Optum Now partners with Vous Vitamin to bring customers savings on personalized nutrition supplements

Image courtesy of Vous Vitamin

Optum Now has launched a partnership with Vous Vitamin, a personalized nutrition company, offering group level savings for those ordering a Vous Vitamin subscription from the Optum Now store. “Group savings available through Optum Now are a 20% recurring savings on personalized vitamin subscription programs so consumers can start a subscription and not just save 20% on their initial order, but every reorder in their subscription program,” says Brad Helfand, CEO of Vous Vitamin.

Vous Vitamin’s platform is unique to other personalized nutrition brands because its customers fill out a health questionnaire and get personalized multivitamin that fits their needs. This is in contrast to companies such as Care/Of, which was shuttered by Bayer in July of 2024, that offered personalized pill packs containing multiple supplements per pack. Optum Now is an RVO Health company that also includes Healthline and Healthgrades. RVO Health was formed in July of 2022 as a joint venture between UnitedHealth Group and Red Ventures, combining the assets of Optum Health and Red Ventures’ healthcare portfolio.

“Optum Now is one of the biggest brand names in healthcare and RVO Health is one of the most trusted sources of health information, with properties like Healthline, and the fact that Optum Now is working with a personalized vitamin company, I think gives a lot of legitimacy to this emerging space of how to customize nutritional supplementation to an individual, and get individuals beyond the mass market and A-Z vitamins to something more tailored to their needs,” says Helfand. “Whenever you see a mainstream, institutionalized health brand choose to partner with an emerging area of wellness like personalized vitamins,I think it extends a lot of great credibility to the space and opens up access to a lot of people that otherwise would be unaware of it.”

The personalized nutrition space is changing. Despite major investments from companies like Nestle into Persona Nutrition and Bayer into Care/Of, the demise of the latter puts into perspective the challenges the category faces. Helfand believes Vous Vitamin is better positioned to succeed.

“In many ways our competitors are getting consumers large quantities of vitamins at high cost whereas we're using data to craft more targeted all-in-one products to get people to less pills and powders and lower cost for their vitamin routine,” explains Helfand. According to Helfand, the model employed by Vous Vitamin’s competitors has negative unit economics, with a high volume of pills and high costs creating high customer churn.

“They're [also] not really built for the average consumer that’s confused in the vitamin aisles because they don't have space in their morning routine for that many pills or that complex of a of a program, or that cost of a program,” says Helfand. Additionally, he argues that the early movers in the space targeted the wrong demographics, namely millennial and Gen Z consumers, by using pop, youthful brand aesthetics.

“This was kind of the wave of direct-to-consumer offerings and trying to connect with younger digitally native consumers. And the thing about younger consumers is they get to be pretty fickle when it comes to subscription programs, so they'll try something and then they'll move on to the next thing within a month or two,” says Helfband “We've always been more focused on the 35 plus age consumer, the more mature consumer, the Gen X, Baby Boomer consumer. They are a much more stable consumer cohort than what the pill packs were generally going after.”

When asked how Vous Vitamin is able to operate more efficiently in terms of cost when they’re essentially creating personalized multivitamins for customers, he explained: “We have a large database and we apply data science to look for patterns. We craft multivitamins around those patterns, and that's what allows us to do it in a unit economics friendly way.”