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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food as Medicine

Food as Medicine Platform Foodsmart Expands Reach to 7.4 Million Patients as it Reels in $10M in Fresh Funding

Today, food as medicine and telehealth startup Foodsmart announced an expansion of its “Foodscripts” program and a new round of funding. The company says it will reach up to 7.4 million patients across three major healthcare systems: Advocate Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Intermountain Health. These healthcare systems, alongside the American College of Cardiology and Glen Tullman’s 62 Ventures, have invested $10 million as part of an expanded Series C investment (now up to $40M) as part of the expansion.

The company is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which encourages healthier eating to create a healthier life overall.  As chronic diseases continue to be a predominant health issue in the United States, there have been calls for our health system to provide better nutritional guidance to patients. The growth in food-as-medicine has come alongside growing usage by at-risk patients of GLP-1 drugs as a reasonably fast way to manage their weight. However, GLP-1 drugs are expensive and often require daily self-administered injections. Foodsmart and other food-as-medicine proponents see “food care” as a better, longer-term, and less costly solution, as well as one that can be paired with initial “jump starter” usage of GLP-1 drugs to get quicker and sustained outcomes.

In an email to The Spoon, Foodsmart outlined the different components of the program expansion:

  1. Extended Reach: The program will be extended to 7.4 million patients across the funding healthcare systems, which the company says represents a substantial increase in its impact and potential to improve health outcomes.
  2. Enhanced Funding: The additional $10 million funding brings the total Series C investment to $40 million.
  3. Strategic Partnerships: Collaborations with healthcare systems and organizations, which Foodsmart says emphasize the importance of integrating nutrition into healthcare and highlight Foodscripts’ potential to transform patient care.
  4. EHR Integration: Foodsmart has developed an Electronic Health Record (EHR) integration, which they say will enable providers to enter and track Foodscripts more easily for insurance purposes.
  5. Upskilling Providers: Foodsmart will start emphasizing upskilling healthcare providers. This involves educating them on the latest scientific data and best practices for addressing the nutritional needs of patients with various chronic diseases.

The growth in offerings within the formalized healthcare community around nutrition guidance comes at a time of increased attention among technology platform providers around personalized nutrition and metabolic health management. Startups like January.AI are providing AI-powered solutions that help those at risk of metabolic disease ways to manage their caloric intake and the impact on their blood glucose levels without having to use a continuous glucose monitor. Other startups like Supergut are tapping into the growing awareness of metabolic health – largely driven by rising awareness of the impact of GLP-1 drugs – by providing over-the-counter supplement approaches that claim to have some of the same benefits as these medications.

Investment in this space has been a countervailing trend to slowing interest among venture investors in plant-based food and other better-for-you offerings, which has been victimized in part by a broader venture slowdown as well as slower-than-expected growth of some of the high-profile, high-fliers in the space, such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods.

Supergut’s Marc Washington Believes the Way to Better Health Is Through Our Stomachs

The Spoon recently sat down with Supergut CEO Marc Washington to hear about his company’s mission and the inspiration that drives him.

To call Supergut Marc Washington’s passion project is a gross understatement. The former Princeton University football player and Harvard MBA built on his background in the health and fitness industry to create a company whose sole aim is to improve our health through our stomachs. It was more than a noble mission that inspired Washington to start this now two-year-old company; his work is inspired by loss.

“Her name was Monica,” Washington told The Spoon. “She had an unbelievable personality. You know, she was the party and an amazing mom, I’d say, you know, hilarious, even inappropriately. But she was like the life of the party. And she was my little sister. And the biggest challenge throughout her adult life was health.” As Marc Washington said, battling several chronic conditions, Monica died during childbirth, a tragic event that shook him to the core.

And so, the idea for Supergut (formerly Muniq) was born. And the term “resistant starches” (starches such as green bananas that feed your good gut bacteria by fermenting in your large intestine) became a mantra for Washington. Available through its website, Supergut is a proprietary blend that contains unripened green bananas, resistant potato starch, oat beta-glucan, and soluble vegetable fiber. Currently, it comes in the form of a shake (four flavors), bar, and fiber mix.

How did Monica’s death lead you to start your company?

It lit a fire that just never has never been extinguished. It’s like this didn’t have to happen. There had to have been better ways to get better control of her health, which could have let her down a different pathway. And this kind of built up over time. And there’s a point where if you want to make a difference, it’s like ‘If not you, then who?  If not now, then when?’

