Brian Groves
President of Lifestyle Nutrition | Nestlé Health Science
Blending clinical science with cultural relevance through the power of digital-driven branding is all in a day’s work for Brian Groves, president of lifestyle nutrition at Nestlé Health Science. Based at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Bridgewater, New Jersey, Groves oversees a portfolio of high-growth brands that operate at the intersection of nutrition, wellness, beauty, and lifestyle.
His goal is to center those brands—Vital Proteins, Garden of Life, and Solgar, among others—as leaders in their categories and position Nestlé as a landmark in the rapidly expanding wellness market.
“We’re building brands that live at the intersection of wellness, clinical science, and culture,” he says, “and using Nestlé’s global scale to accelerate innovation and growth.”
That’s an ambitious goal, but Groves has the background to drive the kind of modern, innovative strategies needed to pull it off. Before he joined Nestlé Health Science in September 2023, he spent nine years at Meta, where he developed deep expertise in digital marketing and consumer engagement—two skills necessary for performance-driven growth. By the end of 2024, he’d demonstrated his value and stepped up from the role of chief marketing officer to a business unit president.
A Digital Leader Enter the Health Space
Groves explains that Nestlé, as a corporation, is of a size that makes it uniquely positioned—it’s the world’s largest consumer packaged goods organization, which gives it “tremendous resource and capability all across the world,” as he puts it. Nestlé Health Science, as a subsidiary unit, is the product of more than 10 years of acquisition activity. “Seventy percent of the portfolio has been acquired in the last seven to 10 years,” Groves says. “With that, we’ve been focusing fairly heavily on integration and bringing all these brands, different culture, different systems, different leaders, and different brands into a singular portfolio that is Nestlé Health Science.”
“What was most exciting was the combination of terrific brands, fast-growing categories, and a modern e-commerce-first environment with massive opportunity for further brand building and innovation.”
The integration of Nestlé Health Science U.S. into Nestlé USA and its repositioning as a Nutrition & Health business reflects a strategic shift. Instead of operating as a separate, globally managed unit, it is now part of Nestlé’s core business, bringing health science and medical nutrition closer to the company’s broader portfolio. This change highlights Nestlé’s growing focus on health and wellness as an important driver of future growth alongside its traditional food and beverage products.
To focus on this fast growth, Nestlé Health Science needed somebody with Groves’s modern brand-building capabilities. When he started as chief marketing officer, he set about establishing a robust marketing infrastructure, and he spent the latter half of 2023 and all of 2024 focused on strengthening the digital and e-commerce foundations needed to compete effectively in these many wellness categories. In December 2024, Groves was appointed to oversee the lifestyle nutrition brands.
“It’s been a dynamic environment,” Groves says, pointing out that they have outstanding leadership brands that are number one or number two in their categories: vitamin and mineral supplements, protein powders, collagen powders, and adult nutrition beverages, all growing at double-digit rates.
Leading a High-Growth Brand Portfolio
The brands within Groves’s lifestyle nutrition portfolio span the active lifestyle category, where cultural relevance plays a meaningful role in how brands connect with consumers. Medical nutrition and pharmaceutical therapies round out the broader Nestlé Health Science portfolio, distinguished by their strong clinical and scientific foundations. Together, these verticals reflect Nestlé Health Science commitment to delivering clinically supported solutions suited to their audiences and purposes.
“These brands participate at the intersection of wellness and clinical evidence with a strong immersion in culture,” Groves explains. “Vital Proteins and Garden of Life, for example, are part beauty, part wellness, part nutrition, and part lifestyle. They’re deeply embedded in how consumers think about health today.”
“We work closely with co-manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and flavor houses to develop breakthrough product offerings.”
This kind of hybrid positioning plays into how Groves strategizes from business perspective. He puts a strong emphasis on digital engagement and influencer partnerships, all of which drives e-commerce growth. It’s a crucially modern approach that is necessary for relevance in a 21st-century market.
“All our brands are digital-first and highly e-commerce driven,” Groves says. “There’s significant synergy in bringing them together under a unified strategy.”
Major Opportunity in a Fragmented Market
The wellness and supplement space has both enormous opportunity and intense competition. Groves acknowledges that limited regulation and the rise of e-commerce platforms—particularly Amazon—have dramatically expanded the competition.
“The supplement space is highly fragmented,” he says. “Amazon has changed the game dramatically over the last three to five years, creating an almost unlimited marketplace. Our job is to break through the fragmentation and continue bringing new users into the category.”
“Reliability is a key part of our strategy.”
But because Nestlé Health Science has evolved so quickly, and acquired so many brands in only a few short years, that sets the company up to take advantage of market opportunities and grow further. Looking ahead to the next three to five years, Groves breaks the growth strategy down into four pillars:
Four Pillars for Growth
1 Strategic channel and pricing architecture: It starts with optimized pricing and packaging across different retail environments. “What works at Costco won’t necessarily work at Walmart, Amazon, or Kroger,” Groves says. “We’re focused on architecting each brand to optimize performance and consumer value within each channel.”
