19 May 2025
Holland & Barrett, the UK’s leading health and wellness retailer, is redefining health and wellness by embracing a growing shift towards preventative care and digital health solutions, a trend which has significantly evolved since the pandemic. Holland & Barrett has launched H&B&Me - a personalised wellness platform that puts biological age at the heart of long-term health. The app empowers users to track their biological age, understand the ‘why’ behind their wellbeing, and take meaningful, everyday steps towards improving their health.
Over the past year, Holland & Barrett invested heavily in its business, with total capital investment reaching £96.3m in FY24. A significant part of this supported the acceleration of its digital transformation, a key driver of its sustainable growth strategy. Key developments included the launch of a new suite of digital platforms, enhancements to the online customer experience, and major improvements to fulfilment operations and supply chain automation.
Holland & Barrett’s long-term purpose, though, is to ‘add quality years to life’, making wellness a way of life for everyone. Achieving this purpose means transforming our customer experience from the retail transaction to being the destination for a lifelong wellness journey.
H&B have created and launched “H&B&Me” to achieve this: H&B&Me is a digital wellness companion app for Holland & Barrett’s loyal customers, helping them build the most important healthy habits to add quality years to their lives. It does this through driving behaviour change in nutrition, physical activity, sleep and emotional wellbeing.
At the heart of the app is a tool that assesses the customer’s biological age vs their chronological age and then suggests ways to reduce it. The age is calculated using advanced risk modelling and data from 400 million person-years of research to calculate a simple biological age score. The huge popularity (and virality) of this simple tool indicates that Holland & Barrett has found a way to ‘hook’ the mainstream population into taking a proactive interest in their wellness.
Then, through science-backed 21-day programmes designed by behaviour change experts, H&B&Me coaches customers to adopt small, sustainable habits that are proven to reduce their biological age – and so improve everyday wellness, prevent long-term illness and add quality years to life.
Data shows H&B&Me’s users are changing their behaviour and building new habits after 21 days on an H&B&Me wellness programme. This is the holy grail for wellness and for preventative healthcare and means H&B can provide a wellness experience that is, quite literally, lifechanging.
H&B&Me is built and run by a small team who merge best practices from behavioural science and design thinking to create a novel and lifechanging customer experience, combining a host of features to drive the impact - users can track progress, set tailored goals and access expert content to support meaningful lifestyle change. A Digital Coach provides daily motivation, while monthly challenges and integrated home health test results support continued progress. Users can also earn points and rewards for healthy behaviours, redeemable at Holland & Barrett - helping to turn insight into action and making lasting behaviour change both achievable and rewarding.
Tamara Rajah, CEO of Wellness Solutions and Chief Transformation Officer at Holland & Barrett said: “We’re living through a societal shift towards prevention, testing and self-care, combined with insufficient public health care provision due to constraints on national health systems, yet with unprecedented interest from consumers in their own wellness. This highlighted an unmet need for an accessible, affordable, engaging preventative wellness solution, which not only tracks wellness, but crucially empowers people to move beyond quick fixes and build healthy habits that lead to lasting improvements in overall wellbeing. This is what we’ve created with H&B&Me, and it sits right at the heart of H&B’s purpose to make health and wellness a way of life for everyone and add quality years to life.”
The H&B&Me app has already shown strong impact. In a nine-week trial, 87% of participants reported significant improvements in energy, mood, sleep, and diet based on adopting healthier habits– Evidence that small changes, powered by the right insights can make a big difference.
Dr. John Deanfield, CBE, Professor of Cardiology at UCL and Director of the National Institute for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research, said: “These findings demonstrate the real-world value of H&B&Me in improving key aspects of daily health. By focusing on biological age, H&B&Me is providing individuals with a more meaningful measure of their well-being - and a practical, science-based way to enhance it. This app has the potential to transform preventative health by making it more personal, measurable and achievable for everyone.”
The launch of H&B&Me marks the next phase of Holland & Barrett’s long-term commitment to prevention and adding quality years to life, with the app recently being awarded with the ‘Salesforce Customer Experience Gamechanger Award’ at the Retail Week Awards 2025.
As part of the award, H&B&Me was recognised as a leader in retail innovation and celebrated for its groundbreaking use of behavioural science to offer an exciting customer experience. The judges praised it as a “brilliant example of different disciplines coming together in a customer's time of need”. Holland & Barrett stood out for helping consumers build sustainable habits that drive change across the four key pillars, with 90% of users reporting behavioural change in just 10 days.
Tamara added: “This recent award win is a testament to our long-term vision of making health and wellness a way of life for everyone, reflecting our Group Strategy to focus on science-led customer propositions and deepening customer relationships across a lifetime.”