Product type | Dietary supplement foods |
---|---|
Owner | Kainos Capital |
Country | United States |
Introduced | 1977 |
Markets | U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, France, Germany, Iceland, Latin America |
Previous owners | Thompson Medical Company, Unilever |
Website | Website |
SlimFast is a brand of shakes, bars, snacks, packaged meals, and other dietary supplement foods sold in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, France, Germany, Iceland and Latin America. SlimFast promotes diets and weight loss plans featuring its food products. Its U.S. headquarters is in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. The benefits of SlimFast for weight loss are unclear.
SlimFast was started in 1977 as a product line of the Thompson Medical Company, founded in the 1940s by S. Daniel Abraham. Thompson Medical also sold the controversial weight loss dietary supplement Dexatrim. In 1987, Abraham took the brand private, and it was acquired by Unilever in 2000. In 2014, Unilever sold SlimFast to Kainos Capital. After the sale, KSF Acquisition invested with Kainos Capital in order to take responsibility for the SlimFast brand in the UK, Ireland and Germany.
SlimFast used the phrase "a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, then a sensible dinner" for many years to describe the use of the products within the SlimFast plan. With the addition of snacks and an approach that allows for different calorie plans, the brand currently advocates a more flexible system.
SlimFast's product line existed in three distinctive eras. There was the original product line (shakes only), the low-carb product line which were made in response to the low-carb diet craze initiated by the Atkins diet and South Beach Diet, and the simplified "3-2-1" product line introduced in late 2009.
SlimFast was originally just a diet shake product line. It consisted of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry shakes meant to replace breakfast and lunch. They would then suggest a low-calorie dinner. Usually, dieters would often pick a low-calorie frozen dinner brand such as Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, etc. as the SlimFast diet itself was a convenience diet and it offered none of its own dinner products. Later in the mid-1990s, SlimFast offered meal bars that could also be used as meal replacements.