Looking at the masses, it’s not as though we’re getting healthier. And despite all the advances in science and technology and food, there’s got to be a better way to move the needle and bend the curve of health outcomes and actually potentially impact public health, and things like that could have changed Monica’s trajectory. And so, yeah, that was my inspiration to throw my hat in the ring, and I started this company a couple of years ago. 

How did you get from the desire to improve our health to an actual product?

I like to describe it as the moments in the Matrix where Neo has decisions to make. I think it was an awakening to see just how pervasive the impact of the gut is on our overall health and that it was actually a pathway to activate this vision that I had. You could reorient your body more healthily, and the gut could be that pathway. So I credit some scientific and medical experts, along with my original investors, for helping me with the approach taken with resistant starch.

How do you use resistant starch to formulate Supergut?

We do have our proprietary blend that is resistant starch and other prebiotic fibers as well as other plants. And a lot of that was based on clinical evidence, like literally looking through close to 200 different studies to show what kind of impact that you can have and what form factors, what dosage levels, what concentration levels, what other things you to combine with it, etc. to get to what we felt like was the most productive.

The first thing was, let’s put it into a shake, which was our first product. We had a prototype within a few months, but it tasted like shit. So, for the next year, modulating the taste work with our suppliers or flavor experts, etc., to get to a shake that would work and that you could enjoy. So we did lots of iterations to get a shake that we’re incredibly proud of and our customers love the taste of. And we now find that in bars and other products.

What was behind the name change from Muniq to Supergut?

Muniq is a combination of Monica and Unique. We looked at many names, but one of the benefits of Supergut is that it just reads as if people get it right away. Since we’ve introduced it, I talk to people like, what do you do? I founded this product that creates nutrition for a super gut. With today’s attention span and the shorter and shorter range, you’ve got like 3 seconds to get across. So (the name) Supergut is helping us open doors and open conversations because it says we are all about gut health.  

Your website proudly states that Supergut is a Black-Owned business? Is there a message there?

My aspiration for what we aspire to do is to impact public health significantly. We want to move the needle; if we do that, we can play an important role in closing health disparities disproportionately affecting black and brown communities. When you look at all the factors that make up our public health crisis, 70% of people are overweight or obese. You know, 50% have some form of diabetes or pre-diabetes. 50% some form of cardiovascular health risk. Keep in mind the, African American, Brown, and Latino communities have a 50% higher incidence of almost every single one. This health disparity gap has been something that has led me to create a solution from the very outset. My goal is to help close that gap.

Podcast: Talking Food as Medicine With NourishedRX’s Lauren Driscoll

NourishedRX provides meals, groceries, and meal kits to individuals, tailored for their individual needs and preferences.

Lauren Driscoll

The company, which recently raised $6 million in seed funding, has developed an AI platform that matches members with personalized meal and grocery offerings. It works with healthcare providers to incorporate food as part of an individual’s long-term health plan.

I caught up with NourishedRX CEO Lauren Driscoll recently to hear how the company got its start and what she sees as the current state of the current food-as-medicine market.

You can listen by clicking play below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mikuna Foods Hopes Its New Funding Will Take Its Superfood Chocho To New Heights

If there’s a category of superfoods that has the potential to surpass super, Mikuna’s line of chocho protein products aspires to claim that title. The competition is intense, but the uses for a clean, gluten-free, low-glycemic, multipurpose powder-like food go well beyond juices and smoothies.

“Chocho is the future of plant-based proteins, and as we look ahead to the brand’s product and innovation pipeline, Mikuna is poised to lead the plant-based industry back to its clean, whole food roots,” company CEO Tara Kriese said in a company statement.

 Chocho is a lupin that, once milled, becomes a protein-rich powder. It is indigenous to South America in the Andes Region, particularly in Ecuador and Peru (where it is known as Tarwi). Mikuna’s founder, Ricky Echanique, is a fifth-generation farmer from Ecuador who suffered from digestive issues. He found the answer in his backyard, discovering that this plant provided solutions to his ailments. After discovering the power of this superfood, it became Echanique’s mission to bring chocho to the world.

 Kriese, a former SVP for plant-based meat company Impossible Foods, brings her market knowledge and personal passion to the company. In an interview with The Spoon, the CEO spoke about her daughter, whose multiple life-threatening childhood allergies took her to the plant-based, clean food world long before it was fashionable.

 After being introduced to Echanique in 2020 and learning of Mikuna and chocho, Kriese knew she was on to something big. “I couldn’t believe that no one was using this amazing crop,” she said. And it’s no one-trick pony, something borne out by the company’s relationship with Erewhon, which features the protein in juices that it features in its in-house Tonic Bar and in juices it sells in the store.

