A manufacturer of vitamins and nutritional supplements plans to lay off nearly half the employees at one of its facilities in Holbrook.
Nestlé Health Science, formerly known as Nature’s Bounty Co., will give pink slips to 31 of its 69 workers at 4320 Veterans Memorial Hwy. starting in July, according to a state regulatory filing.
In the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing, Nestlé Health said the layoffs were occurring for “economic” reasons.
The company’s human resources director on Friday referred Newsday to its media relations department, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Nestlé Health makes vitamins and nutritional supplements that are sold under the brand names Boost, Ester-C, Nature’s Bounty, Osteo Bi-Flex, Puritan’s Pride, Solgar and Sundown, among others.
Nestlé Health is among Long Island’s largest private-sector employers, with more than 1,900 workers in Suffolk County, according to data from the state Power Authority, which supplies low-cost electricity to the company.
Besides Holbrook, public records show, Nestlé Health has facilities in Bayport, Bohemia and Ronkonkoma.
Five years ago, Nestlé Health, which is based in Switzerland, bought Nature’s Bounty, Solgar, Osteo Bi-Flex, Puritan’s Pride and other brands from what was then called The Bountiful Company in Ronkonkoma for nearly $6 billion. At the time, The Bountiful Company was owned by the private equity firm KKR & Co. Inc. in Manhattan.
Greg Behar, then CEO of Nestlé Health, said buying the brands would help to “establish Nestlé Health Science as the industry leader in mass retail, specialty retail, e-commerce and direct-to-consumer in the U.S., while offering significant opportunities for geographic growth.”
The job cuts at the Veterans Memorial Highway facility appear to be the first under Nestlé Health based on a review of 21 years of WARN filings to the state Department of Labor.
The predecessor to The Bountiful Company, called NBTY Inc., cut 73 jobs at eight facilities in 2014, including eight positions at Veterans Memorial Highway, the review shows.
The company was founded in 1971 as Nature’s Bounty Inc. and once had shares traded on a stock exchange.
In 2010, Washington D.C.-based private equity firm the Carlyle Group took the company private, but seven years later, sold a controlling interest to another private equity firm, KKR. The latter was in the process of an initial public stock offering when the deal with Nestlé Health took place.
James T. Madore writes about Long Island business news including the economy, development, and the relationship between government and business. He previously served as Albany bureau chief.