After year of change, Catalent embarks on corporate makeover

With new digs in Tampa, Florida, now open and the one-year anniversary of its $16.5 billion acquisition fast approaching, Catalent is adopting a fresh look as it charts the next chapter of its CDMO saga. Catalent has unveiled new corporate branding, which keeps the company’s moniker the same while trading in the simple blue-against-white lettering of its previous logo with a pair of intersecting, speech-bubble-like boxes bearing the CDMO’s name and new tagline: “Championing the missions that matter.” Under the rebrand, the company is also repackaging its biotech-pharma and consumer health offerings into two distinct sub-brands known as Catalent Pharma Services and Catalent Self Care, Trish Hunt, group vice president and chief marketing officer at Catalent, said in an interview with Fierce. Catalent's new logo and tagline (Catalent) The new look for the CDMO’s core businesses isn’t a restructuring, Hunt stressed. Instead, by parsing out pharma services and self-care mini brands that encapsulate Catalent’s innovative medicine and consumer health contracting businesses, respectively, the company aims to bring more “clarity and cohesion” to the way its image and offerings are portrayed to customers, she explained. The rebrand was launched at the Convention on Pharmaceutical Ingredients meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, Tuesday and will be further rolled out at SupplySide Global’s 2025 conference in Las Vegas this week, Catalent said in an Oct. 28 press release. The CDMO’s global sites will switch over to the new branding and structure “over the coming months,” according to the release. A major objective of the corporate makeover is to “shift the focus” on the role Catalent plays as a CDMO in the life sciences ecosystem, Hunt explained: “We’re a strategic partner; we enable life-changing therapies—so we’re not just a service provider, and we take that really seriously.” The main principle underpinning the company’s new look, according to Hunt, is to accentuate the breadth of Catalent’s business—and the human face of its CDMO offerings—in contrast to its previous marketing approach, which emphasized the technology and capabilities in Catalent’s arsenal. While that old approach “served us well for the time that it did,” the company is now aiming to accentuate the “outcomes and possibilities” that are powered by its contracting infrastructure, she explained. Hunt said she hoped the new branding helps “truly reflect who we are and also where we’re headed.” Catalent has been fine-tuning its corporate makeover for nearly two years now, Hunt said, noting that the company has gained equally valuable insights from both its customer base as well as the companies that have elected not to do business with the CDMO. The rebrand comes a little less than a year after Catalent was acquired by Novo Holdings for $16.5 billion. Novo Holdings, which acts as a holding company for Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, first telegraphed plans to buy Catalent in February 2024. As part of the transaction, Novo Nordisk itself acquired three Catalent fill-finish facilities around the globe for $11 billion. With the change in ownership, “it was just a great time to take a look at ourselves and decide ‘who are we,’ and ‘how do we want to show up?’” Hunt said of the original rebrand impetus. “It’s not necessarily a new Catalent per se,” she emphasized. “It’s just a clearer one.” Even after the site changeover, Catalent currently boasts more than 40 facilities across four continents, Hunt said. In its press release, the CDMO noted that it’s supported development and production of products “representing half of all FDA approvals” in the past decade. The company collectively produces more than 60 billion doses each year and asserts that it has “over 1,000 active development programs at any given time.” Elsewhere, in a further sign of Catalent’s evolution this year, the company late last month opened the doors to its new global corporate headquarters in Tampa. Catalent relocated its home base to the Sunshine State after selling its previous HQ in Somerset, New Jersey—which doubled as an oral solids development and small-scale production plant—to Belgian contract manufacturer Ardena. The new headquarters is a roughly half-hour drive from Catalent’s massive softgel development and production facility in St. Petersburg, Florida.