Procter & Gamble is paying $3.8 billion in cash for supplement maker Thorne, P&G confirmed on August 4, 2026. That’s 5.6 times what private equity firm L Catterton paid to take the same company private just three years earlier, in 2023, for $680 million. Nothing about a supplement brand normally justifies that kind of markup in three years — unless you understand customer lifetime value.
Customer lifetime value, or LTV, is the total profit a business expects to earn from one customer over the entire time that customer keeps buying — not just their first purchase. It matters because it’s the number you compare against customer acquisition cost (CAC) to know whether growth is actually worth anything. A company that sells a $30 bottle of vitamins once has a very different business than one that sells the same customer a refill every month for five years.
Thorne’s growth under L Catterton leaned hard into that second model. Revenue rose from $229 million in 2022 to more than $500 million in 2025, and the company is on pace for $650 million this year. A large part of that came through direct-to-consumer subscriptions and a practitioner channel — doctors and trainers recommending Thorne to patients and clients who then keep reordering — rather than one-time retail sales. Roughly 60% of Thorne’s revenue now comes from consumers under 40, and about half of its younger direct-to-consumer shoppers are subscribers, according to comments from CEO Colin Watts. That’s a customer base P&G is buying not for what it spends once, but for what it’s expected to keep spending for years.
This is the same logic that makes a down round go the other way: when a business’s future customer revenue looks more durable, not less, the market is willing to pay a much higher multiple for the same current-year sales. It’s also a reminder that private equity ownership periods like L Catterton’s aren’t just about cutting costs — sometimes the real work is building the exact subscription behavior that makes lifetime value, not just this year’s revenue, the number buyers are paying for.
Not advice. Just how I see it.