He also highlights the importance of the natural retail channel, where brands like Garden of Life and Solgar originally gained traction. “We use the natural channel as a proving ground for innovation,” he says. “If products perform well with highly discerning consumers there, we know they can succeed in mass retail environments.”
2 Innovation productivity: Groves’s strategy centers on innovation, especially as Nestlé Health Science invests heavily in building innovation pipelines and speeding up commercialization. “We’re focused on productivity of innovation—building strong pipelines and bringing differentiated offerings to the market quickly,” he says. This kind of innovation includes the exploration of new ingredients, formats, and consumer-driven solutions.
3 Modern brand building: Having worked previously at Meta before his time at Nestlé Health Science, Groves has a vibrant sense of the digital realm, and he brings this expertise to modernize the marketing approach in his current position. “Consumers engage with brands very differently today,” he says. “The creator and influencer economy is reshaping brand building.”
That’s only part of the brand building, however. A significant portion of sales come through short-term tactics, particularly on Amazon. “In some cases, 35 to 40 percent of brand volume runs through Amazon,” he says. “We have to balance search investment with brand-building investment to drive long-term growth.” These upper-funnel brand awareness investments might take the form of influencer partnerships or content marketing.
4 Supply reliability: The final pillar is the one that Groves admits isn’t exactly the sexiest strategy, but it’s still necessary—it’s about having a reliable supply. “These categories are SKU-heavy,” Groves explains. “We must ensure we are among our retail partners’ most reliable suppliers.” Being reliable in supply is about operational excellence which, in turn, is critical to supporting innovation and growth. If a retailer can’t count on you to provide the product, then of course that’s bad for business!
“We have to balance search investment with brand-building investment to drive long-term growth.”
Leveraging Nestlé’s Global Strength
Some people might not recognize the subsidiary name Nestlé Health Science, but pretty much anyone around the world recognizes the brand name Nestlé. The sheer scale of the broader organization gives Nestlé Health Science many more capabilities, and that’s something Groves is aware of and wants to use to full advantage.
“We have tremendous resources across the world,” he says. “R&D capabilities, innovation, digital transformation, and retail partnerships all help differentiate us.” There are also the retailers. Nestlé has long-standing and firmly established relationships with major retailers—including mass merchants, grocers, pharmacies, and e-commerce platforms—that give the company a competitive advantage for everything it produces and sells. “Those partnerships help separate our business from many competitors in this fragmented landscape,” Groves explains.
Innovation Across Formats and Ingredients
Innovation is a necessary tool and a powerful one for a company as big as Nestlé, and in the case of these nutrition products, Groves sees a crucial need to be innovative about both ingredients and product formats. This means the benefits their products offer are available in more ways that will appeal to more customers. “We’re investing in unique formats such as gummies, chews, powders, and ready-to-drink beverages,” he explains.
“A big focus has been bringing different brands, cultures, and systems together into one organization.”
For example, Nestlé Health Science recently launched a Vital Proteins collagen sparkling water, a collaboration that leverages expertise from the company’s water division. “We’re really excited about it—it’s a great example of bringing Nestlé capabilities into new brand extensions,” Groves points out.
As far as ingredients go, Groves knows the next “big thing” is waiting to be discovered, and part of being a leader in the industry is looking to find that, so they can potentially set a trend or at least be on its forefront. “Everyone is looking for the next big idea: the next protein, collagen, or emerging wellness ingredient,” he says. “We’re deeply invested in that exploration.”
Supply Chain Resilience and Operational Excellence
Operational excellence always plays a dominant role in the approach Groves takes to leadership, and in the current global market recently disrupted by tariff pressures and global supply chain problems, that means supplier diversification. “We’re diversifying our supplier ecosystem,” Groves says. “Reliability, quality, and cost efficiency are key priorities.”
But it’s not just supply. Nestlé Health Science must consider its manufacturing model, which the company takes a hybrid approach to by combining internal production with co-manufacturing partnerships. “We work closely with co-manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, and flavor houses to develop breakthrough product offerings,” Groves says. It’s a collaborative ecosystem that lets Nestlé support rapid innovation while still ensuring scalability.
A Major Player in Health Science
All this business strategy and marketing savvy points to one key objective for Groves: increasing awareness of Nestlé Health Science as a major force in wellness. “Nestlé historically wasn’t known for health science and wellness, but today we are a major player,” he says.
His approach is clearly working. Even if general consumers don’t associate the name Nestlé with health and wellness just yet, their dollars reflect that they do value the work the company is doing. From the portfolio of leading brands, many of them hold the number one or number two spot on the market, including Pure Encapsulations, Vital Proteins, Garden of Life, and Orgain. “We’re investing heavily and growing quickly,” Groves says.
In fact, he describes Nestlé Health Science as being in growth mode. “We want to continue to lead in the areas where we’re leading today, and we’re always open to new partnerships,” he says.
