Europeans spend billions on pills that aren't allowed to promise anything. An EU supplement can only advertise health claims approved by EFSA, the food safety regulator, and roughly 92% of claim applications fail. A dossier costs around €700,000, usually to be told no. So the industry sells magnesium, collagen and probiotics while saying remarkably little about what they do. Sales grow every year regardless. In France, the market hit €3bn in 2025, and 61% of adults now take the stuff.

Private equity has noticed. 3i turned Havea, a family-owned French vitamin maker, into a reported €1bn+ exit. KKR, CVC and Bayer have all bought in. Two weeks ago STADA, itself private equity owned, picked up sixteen pharmacy supplement brands from a Danish family business and promised to keep buying.

The Americans ran this trade first, and loudly. US supplement sales went from roughly $49bn in 2019 to nearly $70bn in 2024, and Nestlé once paid 16.8x EBITDA for a supplement platform. Europe is on the same curve, but earlier: the share of French adults taking supplements went from 46% in 2018 to 61% in 2024. That gap is the pitch in one line. Buy Europe today, get America's last decade on replay.

Except the two markets don't share a sales channel — and in supplements, the channel turns out to be the active ingredient.

In the US, vitamins are sold wherever attention is cheapest: Amazon, mass retail, Instagram. In continental Europe, they are sold where trust already lives: the pharmacy. French pharmacies take 55% of all supplement sales, and that share grew 8.2% in 2024, faster than the market itself. In Italy, Europe's largest supplement market, pharmacies move around 80% of product. The gatekeeper is not being disrupted. It is gaining share.

Why does this matter? Because the pharmacist solves the industry's oldest problem, trust, at no cost to the brand owner. American roll-ups had to build credibility themselves: own the factory, own the quality control, then sell the whole apparatus to a strategic. A European brand with good pharmacy relationships collects its credibility across the counter, one recommendation at a time. That relationship is the real asset in this market, and it is what every acquirer in this story has been paying for. The one big exception is Germany, which grew up on drugstores and Amazon rather than pharmacists. Keep Germany in mind; it becomes important later.

The template deal is Nutranext, told at length in Road to Carry's Behind America's Vitamin Aisle. The short version: Jose Minski owned a Florida supplements business, Nature's Products — part brand portfolio, part contract manufacturer. Instead of selling it, he co-founded a private equity firm, WM Partners, dropped the company into its first fund as the platform, and renamed it Nutranext.

The strategy was simple to state and hard to execute. Buy adjacent supplement brands at single digit EBITDA multiples, in the firm's own words. Run everything through the company's own certified factory, because in an industry infamous for sketchy ingredients and creative labelling, controlling production is what makes brands trustworthy enough to sell at scale. Under the fund, revenues nearly doubled while EBITDA more than quadrupled.

A few years later, Clorox — yes, the bleach people — paid $700m for Nutranext, about 3.5x its 2017 sales of roughly $200m. The detail that matters is what Clorox was paying for. Not the dozen or so brands, most of which you have never heard of. It paid for the machine: the factory, the regulatory grade quality control, the omnichannel sales engine. The brands were the vehicle. The machine was the asset.

Hold onto that thought, because it is the test we will apply to Europe: what does the machine look like when the customer buys on a pharmacist's word instead of an Amazon review?

Meet Havea, known as Ponroy Santé until 2019. In 1975, Yves Ponroy started a natural health laboratory in western France. Fifty years later the group still makes 80 to 90% of its products at one site, running up to 100,000 capsules an hour and getting a new product to market in two or three months. Sound familiar? Europe's version of the story also starts with a factory.

The private equity chapter opens in January 2017, when 3i invested €150m, alongside €30m from Cathay Capital, into a business doing more than €170m of sales. The thesis was consolidation, and the executive chairman said so out loud on day one. Then they went shopping.

Notice the pattern in the third column. Every deal bought a channel or a prescriber relationship. The brands came attached to the distribution, not the other way round.

The integration model is the opposite of the American stitch together. Brands keep their names, teams and sales forces; the shared machine is the factory plus a central support unit that cut launch times from months to weeks. You consolidate the engine room, not the shopfront. In a market where the shopfront is a trusted local brand recommended by a pharmacist, that is the correct answer.

