A UK health and wellbeing retailer, headquartered in Nuneaton, selling vitamins, supplements, natural beauty and vegan and vegetarian food.
Holland and Barrett is a health and wellness retailer. It sells vitamins and minerals, herbal products, ethical beauty and vegetarian and vegan food, through shops and online. It describes itself as a health and wellness brand, and its shops are a familiar sight on UK high streets. Customers can also buy sports nutrition, natural remedies and foods for different diets, with advice from shop colleagues, and the brand has been advertised on TV with Kim Wilde in 2004 to 2005 and David Jason narrating a 2013 campaign.
The company traces back to 1870, when Major William Holland and Alfred Slapps Barrett bought a grocery store in Bishop's Stortford. A shop in Epsom High Street is recorded in 1900. In the 1920s Alfred Button and Sons bought the business and kept the name, and in 1970 Booker acquired it as the business moved towards health foods. It has had several owners since. In 2015 the company said it would pay its entire workforce, and in 2012 it withdrew from the government Work Programme after protests. The business later passed to LloydsPharmacy in 1992 and to NBTY in 1997. The Carlyle Group bought NBTY in 2010, and in June 2017 it was sold to L1 Retail. Names it has used include Holland and Barrett Europe Limited from 2002 and NBTY Europe Limited from 2004 to 2015.
We did not find a mission statement in the pages we could read, so we are not quoting one. Its own jobs and corporate pages should be checked for current values.
The headquarters is at Eliot Park in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, which also served as the central distribution hub. In March 2016 more than 300 people worked at the Nuneaton base, and the company was expanding the building. Wikipedia lists about 1,300 locations and 9,000 employees in 2025, but the sources give conflicting total store counts and no UK-only figure. Wikipedia reports revenue and international franchising, with first stores in Durban in 2008 and Shanghai in 2012, but the UK remains the base. The Nuneaton site holds its central distribution hub, which the group legal director described in 2016 as fitting the bill perfectly.
Jobs in the business include shop colleagues and managers, buyers and product developers, nutrition and regulatory teams, warehouse and distribution, marketing, e-commerce and finance. It could suit someone interested in food, wellbeing and how health products are regulated and sold.
Website: www.hollandandbarrett.com
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