GNC Near Me

GNC Holdings, Inc. is the current name of General Nutrition Center, an American health and nutrition store chain. The company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was also the location of the very first store. The company sells items such as vitamins and supplements, and products related to health, nutrition, fitness and sports.

The company started back in 1935 with a single small health food store. It prospered and continued to grow, even through the challenges posed by World War II, and today operates thousands of locations. You can find the locations of your nearest General Nutrition Centers, simply by searching for “GNC near me”!

GNC Near Me – Find it on the Map

GNC Near Me – GNC Trivia

What is the history of GNC?

David Shakarian opened a small health food store in 1935, in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He originally named his business Lackzoom. The business was not initially successful, and he only earned $35 on his first day. However, business picked up and he opened a second store only six months later. One year after this, the Ohio River flooded and both of his stores suffered heavy damage. By 1941, Shakarian had re-opened those two stores, along with five more locations. The company was officially registered in 1936. During World War II, gasoline was rationed, and so people began to use their cars less. In order to keep business up, Shakarian decided to open a mail-order business, where customers could send a check in the mail and Shakarian would mail their purchases to them.

A typical GNC store in Pennsylvania.

How large is GNC today?

During the 1960s, a health food craze swept across America. David Shakarian was able to use the increased business to expand outside of Pennsylvania. He changed the name of the business to GNC at this point. The company became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange in the 1980s, and Shakarian continued to run the business until his death in 1984. Due to his death and the overexpansion, the company began to lose money. Shakarian’s family hired an executive to turn the company around so it could be sold. The company changed hands various times, and is currently owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Ares Management. The company was made private during the early 1990s, but since 2011 has gone public once more. Today the company employs over thirteen thousand people, and has over seven thousand locations. The company operates with a revenue of $2.6 billion. Over six thousand of the locations are in the United States. The brand GNC LiveWell operated in over forty locations in Australia, beginning in 2000, until going into voluntary administration in 2015. The GNC brand still exists in 49 other countries today, however.

What items does GNC sell?

GNC stock items to assist with weight loss, bodybuilding and other physical activities. These include nutritional supplements, vitamins and natural remedies. The company also sells other health and beauty products, like bath salts, shampoos, soaps, deodorants and natural oils. Other products include pet and animal supplements, various natural herbs, proteins and energy drinks, and hair, nail and skin enhancing treatments.
To find the General Nutrition Centers nearest to your area, you can simply search for “GNC near me”.

GNC Near Me – GNC Facts

In 2015, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that they were cracking down on GNC, as well as Walmart, Walgreens and Target, for selling supplements containing cheap fillers and allergenic compounds instead of the herbs that they advertised on the label. These fillers were made of powdered rice and asparagus, among other things, none of which contain any medicinal value. In 2015, the attorney-general of Oregon filed a lawsuit; they claimed that the company knowingly sold items containing the banned ingredients picamilon and BMPEA.

Some previous owners of GNC include The Thomas Lee Company, an investment and management fund; Royal Dutch Numico, part of the Dannon group of companies, and Apollo Management, an American private equity company. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, an investment company that manages the pension funds of schoolteachers, and Ares Management, an asset management company, bought GNC in 2007.

One of GNC’s products, vitamin supplements, date back to Ancient Egypt, where it was discovered that eating liver helped to prevent night blindness. In the 18th century, Scottish doctor James Lind discovered that citrus fruits would counteract scurvy, a disease now known to be caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. In 1881, Russian surgeon Nikolai Lunin discovered that milk contained other essential ingredients, apart from proteins, fats, carbohydrates and salts. In 1912, Polish biochemist Casimir Funk discovered the structure of the ingredient of brown rice that made it beneficial. He named this substance a vitamin, or amine. Vitamins continued to be discovered in various foods in the 1900s, and were assigned the letters A, B and C, because their exact structure was unknown. The B group was later found to actually include several distinct groups, which were renamed by adding numbers, thus giving vitamin B1, B2, etc.

The current CEO of GNC is Mike Archibold, who formerly served as CEO of the Talbots clothing and accessories business. He was also president of another vitamin chain, The Vitamin Shoppe.

GNC sell their products in their stores, which are mainly business-owned, with about nine hundred being franchises. Most of the stores in the United States are located in malls and shopping districts. The company also sells its products online, both on its own website, and also formerly on the internet health and beauty retailer drugstore.com, until that site ceased running in 2016.

For the locations of GNC stores near you, just search “GNC near me”!