 The well-known Los Angeles-area gourmet supermarket’s use of chocho is part of Mikuna’s current multipronged strategy, which will evolve with its new investment dollars. The company sells its original or pure product along with vanilla and cacao varieties direct to consumers via its website. They also are available at Amazon and in retailers and foodservice locations across Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and California.

Mikuna’s seed round investors include Olympians and World Champion athletes like Leticia Bufoni, professional skateboarder and six-time X Games gold medalist, professional surfer, and three-time world champion Mick Fanning; and professional snowboarder and Olympic gold medalist Sage Kotsenburg.

“I’ve always wanted a protein powder that’s clean, and Mikuna is as clean as it gets with just one simple ingredient, chocho,” says Professional Surfer Mick Fanning. “With Mikuna, I’m investing in both the future of nutrition and our planet, and to join such an impressive community of individuals to support Mikuna’s growth was a natural fit for me.”

Backed by more than hype, Kriese senses that, like her, when consumers learn of the power and versatility of this Andrean superfood, they will have a “chocho moment” just as she did.

We Tried Kokada, a First-of-Its-Kind Sugar and Nut-Free Alternative Coconut Spread

Breanna Atkinson first stumbled upon a coconut spread while traveling in London for work a few years ago. She fell in love with it but couldn’t find anything like it in the United States. So what’d Atkinson do? She decided to make her own. 

Atkinson worked on her vegan spread for 16 months before she began selling it under the Kokada brand in farmer’s markets in mason jars in October of 2020. It was a hit, and eventually, Atkinson began selling the spread in stores in North Carolina (Atkinson and her co-founder and fiance, Jared, both attended Duke). It’s now available online at Kodada’s website and Amazon and in 14 retail stores across the Mid-Atlantic region.

Kokada is made with less than 5 ingredients and without refined sugar, using mainly coconut and coconut treacle as a natural sweetener. What makes Kokada different from other spreads – other than its natural ingredients – is that it’s sold in the nut butter category even though coconut isn’t a nut. Coconut treacle is a healthier alternative to refined sugar and is ideal for people trying to avoid sugar spikes, such as parents of young kids or those who are diabetic. 

In fact, most of Kokada’s customers are parents of young kids since they can’t pack their kids peanut butter because of allergies in schools. Their other target customer segment is people with nut allergies because their main alternative on the market is sunflower butter. 

Kokada originally started with an original flavor, but people soon began asking for a flavor similar to Nutella (which is not vegan). Atkinson told me that their goal is to eventually have five different flavors, four permanent and one seasonal. 

My roommates and I have at least five different dips or spreads in our room at a time, so when Atkinson offered me a sample, I had to try it out. Before Kokada, I had never heard of coconut spread (probably because Kokada is the first on the market in the US), so I was excited to try it.

We tried the original flavor, which is made with only coconut and coconut treacle as a sweetener, on top of a banana. The spread has a mild coconut flavor and a smooth texture with a few small pieces of coconut in it. I was surprised by the coconut flavor since I’ve never had it in a spread, and it was a bit sweeter than I expected. I also tried it as a sweetener in my matcha latte, and I liked the subtle coconut flavor it added but was a bit caught off guard by the coconut pieces in my drink. 

Kokada brownie flavor on pancakes

We tried the brownie flavor, which I liked more than the original flavor. It had a very realistic brownie flavor without the overly artificial sweetness of Nutella. I added IT on top of a waffle and on top of some pancakes. A little bit goes a long way, but it complemented the pancakes and fruit very well. It’s since become one of my breakfast staples as I like the way the sweetness doesn’t give me a sugar overload in the morning.

Kokada will be focusing on developing their flavors and launching in major retailers in the next year, so keep an eye out for a jar on a shelf near you soon!

Nuritas Raises a $45 Million Series B Round For AI-Powered Peptide Discovery

Ingredients startup Nuritas announced earlier this month that it has completed a $45 million Series B round. The new funding will help the company to expand globally and scale its tech platform for peptide discovery.

Like proteins, peptides are made up of amino acids. But while proteins consist of long chains of amino acids, peptides are smaller and easier for the body to break down. Nuritas uses its artificial intelligence-powered tech platform to look for new, bioactive peptides in familiar food sources. The resulting ingredients are likely to find applications in the next wave of plant-derived nutritional supplements.

