From health-care hope to costly setback: Nestlé sells vitamin brands at a multibillion-franc loss

Nestlé is selling the vitamin business it once hoped would help transform the food giant into a health-care company. The seven brands, sold mainly in the United States, will go to American private-equity firm Yellow Wood Partners for around 800 million Swiss francs. Nature’s Bounty is among them.

The sale comes near Philipp Navratil’s first anniversary as chief executive and confirms the direction he began signaling in February, when Nestlé said it planned to dispose of the business. The mainstream vitamin unit generates about 1 billion francs in revenue, a small amount beside Nestlé’s total sales of 89.5 billion francs.

Yet the transaction closes what Vontobel analyst Jean-Philippe Bertschy called “a painful episode of value destruction.” Nestlé announced a 1.3 billion-franc impairment when it presented its first-half 2026 results. The charge would have been larger if the company were not retaining some vitamin brands.

The retreat reverses ambitions associated with Mark Schneider, who bought several vitamin and supplement companies as part of a plan to push Nestlé further into products between nutrition and health. In 2021, Nestlé paid about 5.2 billion francs for The Bountiful Company, which owned most of the brands now being sold. Nestlé Health Science had already been created under Schneider’s predecessors, Paul Bulcke and Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.

The vitamin strategy failed to deliver. Nestlé may now generate less revenue from mainstream vitamins than it did when it made the 2021 acquisition. The company also assembled the portfolio too quickly, and information-technology problems during integration left it unable to deliver products for months. The sale acknowledges that Nestlé backed the wrong segment, even as it continues to operate in health care.

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a painful episode of value destruction