing, testing, and regulatory compliance are real costs.

The buyers in the room tell the story about what each one needs. Haleon, the consumer health spin-off from GSK that owns Advil and Centrum, is trying to establish itself as an independent player and expand in the roughly $70 billion U.S. supplements market where it doesn't currently have a dominant branded position. Thorne would give it one. Unilever, under new CEO Fernando Fernandez, has been reshaping its portfolio toward beauty and wellness and away from food - which it just merged with McCormick in a deal that immediately wiped 7 percent off its share price because shareholders worried about the debt load. Unilever's wellbeing unit posted double-digit revenue growth in 2025, which is the sort of number that makes an M&A committee pay attention. P&G, which already owns Merck's consumer health business (including Seven Seas omega-3 and Femibion vitamins), sits at about $146 a share and reported flat organic sales in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. A growth inflection in wellness would be welcome.

All three are plausible. None of them has proved they can absorb a fast-growing DTC supplement brand without turning it into a P&G product - meaning slow, margin-optimized, and culturally inert.

The real story here is L Catterton's funding model. They bought Thorne at public-market prices when the stock was trading around $5 a share, paid $10.20 to take it private (a 94 percent premium), then grew the business and are now asking roughly six times what they paid. That is not a bad trade. That is a textbook PE growth-leverage play: take a boring-growing brand private, hire an operator who understands the DTC channel, streamline go-to-market, double revenue, and sell to a strategic buyer who needs the demographic story as much as the products.

The buyer's problem is the same one every strategic acquirer faces at this stage: paying for the future while owning the past. At $4 billion, Thorne is not a $650 million company. It's a company that has to justify being a $4 billion company. That requires either sustained triple-digit-percent growth (unlikely at this scale), premium margins that don't erode as the brand gets distributed through Walmart and Target, or a demographic moat that Gen Z shoppers actually defend.

L Catterton already got paid. The strategic buyer is the one who has to live with the multiple.