About Us

Holland & Barrett International is a UK leader in health and wellness with over 150 years of experience, supplying its customers with a wide range of vitamins, minerals, health supplements, specialist foods and natural beauty products.

Our Proposition

Holland & Barrett International’s business is segmented into key areas:

• Vitamins & Supplements
• Sports Nutrition
• Natural Beauty
• Food & Drink

We sell a wide range of branded and own-label products across these categories and also own a number of trademarks for specific product lines.

In total we offer our customers a wide range of SKUs, including products from some of the world’s most famous vitamin, nutrition and natural beauty brands including Dr Organic and Precision Engineered.

Our Expertise

We are particularly proud of our extensive specialist training programme, which is unparalleled in the health supplement industry. Using our unique “Hive” online training platform, our associates can learn in an interactive way from anywhere in the world.

Our associates are fully trained in understanding product safety and contraindications for products and can advise on a variety of different medical conditions. They can help to not only relieve the symptoms for ailments but also advise on products which will help prevent reoccurrence.

Our commitment means customers can confidently have access to clear and concise information to help them make informed product choices to match their needs.

Our training courses progressively develop our colleague’s knowledge on everything from vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements to sports nutrition, beauty products and how our bodies work, giving you a service level not found anywhere else on the high street or online.

Innovation - Free From

We believe in innovation not just for innovation’s sake, but in sourcing products to fulfil our customers’ health and wellbeing needs from the comfort of their high street. In 2015, we set out our aim to become the UK’s largest Free From retailer with the launch of the largest Free From food range available in the UK and the country’s first ever Free From concept store –Holland & Barrett More.

Catering for the needs of the estimated 10 million of food allergy and intolerance sufferers in Britain, our proposition listed 600 Free From products at launch with the aim to go on to list 3,000 products, covering all the main Free From categories defined in legislation, from gluten and dairy free through to nut, egg and fish allergies.

This wasn’t just a business move for us. One of the drivers for the new proposition was the personal experience of our former CEO Peter Aldis whose son has a nut allergy. This experience prompted Holland & Barrett to partner with national charity Allergy UK, which campaigns to ensure allergy is not a forgotten condition, and provides advice, information and support to people with allergies and food intolerance.

Charitable Giving

Holland & Barrett International’s wellbeing ethos means charity is a big deal. Our own foundation Healthy Hope supports fundraising efforts of our associates across our business with the key focus on health and wellbeing, education relating to health, wellbeing and the environment and the protection and improvement of the environment.

Every year we donate a large amount of money from various fundraising events to Rainbows Children’s Hospice in Loughborough. Here, life-limited children and their families can find care and support.

Corporate Social Responsibility

At Holland & Barrett we don’t just want to be good for our customers, we want to be good for the planet too. That’s why in 2007 we launched the Plan-it Green project to ensure we are environmentally responsible retailers. We are very proud of our achievements here:

• We were the first retailer to abandon plastic bags in store, six years before the 5p charge was introduced by the Government this year
• We are the only national retailer to have introduced an entire range of toiletries free from parabens and sodium lauryl sulphates
• We look to source over 95% of our products from suppliers in the UK to considerably reduce the need for sea and air freight
• We have introduced carbon offsetting initiatives with the Carbon Trust and switched to renewable materials for all advertising materials

In addition to these achievements, we are particularly proud to be the first national retailer to ensure all of our products are free from plastic microbeads which have been found to cause harm to the oceans and the marine life that live there.

Our products are made from natural ingredients taken from Mother Nature and so we want to help look after the environment in return. From waste, energy and the products we sell through to the suppliers we work with, we want to make our impact on the planet as small as possible.

Market Regulation & Customer Safety

As one of the world’s leading health and wellness retailers, we understand that it is our duty to set a gold standard in terms of regulation, consumer safety and labelling.

Holland & Barrett International is a long-standing member of the Health Food Manufacturers’ Association, working effectively to represent the interests of the UK natural health products industry at all levels of the legislative, regulatory and Parliamentary process.

As part of our membership, we comply fully with the HFMA’s Code of Practice to raise standards across the entire industry when it comes to labelling and marketing of our products, in line with the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation, set out by the European Food Safety Authority. We ask all of the thousands of suppliers we work with to adopt the same high standards when it comes to the production and marketing of their own products.

We are committed to the safety of our customers with all our products. Our charter includes a commitment that every sales associate is 'qualified to advise', but at our head office, our technical and safety advisory ensure that our products are produced in a way that ensures the safest possible experience for our customers, and we always urge all customers to speak to their GP before embarking on a new nutritional routine.