What a supplement brand is actually worth.

Capstone Partners put the average vitamins and supplements M&A multiple at 10.7x EV/EBITDA across 2024 and 2025 year to date, ahead of the broader consumer sector at 9.7x. Seventy deals closed in the category in 2025 year to date, up from 59 the year before. Strategic buyers took 80% of them.

If you own a supplement brand, 10.7x is the number that sticks in your head. It is almost certainly not your number.

The number that applies to you

Multiples move with size, and they move hard. GF Data’s Q3 2025 figures for the lower middle market:

• $1M to $5M enterprise value: around 5.5x
• $5M to $10M: around 5.6x
• $10M to $25M: 6.4x
• $25M to $50M: 6.8x
• $50M to $100M: 8.3x
• $100M to $250M: 10.3x

The 10.7x sector average is carried by deals five to twenty times the size of yours. A brand throwing off $2M of EBITDA is not in a 10x conversation. It is in a 5.5x to 6.5x conversation.

What that gap is worth in dollars

Take a brand doing $8M of revenue at a 25% EBITDA margin. That is $2M of EBITDA.

At 5.5x it sells for $11M. At 6.5x it sells for $13M. One turn of EBITDA is $2M, which is more than most founders pull out of the business in three years. And that turn is decided almost entirely by things you control.

What actually moves it

Four things raise the number, in rough order of how much they matter:

1. Repeat purchase. A subscription base or a high reorder rate is the single most valuable thing on your P&L, because it is the only line a buyer can forecast with confidence. Everything else is an assumption.
2. Channel spread. One retailer or one marketplace above 40% of revenue gets priced as a risk. Buyers do not pay a premium for a business whose largest customer could halve it with an email.
3. Gross margin, held under scrutiny. Not the margin in your deck. The margin after freight, returns, chargebacks, promotional allowances and the pallets sitting in a 3PL you have not written down.
4. Management that is not you. If the key supplier relationship, the formulation knowledge and the retailer contacts all live in one head, the buyer is purchasing a job.

Three things lower it: heavy Amazon dependence, unsupported label claims, and aging inventory nobody has taken a write-down on.

Revenue multiples, and why founders reach for them

Founders with thin EBITDA often ask to be valued on revenue instead. Buyers do it too, at roughly 1x to 2x for a brand with real repeat purchase and clean margins. Be careful what you are asking for. If your EBITDA is thin because the business is subscale, a revenue multiple flatters you. If it is thin because you are reinvesting hard into a business with 70% gross margins and a growing subscription base, the revenue multiple is the honest one and you should push for it.

The part nobody tells you

The multiple is set by the market. The EBITDA is set by you, and it is the bigger lever. Moving from a 20% to a 25% EBITDA margin on $8M of revenue adds $400K of EBITDA. At 6x, that is $2.4M of enterprise value, from margin work you would want to do anyway.

Founders spend their energy negotiating the multiple in the last three weeks. The money is in the eighteen months before that.