If you have been in the supplement industry for a while, the recent deal flow feels familiar. Brands are being bought and sold. Portfolios are being pruned. Specialists are stepping in to steward assets that no longer fit their prior owners.
Belief is hard to quantify, easy to damage, and costly to rebuild post-acquisition.
In 2024, Clorox exited its Better Health Vitamins, Minerals and Supplements (VMS) business in its entirety, selling Natural Vitality, NeoCell, Rainbow Light, and RenewLife to an affiliate of Piping Rock. It is worth noting that Clorox did not “build” these brands from scratch. RenewLife entered Clorox via acquisition in 2016, and the rest of the portfolio was largely assembled through the Nutranext roll-up, which Clorox acquired in 2018. In late 2025, Church & Dwight announced an agreement to sell VitaFusion and L’il Critters to Piping Rock as well.
At the same time, Nestlé publicly launched a strategic review of its mainstream and value VMS brands, and has been explicit that the review may result in divestments. Much of Nestlé’s supplement footprint was built through acquisition, including Atrium Innovations in 2017, which brought in the consumer brand Garden of Life, and the core brands of The Bountiful Company from KKR in 2021.
On the surface, this is portfolio management. Upon closer inspection, it points to what is different about supplements, and what large CPG owners can easily discount. Many of these deals are ultimately about the hard-to-quantify value of belief.
About “belief” in the supplement industry
We have chosen the word belief instead of the more common word trust because it better reflects how this category works. Belief includes trust, but it is broader.
In our consumer research, we consistently see belief formed through multiple inputs: tradition, practitioner authority, ingredient logic, founder credibility, and traceability. Not all of these inputs are provable in a strict scientific sense, yet they can create a durable belief in efficacy.
Belief is also shaped by alignment. People choose brands that reflect their worldview, whether that is environmental stewardship, an integrative health philosophy, skepticism of industrial systems, or a clear sense of who the brand is for.
And then there is the story. Some brands simply feel coherent and human. They feel like they understand the whole person, not just a symptom.
That is the kind of belief we mean in this article. It is also the part of the category that large acquirers can underweight when they evaluate and integrate supplement brands.
That is why belief is the variable within integration that deserves more rigor. Every buyer is making an integration choice, whether they name it or not. In supplements, the most expensive mistakes happen when a brand is standardized beyond what its belief system can tolerate
A quick look back at what we predicted in 2018
In 2018, I penned When Brands Collide: Dietary Supplements in the New M&A Universe as a cautionary reminder of what can happen when a beloved supplement brand is acquired by large CPG. We pointed out that loyal customers will switch if they feel betrayed, and that the most vociferous supporters can become the most strident critics. We also argued that many customers are more loyal to their beliefs and what motivates them to buy, than to any brand itself.
Eight years later, we have hindsight. We can see when belief is protected and when it is weakened during integration. We are now seeing what new owners do when they inherit brands that need belief rebuilt.
Preserving belief after an acquisition
This piece is a practical update. It is about what buyers can do to preserve belief at acquisition, and what operators can do right after close to avoid weakening the very asset they paid for.
In many cases, you can see the consequences years later. One of the clearest signals is divestiture. When a brand’s belief is diluted, growth often slows, the asset becomes harder to justify inside a portfolio, and it eventually changes hands. That is the pattern behind several recent deals.
Clorox to Piping Rock
Clorox described its 2024 divestiture as part of a portfolio evolution aimed at reducing volatility and improving margins.That is a sensible corporate posture.
What makes this story instructive for supplement CEOs is how the acquirer framed the opportunity. In the New Hope press release, Piping Rock’s president said their primary focus was to restore these brands to their authentic roots within the natural and health food store channel, while honoring brand history and reintroducing popular items that previously resonated with customers.
That language is not an operations thesis. It is a belief thesis.
Lesson: When a brand moves from a conglomerate to a category specialist, the value creation shifts. A conglomerate owner often tries to make the brand fit its machine. A category operator is usually buying it because they think the brand still has something real in it, and they believe they can revive it.
Church & Dwight to Piping Rock
In December 2025, Church & Dwight announced it would sell VitaFusion and L’il Critters. The CEO said Piping Rock has deep experience in vitamins and will be a successful steward for the brands.
Stewardship is not a throwaway word. It is an admission that the brand is healthiest when it has an owner whose operating model aligns with its category rhythm and consumer expectations.
Lesson: A brand can be healthy yet non-core. When that happens, the primary risk becomes orphaning. Innovation pace slows. Narrative gets thinner. The brand still sells, until it does not. The acquirer that wins next is the one willing to make belief central again.
