We’re thrilled to close out 2024 by celebrating our final Trailblazer of the year—Greg Horn! Greg is the Managing Director & Partner at William Hood & Company, where he leads the Ingredients practice. A seasoned leader in health and nutrition, Greg was previously CEO of GNC Live Well, where he helped grow revenue from $400 million to $1.5 billion. He has also held senior leadership roles at Garden of Life and Royal Numico.
Greg has co-founded several successful nutrition companies, including Celsius®, Attune Foods, and Axcella Health. Throughout his career, he has been involved in over $5 billion in M&A and capital-raising transactions, including the sales of Natreon, Nutrition21, and Metagenics. A passionate advocate for health and sustainability, Greg is also the author of Living Green, Living Well, and The Meaning of Light. He holds an MBA in Finance from UCLA Anderson and a BA from the University of Redlands. Explore his insights in the responses below.
In your opinion, what makes our industry uniquely exciting, and why?
Every single day I remind myself what we are really trying to do here, and for me that is bringing to life the potential of nutrition to positively impact human health. Nutrition is fundamental to sustaining and improving life, and we are just beginning to understand and apply its potential. For pregnant women, infants and children, the right nutrition can provide a strong head start with lifelong advantages including preventing blindness, reaching full brain development and height potential, and more – just ask the people who are doing this every day with Vitamin Angels. For vulnerable populations including the elderly, the incapacitated and the very ill, the right nutrition can literally be the difference between life and death. For the rest of us, the right nutrition can make our lives better every single day, help prevent and manage conditions, and improve performance across a wide range of health parameters.
Our industry is uniquely exciting because we are just scratching the surface of nutrition’s potential. Scientific discoveries validating the effectiveness of specific nutrition therapies and compounds are being published at an increasing rate, and each study stands on the shoulders of all previous learning. For someone who cares deeply about the health potential of nutrition and has built a career developing effective products that allow people benefit people, the field has never been more interesting or exciting.
What’s the most unconventional approach or strategy you’ve seen work wonders in our industry?
Keeping it simple. That’s the hardest thing to do and also the most effective. The highest-profile successes I have had resulted from simplifying the thinking enough to have clarity on innovative solutions that consumers could relate to and benefit from. Mega Men as the first multivitamin for men, moving GNC from “Where America Shops for Health” to “Live Well”, creating Celsius as the first functional beverage with human clinical trials supporting benefit, leveraging the organic and non-GMO logos to enhance the profile of the Garden of Life brand – these were all simple, powerful ideas that broke through to consumers.
In your opinion, what emerging technology or trend will have the most significant impact on our industry in the next three to five years?
Four themes – smarter computers, better metrics, a bigger toolbox of bioactives and advanced insights into highly complex “-omic” interactions – come together to herald in a whole new era of applied effective nutrition with a degree of precision and tunability with feedback that we can only imagine today. Rich people and performance athletes will probably be the first to benefit, but at scale this set of advancements can benefit tens of millions of people and help manage and even prevent the largest nutritionally-addressable health conditions facing humanity. Conditions like diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, obesity, and other major killers that are well known to be highly impacted by nutrition. The democratization of information made possible by first by the internet and now by AI will enhance accessibility for these breakthroughs.
What are the most common misconceptions people have about our industry, and how would you debunk them?
One common misconception about the dietary supplement industry is that it is somehow “not regulated”. There are tighter regulations around dietary supplements than there are around food, beverages, cosmetics, and many other products we use and consume daily. I was one of the leaders and advocates for the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, and that set of regulations governs how dietary supplement products are manufactured, how they must be tested, what structure-function statements can be made, and how they can be sold. Thirty years later, reading about someone claiming we are “unregulated” drives me crazy.
Describe a project or initiative you’re currently working on that you’re particularly passionate about. What makes it stand out?
My next book will be called Living Longer – The Art and Science of Aging Well. For many years I have been studying all I can about the biological markers of aging and how nutrition and lifestyle factors can influence them. I see cellular health as the key, and there are four factors in the construct I am working on for optimal cellular health and longevity: Cellular energy is the ability to make energy in the mitochondria. Cellular renewal is the replacement of lazy senescent cells with fresh new ones via autophagy. Cellular protection is the prevention and repair of damage from intracellular antioxidant mechanisms. Cellular strength is enhancing the integrity and resilience of cellular membrane. I have been fortunate to do deep work on product and ingredient commercialization in each of these areas. I am currently most fascinated with influencing cellular strength with pentadecanoic acid (C15:0), the first new essential nutrient discovered in more than 40 years. Cellular strength has cellular longevity implications but also far more immediate potential to enhance cardiovascular, liver, brain and immune health.