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Meet the siblings who have grown UK’s best-selling probiotics brand into £24m firm

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2 weeks ago

November 9, 2024

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Soraya Janmohamed still feels “warm and nostalgic” when she imagines walking back through the doors and the perfume smells which pervaded her father’s chain of local community chemists.

She has good reason to. It was where she, along with her sister Jalal and brother Farah, learned the pharmacy ropes before the co-founding trio went global with their family-owned company Optibac Probiotics, the UK’s best-selling brand in its field.

After the siblings finished university and garnered external business experience, they have since learned on the job at Optibac, growing the firm to projected turnover of more than £24m.

The Hampshire-based firm, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, has around 100 employees, with the business made up of 82% women and gender equality on its board.

“We’ve had amazing people come in and teach us things,” says Soraya. “An HR consultant came a decade ago, who suggested we pay six-month maternity leave. We felt that was what we should do. We don’t wave about the term feminism but we do consider ourselves quite a feminist business.”

Soraya Janmohamed along with her co-founder siblings has grown Optibac Probiotics over 20 years.

Employee benefits also include £500 worth of free probiotics annually, an increase in holiday days and reduced hours, as well as a week’s extra pay at Christmas.

The latter dates back to their father Feroze’s business outlook. “He taught us things right from the get go,” says Soraya. “He wasn’t a big marketer but for the first five years all our focus was on sales. That was what was going to bring in the revenue.”

She says the best advice handed down by their father, who is retired but sits quietly on the Optibac board, was “to hire people smarter than you”. He was also a community staple. “People all knew dad and from all walks of life,” she adds.

Having started with his much-loved Coopers Chemist on Andover high street, he grew 12 local pharmacies in the South East over 35 years, with his offspring acting as fledgling sales reps.

“We used to get on the phones to independent pharmacies and we were so focused that people would know that, if they wanted to sell us something like utilities or advertising space, they would have to call us after 5pm,” recalls Soraya.

“From 9 to 5, our shops were open and we were calling our customers.”

Focus shifted when their father’s pharmacist friend in New Zealand first told the siblings about probiotics, after recommending them to customers alongside antibiotic prescriptions.

“He would say I am recommending a probiotic alongside it, explaining that this was your good bacteria,” says Soraya. “Antibiotics kill your bad and good bacteria and he told customers to take it as a top up and they won’t get the side-effects.”

Jalal Janmohamed pictured with King Charles.

After their father sold his business in the early 2000s and helped launch the trio’s venture — Optibac wasn’t registered as a trademark for a few years — they began contacting partners at biological institutes and researched types and strains behind probiotics. It formed their gold-standard science policy today.

“It’s daunting speaking to these big guys but we wanted to work with the best,” recalls Soraya. “Different strains of friendly bacteria do different things. There is clear research on it, scientifically proven, that one is for pregnancy, this one is for vaginal microbiome or diarrhea. Nobody had done that and we had a unique angle.”

Their natural alternative to traditional over-the-counter medicine was born. Twenty years on, Optibac, which has given over £2m to charity, is now also seen as the most recommended brand of friendly bacteria supplements, stocked by major UK retailers and operating in over 25 international markets. Over the last five years, they have also received both Queen’s and King’s Awards for enterprise.

“When we started there was a sense we were behind in probiotics as opposed to Australia and New Zealand,” says Soraya, an Optibac director. “There is a lot of competition out there now and we need to make sure we secure and keep hold of that [best-selling brand].

“We are still not there in the UK but we have seen a huge interest over the last 10 years in gut health. You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard that, ‘wow, 70% of the immune system is based in the gut’.”

Being a ‘most trusted’ firm

Our senior leadership team have challenged us at times. They have seen that skin health is huge or people are googling probiotics for weight loss. I think they’ve felt we have held back at times and it may be frustrating from a marketing point of view.

We do have integrity and we are excited about probiotic for weight loss but to date the research isn’t good enough. We’ve always been about the science and probiotic.

Optibac's founders were inspired by their father, Feroze, right. — Optibac’s founders were inspired by their father, Feroze (R).

Probiotic growth

It’s so important there is enough research before we launch it. Microbiome has been linked to many different areas of health such as the brain, skin and immune system, as well as vaginal microbiome. People have understood about the gut over the last 10 years, but this has been linked not just to obvious health concerns like thrush and cystitis but endometriosis and even fertility. We are really watching that research.

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