Who Owns the Company Matters

Hey, Jen here again. I’m the CEO of The Synergy Company. 

If you follow health and wellness, you probably saw the news that Procter & Gamble is acquiring Thorne for $3.8 billion. 

First, I'm not here to bash Thorne. I know people affiliated with the company, and they're good people. Thorne has built a respected brand with a high-integrity origin story. Nor is P&G new to health and supplements; it already owns brands including New Chapter and Align. This is what consolidation looks like. And from a financial perspective, it's a remarkable outcome: L Catterton took Thorne private in 2023 in a transaction valued at roughly $680 million. Three years later, P&G is paying $3.8 billion. 

Don't hate the player, hate the game? To be clear, I believe businesses should grow and profit is essential to a healthy enterprise. Growth lets us invest, innovate and create more good jobs. My coworkers matter enormously to me, and I want the jobs we create to be good ones: jobs that support people, families and the local economies where we live and work. I also learn from large companies all the time. Scale, technology, talent and access to capital can create extraordinary capabilities. 

I've spent my career working across different forms of ownership and governance, from employee-owned and closely held companies to founder-led businesses, boards and institutional capital. I've lived inside these systems, and one thing I know is that who owns the company matters. Not because one ownership model produces good people and another produces bad ones, but because ownership creates incentives. Those incentives eventually show up in how patiently a company can think, what it invests in, what it cuts, what return is enough, whose voice carries weight, and what happens when financial performance and product integrity appear to be in tension. 

That is why I find the customer reaction to the Thorne acquisition more interesting than the acquisition itself. Across Thorne's social media, customers are asking some version of the same question: Will the product change? Will the quality stay the same? Can I still trust this company? 

Those aren't irrational questions, nor are they evidence that consumers don't understand business. I think they reveal that consumers understand something quite sophisticated about business: incentives matter, even when you can't see them.

I don't know what P&G will do with Thorne. None of us does. They may be excellent stewards of the brand. They certainly have 3.8 billion reasons not to destroy what made it valuable in the first place.

There is some relevant history. P&G acquired New Chapter in 2012, and its founders stayed with the company for another six years. In a 2018 interview with NutraIngredients, Paul and Barbi Schulick went out of their way not to demonize P&G. They described a relationship that had been good for a long time and credited P&G with giving New Chapter reach it likely could not have achieved on its own. But they also explained why they ultimately left: what they described as “financial pressures to accelerate profits,” and concern that those pressures could eventually erode New Chapter's innovation and distinctiveness. 

But I can tell you what ownership looks like where I sit. 

The Synergy Company remains closely held by its founders, Mitchell and Jayne May. I know my owners. I work with them directly. I know what they care about, what they will invest in, what drives them crazy and where they refuse to compromise. They know me just as well. There isn't an abstraction called "shareholder value" sitting between us. 

That doesn't mean we get to ignore economics. Quite the opposite. I am responsible for making this company financially stronger. We have to grow revenue, generate profit, manage cash, allocate capital intelligently and make hard choices about where we spend. Profit isn't in conflict with our principles. Profit gives us the ability to keep practicing them. 

But there is a difference between discipline and extraction. A disciplined company asks whether a cost makes us better. An extractive system can eventually start asking how much value can be removed without breaking the thing that creates it. Those questions can look remarkably similar in a spreadsheet. They are profoundly different questions in practice. 

That's where proximity matters. And proximity isn't only about who owns us. It's about how we operate. 

We go deep into the science, the plants, bioavailability, combinations and forms. We call this the Bog Crawl. It is part of our founding DNA, born from Mitchell's relentless drive to seek what can be best, and sustained through deep inquiry and rigor. We keep going, following the science into the particulars, even when an easier answer is available. 

That rigor extends to what goes into those formulations. We are positively insufferable about who we buy ingredients from, how they're grown, how they're harvested and processed, what compounds are actually present, and whether there is something better. Some of those relationships with farmers and suppliers go back decades. 

Sometimes that inquiry takes us all the way back to the soil and to organic and Biodynamic agriculture. Not because those words make for good corporate virtue signaling, but because how a plant is grown, where it is grown and what it encounters while growing can matter to what that plant ultimately becomes. And for Mitchell, Organic has always been about people, too. It means reducing the exposure of farmers and agricultural workers to toxic chemicals in the process of growing the ingredients we depend on. How we grow something matters to the plant, to the people who grow it, and ultimately to the people who use what we make. 

Mitchell and Jayne built this company according to a particular set of convictions, and I believe stewardship means preserving them. But preservation doesn't mean standing still. It means knowing what is essential, protecting it fiercely, and continuing to find better and more precise ways to express it. 

In fact, stewardship isn't simply preserving what Mitchell and Jayne built. It's preserving the convictions and practices that allowed them to build it in the first place. The next generation's responsibility isn't merely to preserve Mitchell's answers. It's to preserve the seeking. 

That's work we're doing right now. 

At the heart of Pure Synergy are our products and the people who use them. We're going deeper into both: the plants, the science, the formulations and the extraordinary particulars of how our products are made, but also the people who choose them and what they're trying to make possible in their own lives. The intersection of those two things is Pure Synergy. 

Over the coming months, you'll begin to see us tell that story more precisely. Some things will look different. That's intentional. But the ownership isn't changing, the convictions aren't changing, and we aren't sanding off our edges to look more like the increasingly consolidated wellness industry around us. Quite the opposite. We're getting clearer about what makes us different. 

We are a relatively small company competing alongside some enormous ones, and I like that. Competition sharpens our wits, our attention and our passion for getting it right. We learn from big companies. We'd be foolish not to. Scale can produce extraordinary capabilities, and there are things large companies do exceptionally well. But scale can also create distance, and our proximity is something I don't want to trade away. 

We know our farmers and suppliers. We formulate our products. We make them. We know our owners. And increasingly, we know the people, our consumers, who use them. 

Competition doesn't require us to become more like everyone else. At our best, it forces us to become more distinctly ourselves. I’m interested in growth that amplifies what makes Synergy valuable rather than extracting value from it. I want us to become more successful without becoming more distant. 

If the recent news in our industry has you looking more closely at the companies behind the products you use, I think that's a good thing. Look closely. Ask who owns them. Ask where and how their products are made. Ask what they optimize for and what they won't compromise. Ask whether the story they're telling matches the choices they're making. 

We’re getting ready to tell our story in a more powerful way so we can keep earning your trust.