Look around your operatory: the gloves, the burs, the impression material, the handpiece, perhaps the software running the front desk. A great deal of it likely arrived through one company. Henry Schein is the world’s largest provider of health care products and services to office based dental and medical practitioners. An S&P 500 company that booked nearly $13 billion in revenue in 2024. It began, improbably, as a corner drugstore and the story of how it traveled from there to here is really the story of three pivots.

Pivot one: from prescriptions to practitioners

In 1932, a pharmacist named Henry Schein and his wife, Esther, borrowed $500 and opened a small drugstore in the Woodside section of Queens. The decisive move arrived in the 1950s, when the store began selling supplies to physicians through a mail order catalog. It was a quiet realization with an enormous opportunity. There was a better and more durable business in equipping practitioners than in serving walk-in customers one purchase at a time. Schein leaned into distribution, expanded into dental supplies through the 1960s, and by the late 1980s held roughly 10% of the U.S. dental supply market.

Pivot two: going public, and becoming an acquisition machine

For decades Schein was a family firm. Its transformation into a giant began in 1995, when the company went public on the Nasdaq and raised $72.8 million. Newly capitalized, it did what consolidators do: it bought. In 1997 alone it acquired Sullivan Dental Products for roughly $318 million. This deal made Henry Schein the world’s largest distributor of dental supplies, together with the practice management software company Dentrix, and the medical distributor Micro BioMedics. Dozens more regional distributors followed, first across the U.S. and then abroad in the U.K. and the Netherlands; revenue crossed $2 billion by 2000. This is the engine most people miss. Schein did not merely ride the growth of dentistry, it rolled up the fragmented business of supplying it, one distributor and one software company at a time.

Pivot three: focus

Growth by acquisition eventually produces sprawl, and the third pivot was discipline. In 2019 Schein spun off its animal-health business as a separate public company, Covetrus, refocusing the parent on dental and medical distribution and technology and services. The logic was straightforward. Distribution alone is a thin margin business; distribution plus the software a practice runs on every day is a stickier, more valuable one.

The reminder of how central it had become

If anyone doubted how much of dentistry runs through Henry Schein, October 2023 settled the question. A ransomware attack forced the company to pull systems offline, knocking out its e-commerce platform for weeks; practices scrambled to source supplies elsewhere. Schein later estimated the incident cut roughly $350 to $400 million from a single quarter’s sales and exposed data on more than 160,000 people. A supply chain that efficient is also a single point of failure.

The end of an era

The company’s modern scale is inseparable from one person. Stanley Bergman, who joined in 1980 and became CEO around 1989, grew revenue from about $225 million to nearly $13 billion across three and a half decades. In 2026 that era closed: Bergman stepped down after 35 years as CEO, remaining as chairman, and handed the top job to Frederick Lowery, a distribution executive from Thermo Fisher Scientific.