Why Trust Us for Supplements and Health Advice

When you are shopping for natural remedies, you have a lot of choice.

You could choose to buy from a chain store with hundreds of branches, your supermarket, or from your nutritionist. And that’s before you hit the internet where your head will truly explode with choice and marketing messages.

You will be told that the product being offered to you is the "best", the "cleanest", the most unique, groundbreaking, cutting edge, "pharmaceutical grade" supplement you will ever need. Or you could just be interested in the price.

Stocking remedies since 1904

At Hanover Healthfoods we are just like you – but we’ve been filtering the deluge of products and their claimed health benefits for longer. A lot longer. We believe that our constantly evolving range contains some of the best you can get. We also keep an eye out for good consumer value for you but we will always give you a choice of the best available.

We have always stocked remedies since we started in 1904. In those olden days it would have been things like brewer’s yeast tablets, digestive and nerve tonics, herbal laxatives. From the 1970s we started stocking vitamin and mineral supplements which were starting to attract research in the US.

In the 50 years since then we have seen countless thousands of products come and go. Some have lasted because they are timeless – like Vitamin C – others have rode a brief wind of popularity fuelled by the original ‘influencers’. Men in white coats like Nobel Laureate, Linus Pauling, and celebrities like the romantic novelist, Barbara Cartland. Take home – celebrity health tipsters are so not new.

In those 50 years our knowledge and experience of supplements has deepened and broadened in a way that you just can’t get in most places.

We have built up relationships with trusted suppliers. We have been to their laboratories around the globe where your products made and tested. We have learned the pitfalls and challenges of making supplements – how difficult it is to get a variety of powdered ingredients down fine tubes into the encapsulating machines which produce your capsules. We have seen the techniques and processes that they employ to check the quality and purity of raw ingredients. We have seen them fail and succeed. We have evaluated the honesty of how they have responded to the occasional failures. In many cases we have friendships with the people who own and run supplement companies going back decades – we have sorted out the wide-boys from the dedicated, ethical and professional.

And this isn’t a one-way street. We ask questions. We are not spoon-fed. If something doesn’t add up then we will (and have) challenged our suppliers. If we aren’t happy then whole ranges are removed.

Accordingly we have selected to sell only brands and products from suppliers that we trust to produce a consistently accurate, safe and effective products year after year after year.

Loyal to products, not brands

That said, we are not a store that focuses purely on good quality brands. From within those brands we choose to recommend the best products available. Whilst we may love Viridian Nutrition, for example, if we believe that you are better served by a different formulation from another supplier then we will not hesitate to recommend that.

Whilst we do make money from selling your supplements, making a fast buck and selling you half the shop, regardless of your needs, are not our Modus Operandi. We prefer to build your trust by recommending products we believe in, but also challenging increasingly lurid claims made on YouTube and TikTok. The choice is yours at the end of the day, and we respect that, but hopefully you will go away with the impression that:

1. we knew what we were talking about, and

2. we told you the truth.

Knowledge is power

We make an effort to hang on to our staff for as long as possible. It takes a long time to build up the background knowledge which we feed into your decision making. The anchor of this is John, the shop’s owner and training lead, who started in 1994 and is always delighted to pass on what he knows to whoever wants to listen.        

In essence we are a big, old filter. The products have come in over the decades and have been slowly filtered through clinical research – good and bad, personal experience, and the feedback of thousands of other customers. Finally, it has to navigate our natural scepticism – the BS detector which helps keep us, our suppliers, and our advice to you honest!

We hope to see you soon.