The Last Independent Supplement Brands

Written by Dr Jatin Joshi, co-founder and Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of Personally, and a researcher at the University of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. I have a financial stake in this company, and you should weigh what follows with that in mind.

If you have taken supplements for any length of time, you probably have a brand you settled on years ago. You did the reading once, you liked what you found, and you have bought the same thing since without going back to check.

It is worth going back to check. Not because the brand has necessarily got worse, but because there is a reasonable chance it is no longer owned by the people whose judgement you were actually buying.

The short version. A great deal of the supplement aisle has been bought up over the past decade by large consumer goods groups, pharmaceutical companies and private equity firms. That is not a scandal and it does not automatically make a product worse. But ownership shapes what a formula is optimised for, and the pressures that come with scale pull against exactly the choices that make a formula good. Independence is not a virtue by itself. It is worth something because of what it permits.

The pattern is public and easy enough to verify. Over the last decade or so, brands built by small teams with strong opinions have been acquired, folded into portfolios, and run at scale. Some were bought by consumer goods groups that also sell soap and ice cream. Some by pharmaceutical companies. A large number by private equity firms, which buy with an exit in mind and a timetable attached.

None of that is wrongdoing. Founders are entitled to sell what they built, and buyers are entitled to buy. Plenty of acquired brands are made carefully and to a good standard. I would not want anyone to read this as an accusation about particular people, because it is not one.

But it does change the question the formulation team is answering.

Three pressures come with scale, and each one pushes in the same direction.

The first is cost of goods. When a formula is made in enormous volume, a few pennies per unit on an ingredient becomes a real number on a spreadsheet. That is exactly where the cheaper form of a nutrient starts to look sensible. Nutrients come in different chemical forms, and the forms are not interchangeable in how well the body takes them up or how well they are tolerated. The better form usually costs more. Once, at small volume, that decision is easy. Across millions of units, with a target to hit, it stops being easy.

The second is shelf life and stability. A product that has to survive a warehouse, a lorry, a shop and a customer's cupboard is under constraints that a product made recently and shipped straight to one person is not. Those constraints are legitimate. They also rule things out.

The third is the portfolio. A company with a range of products has something to protect. If the evidence for an ingredient moves, and that ingredient is in six of your lines, changing your mind is expensive in a way it simply is not for a company with one thing to change. I am not claiming anyone knowingly sells something they think is useless. I am saying that the cost of updating gets high enough that the update tends to be slow.

Independence is not virtuous in itself. There is nothing morally superior about a small company, and some small companies are careless in ways a large one would never get away with. What independence buys is a set of permissions.

You can choose the expensive form of a nutrient because it is the better one, and take the hit.

You can change a formula when the evidence changes, without a portfolio review and without explaining to anyone why last year's version is being retired.

You can leave something out. This is the one people underrate. When there is no range to protect and no category you have to have an entry in, the decision not to include an ingredient costs you nothing, so you can make it on the evidence alone.

It would be convenient to leave that argument there and let you assume we are the family workshop at the end of it. We are not, and you should have the real picture.

Personally is a venture-backed company. We have taken outside money, our investors expect a return, and in time they will want an exit like any other investor. Anyone telling you that structure carries no pressure at all is not being straight with you.

What I would say is that the pressures currently point the same way as the product. We make each formula to order in our own facility in Boulder rather than buying finished goods in bulk, so there is no warehouse of stock whose value falls if we change a formula. There is no legacy range to protect, because there is no range. And the business depends on people staying month after month, which makes over-promising an expensive mistake rather than a cheap sale. That alignment is a fact about our current structure, not a promise about our character. If it stops being true, the right thing is to say so.

You do not need to abandon a brand you like. You do need to know that "I researched this in 2019" is not the same as knowing what you are buying today.

So look up who owns it now. Look at the form of each nutrient, not just its name. And see whether the formula has been changed in the last few years, because a formula that has never moved is telling you something about the company that makes it.