It worked. By 2021 revenue had doubled to €212m and EBITDA had tripled, with margins up from 22% to 28%. In October 2022 a consortium led by BC Partners bought the business, reportedly for €1–1.1bn — roughly 5x revenue. 3i's proceeds: €540m, or 3.0x its money at a 23% IRR. Not Clorox money. But a proper outcome, achieved in five years.

And the buying hasn't stopped. Under BC Partners, Havea added Bears with Benefits, a German gummies brand bought for its direct-to-consumer muscle, and Biocyte, a French nutricosmetics business — then announced a €500m acquisition war chest and a €1bn revenue target for 2027. Revenue reached roughly €330m in 2024, so organic growth alone won't get there; the rest has to be bought, and nothing has been announced since January 2023. If you own anything Havea might want, take note: somewhere in western France sits half a billion euros that still needs spending. And Havea is one platform among several — remember STADA from the opening, promising exactly the same thing.

The obvious objection to everything above: maybe Europe isn't different, just late. Online is growing everywhere, Germany already looks half American, and the adoption curves rhyme.

Two facts don't cooperate. First, the gatekeeper is gaining share — French pharmacy sales grew ahead of the market in 2024, and channels being disrupted do not usually outgrow their disruptors. Second, the gap is legal rather than developmental. America deregulated supplements in 1994; the EU built a closed claims list in 2002. Forks in the road, not points on the same road.

Germany, the most American market in Europe, is the tiebreaker. Its digital native brands all sold: Bears with Benefits to Havea, Natsana to Bayer, Sunday Natural and The Quality Group to CVC. Not one grew into a consolidator. The reason is an asymmetry: credibility built in the pharmacy travels onto the digital shelf — Havea's own online sales went from 3% to 30% in three years — but credibility built on Amazon doesn't travel back the other way. The traffic runs one way: digital brands sell, platforms buy.

So there are two trades here, not one. The feeder trade is the US playbook as an on-ramp: build a digital brand fast, prove the repeat purchases, sell within five years. The platform trade is the Havea model: own pharmacy relationships country by country, then buy the digital natives once someone else has de-risked them. Slower and dearer, because every new market must be bought rather than entered — but that cost is the moat. What makes a platform painful to build is what makes it valuable to own.

Britain ran the experiment for us. The UK kept essentially the same claims rules after Brexit, but it never had the pharmacy channel: British supplements sell through Holland & Barrett, the supermarkets, Boots and Amazon. The result looks like America — a crowded scrap for attention in which even the top five brands' combined share slipped from 44% to 40% in two years. Same rulebook, different outcome. The moat is the pharmacy counter, not the regulation.

Which gives you the one number to watch: continental pharmacy share. If the French and Italians ever start buying vitamins the way the British do, the moat is gone. For now, the opposite is happening. Comfortable over a five year hold; twenty years is a bet.

Plenty. Three things would worry me most.

The honest answer: the targets exist, the entry prices are sane, and the hard part is not the part you'd expect.

Look at what Havea actually bought: businesses doing €12m to €23m of revenue. That is squarely search fund and independent sponsor territory. Founder-led supplement brands trade at around 3.5x to 5.5x EBITDA, scaled platforms at 8x to 11x, and the strategic ceiling sits far above that — Nestlé paid around 16.8x for Bountiful in 2021. The multiple ladder runs in the right direction, which is more than can be said for most sectors this popular.

But notice what every rung of that ladder is actually pricing. Havea didn't pay for brands; it paid for 7,000 Italian pharmacies and a roster of Belgian pharmacist relationships. A supplement brand without a channel is stock in a warehouse with a nice label. So the two realistic ways in are the two trades from earlier. Build or buy a digital brand and run the feeder play, accepting that Germany has shown how the story ends: you sell, probably within five years, hopefully well. Or buy a small pharmacy channel brand with genuine prescriber relationships — rarer, slower, less glamorous, and precisely the asset the platforms keep writing cheques for.

When I wrote about accounting roll-ups, the conclusion was that the binding constraint isn't capital, of which there is plenty, but operating skill. Half of that survives the journey here. Capital is still abundant. But in supplements the scarce input isn't operations. It's distribution. Buy the relationship, not the label.

Disclaimer: Stripped back to just the facts and a few opinions. Views are my own, sources public, none of it financial advice. Best consult a professional before doing anything with real money.