Holland & Barrett has launched H&B&Me – a personalised wellness platform that puts biological age at the heart of long-term health. Health Tech World speaks to Tamara Rajah, CEO of H&B Wellness Solutions and chief transformation officer at Holland & Barrett to find out more.
For 150 years, Holland & Barrett has been at the forefront of wellness – now, the retail giant is embarking on a digital transformation.
Over the past year, Holland & Barrett invested £96.3m in its digital transformation, with key developments including 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.
Signifying this transformation from high street retailer to long-term health and wellness partner, the H&B&Me app enables users to track their biological age, understand the ‘why’ behind their wellbeing, and take meaningful, everyday steps towards improving their health.
Focussing on four main pillars of health, including nutrition, physical activity, emotional wellbeing and sleep, H&B&Me includes features such as blood testing, behaviour change programmes, and community challenges, encouraging healthy habits and providing personalised advice to add quality years to their lives.
H&B says the app forms a key part of its mission to shift focus from treatment to prevention, placing biological wellness at the heart of its science-led approach to long-term health.
“Our long-term purpose at Holland & Barrett is making health and wellness a way of life for everyone,” says Rajah.
“There is currently a huge appetite for wellness – we see it in our customers all the time – it’s become a part of people’s natural disposable income, rather than thinking about it as a luxury. At the same time, we’ve seen how much stress on the healthcare system to actually be able to cover wellness and prevention.”
Holland & Barrett, Cardiff © James Winspear.
Accessible wellbeing support
Rajah highlights that access to health supporting technologies such as personal wearables is often a privilege for those who can afford to buy them, and H&B wanted to create a solution that could support wellness while also being accessible to the wider population.
“The ambition is to really create long lasting change beyond quick fixes,” explains Rajah.
“How do we move to creating a healthy individual who can live their best life today, with the most energy and so on, but also prevent chronic conditions in the future? Looking at this with our team of behavioral scientists, we found that you need to build healthy habits in people.”
In recent years, research has revealed that our biological age can be a key indicator of health outcomes. While there are a number of ways to test this, such as DNA methylation tests and biomarker testing, they can also be very expensive, making them inaccessible for the majority of people.
H&B&Me has partnered with digital health technology platform Dacadoo to develop the app. Using advanced risk modelling and data from 400 million person-years of research from Dacadoo, the app enables people to affordably and accurately test their biological age vs their chronological age and then suggest ways to reduce it.
“Your body’s age is controllable and it’s adaptable, and it’s something that you can make a difference in, versus your chronological age,” says Rajah.
“So, we’ve created behavioral change programmes in the app which help people build healthy habits in nutrition, fitness, sleep and emotional wellbeing, which we know are the essence of wellness.”
Using this data, a person’s age score is calculated on the H&B&Me app by asking 20 simple questions combined with any personal fitness tracker data to provide a “starter” age, and soon users will be able to input blood test data to get more accurate scores.
The four pillars of health
The H&B&Me app is centered around four pillars of nutrition, physical activity, emotional well being and sleep.
“All the features on the app are geared towards building these healthy habits. You can set goals, for example, eating more protein, eating more fibre, doing strength exercise, in addition to cardiovascular exercise, sleeping the right number of hours, but also making sure you have the right quality of sleep,” explains Rajah.
“Those are all habits that can be built. We take you on a 21 day behaviour change programme and we’ve also got lots of content, digital coaching, and reminders such as providing recipes or reminding you to pack healthy snacks.
“At the end of the 21 days, the goal is that it’s not that you’re changed for life, but that you’ve started to build in some of those good daily practices, and you keep them going, and that’s what we measure.
“We measure that sustained behaviour change and we’ve been able to see that up to 90 per cent of people say they have changed their behaviour from going through these programmes.”
People can also take part in community challenges such as swimming, walking and running challenges, with a leaderboard for the challenges featured on the app, with points and rewards for taking part.
“There’s lots of apps tracking your wellness and you can find all kinds of wearables and all kinds of ways to diagnose, such as blood tests, and apps developed particular solutions around particular needs, such as mental health apps and sleep supports,” says Rajah.
“But there isn’t a whole journey for the consumer – and that’s where we’re trying to make all those joints.”
The H&B&Me app has already shown strong impact. In a nine-week trial, 87 per cent of participants reported significant improvements in energy, mood, sleep, and diet based on adopting healthier habits.
The app was recently awarded with the ‘Salesforce Customer Experience Gamechanger Award’ at the Retail Week Awards 2025, being recognised as a leader in retail innovation and celebrated for its groundbreaking use of behavioural science to offer an exciting customer experience.
Tamara Rajah