Nestlé’s VMS review
Nestlé’s language is unusually direct. In its 2025 half-year results, the company said it launched a strategic review of its mainstream and value VMS brands and stated that the review may result in the divestment of those brands. Reuters reporting added detail on which brands were included and signaled that sell-offs could occur in 2026.
Nestlé also framed the intent clearly. It said it wants to focus its VMS business on premium brands where its capabilities in science, innovation, and brand-building provide a distinct competitive edge.
Mainstream VMS is increasingly hard to differentiate. When everything starts to look the same, what protects the brand is the belief it has earned. Premium brands are often the ones that have earned that belief through clearer standards, clearer proof, and clearer identity.
Lesson: Attention is a strategic resource. In mega-portfolios, supplements compete internally for attention and capital. Belief suffers when brands are forced into simplification without a belief owner.
The Persona exit and founder reacquisition
We worked with Jason Brown to launch Persona Nutrition, one of the first personalization-led DTC supplement brands. It was built and positioned for acquisition, which occurred when Nestlé Health Science acquired it in 2019 as part of its expansion into personalized nutrition. In 2024, Persona returned to founder leadership when Jason reacquired the business and brought it back under his ownership.
This is a case study in how a supplement brand can be strategically interesting and still struggle inside a conglomerate portfolio if it is too small to command attention, or too specialized to fit the existing operating model. Personalized nutrition requires a particular kind of focus and craft, especially in subscription.
Lesson: When that focus is diluted, growth can stall. In cases like this, a return to founder ownership can be less about nostalgia and more about putting the brand back in the hands of an operator whose belief and expertise match what the model actually demands.
How belief gets broken after close
Belief rarely collapses in a single move. It is usually weakened by a series of small changes after close. Here are five patterns we see most often.
- Voice change: The brand starts speaking like the parent, or like generic wellness. Loyal consumers describe this as losing authenticity.
- Proof change: Standards change. Sometimes the brand starts stretching claims and overpromises. Sometimes it becomes watered down. Either way, the customer notices inconsistency.
- Hero dilution: The hero SKU that carries the brand gets crowded by extensions, line complexity, or quiet formula changes that make customers question what else has changed.
- Channel drift: Expansion happens faster than the belief system can follow. The brand’s authority cues no longer match where it is sold and how it is merchandised.
- Governance change: Too many hands touch the brand with no single accountable owner of belief. Marketing, sales, regulatory, e-commerce, and product each make reasonable decisions. With no one as the keeper of belief, the brand gradually loses the memory of what made it believable to its customers.
If you are buying belief, how much do you plan to steward it
Not every acquirer aspires to be a steward. That is fine. The problem is when an acquirer thinks it is buying a simple product business, but the consumer is buying something else. In supplements, that something else is often belief.
The useful question is not whether the acquirer is a good operator. It is how much belief stewardship the asset requires, and whether the acquirer is willing to provide it.
Here is a simple way to tell when a brand is belief-heavy. If several of these are true, the brand will not tolerate aggressive standardization without paying a price.
A brand is belief-heavy when:
- Customers talk about it in values language, not just benefits
- Transparency is part of the product, meaning traceability, sourcing, and showing the work
- The brand’s credibility matters as much as the ingredient list
- One or two hero products carry symbolic weight and loyalty
- The channel is part of credibility, whether that is natural, practitioner, supplement retail chain, or DTC
- The founder story or origin story is still doing work
When those conditions exist, integration choices have brand consequences. You can still pursue efficiency. You just have to know what you are not allowed to standardize.
What we see in the M&A landscape right now
This is what makes today’s wave of unbundling so instructive. In multiple recent deals, the buyer is not just buying distribution. They are buying the chance to restore meaning. That is why words like stewardship and restore authentic roots keep showing up in deal language. It is a signal that the asset is belief-heavy, and that belief needs active care.
That is the cycle we are watching play out across supplements right now. Belief gets bought at a premium. It gets weakened when integration standardizes the very things that made the brand believable. Then it gets rebuilt by the next owner, or by the same owner once it recognizes what it actually purchased.
In 2018, we were in the age of large strategic acquirers buying supplement brands. Today, we are increasingly in the age of rebuilding them. The supplement category is unlike other CPG categories because consumers are not only buying a product. They are making a judgment call about what to trust. The brands that win are the ones that earn belief and keep earning it. Belief creates permission, loyalty, and premium pricing. It also gets quietly damaged when post-acquisition integration standardizes the wrong things.