After the artificial intelligence platform makes its predictions about useful peptides, the Nuritas team produces them in experimental quantities and performs in vitro, cell-based testing. If that initial testing confirms the platform’s predictions, the team scales up production, and then moves to preclinical and clinical testing phases to understand the peptides’ effects on human health.

Since its founding in 2014, Nuritas has launched PeptiYouth™, an ingredient that the company says improves cellular regeneration to slow visible signs of aging. They’ve also introduced PeptiStrong™, discovered in fava beans, which improves muscle synthesis and reduces muscle loss. The company plans to introduce both products to the market in early 2022.

The team has established partnerships with big food industry names, including Nestle and Mars. They also plan to explore applications for peptide ingredients in the medical food and cosmetics industries.

Nuritas’ Series B round was led by Cleveland Avenue, a Chicago-based venture capital firm and accelerator for food and restaurant tech startups. (Also in Cleveland Avenue’s portfolio are Beyond Meat and Bartesian, the countertop cocktail-mixing robot.) Participants included food and agriculture investors Wheatsheaf Group and Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, and the European Circular Bioeconomy Fund.

“Our new investors bring a wealth of invaluable expertise,” company founder and CEO Dr. Nora Khaldi said in a press release, “and this latest round will help to build our US headquarters, continue to expand our team, scale our platform to discover more life-changing ingredients and accelerate our route to market.”

Last year, The Spoon noted the rise of computational biology startups taking a targeted approach to ingredient discovery. Nuritas currently boasts the largest peptide knowledge base in the world—and with tools like machine learning becoming more and more relevant to food innovation, that invisible infrastructure could position the company to play a big role in the ingredients supply chain of the future.

COP26 Spotlight: Eagle Genomics and the New Frontier of Microbiome Data

The microbiome is the collective genetic material of all the microorganisms that inhabit an environment, like the human gut or a particular soil. Eagle Genomics, an England-based company, is developing a platform that uses data about that genetic material to drive innovation.

At yesterday’s special COP26 session on nutrition and health (hosted by the U.N. Climate Change Global Innovation Hub) speakers discussed technologies that could help to address food and nutrition challenges while limiting climate change to 1.5 degree Celsius of warming. In his talk at the session, Eagle Genomics CEO Anthony Finbow made a case for microbiome science as a future driver of food system transformation.

“We don’t need to go into space to discover the new frontier,” Finbow said at the session. “We need to look within ourselves and within the soil to really understand how we are going to solve for climate change.”

That new frontier is in the human gut, where trillions of bacteria interact with human epithelial cells, sending signals to each other across a layer of mucus. And it’s in the rhizosphere, the dynamic space around a plant’s roots where microorganisms come to feed on nutrients produced by the plant, and provide protection from pathogens in exchange.

Symbiotic relationships between microbes and larger organisms are fundamental to life as we know it. According to Finbow, the importance of those relationships has long been overlooked. Now, however, “we’re seeing major enterprises across the world acknowledge the contribution of the microbiome and recognize its importance,” Finbow said.

Businesses are now unlocking microbial knowledge to improve human health, create safer products, and grow food crops more sustainably. DayTwo of Israel analyzes individuals’ microbiome data to provide personalized nutrition recommendations. Joyn Bio, a collaboration between Ginkgo Bioworks and Leaps by Bayer, is engineering improved microbial strains that can deliver more nitrogen to plants, cutting down on the need for fertilizers.

Eagle Genomics wants to become a network for businesses like these—as well as farms and research establishments—to collaborate and share data. The company’s cloud software platform uses network science, AI, and causal analysis to analyze microbes and their relationships to each other.

The company is currently working on its Series B raise, which Finbow estimated will amount to $30-50 million. They’ve received contracts from large enterprises for the use of their software platform, and have recently begun offering access to research establishments at a lower price point.

Throughout his presentation, Finbow was optimistic about the potential for microbial science to reconfigure our relationship with the environment and the way we think about human health.

“It is possible, by integrating the way we farm animals and grow plants in a way that nurtures the microecology in the soil, to actually reverse climate change—to actually start to capture more carbon and maintain that carbon within the soil,” Finbow said at the session. “It is possible for us, by engineering the microbiome of animals and ourselves, to live healthier lives and to subsist in a more sustaining environment.”

Danone Expands Brightseed Partnership to Uncover Hidden Healthy Compounds in Plants

Danone and Brightseed announced an expanded partnership today that will have the food and beverage giant using Brightseed’s Forager artificial intelligence platform to uncover more phytonutrients from additional plant-based ingredients.

Brightseed’s technology studies plants on a molecular level to identify and catalog previously unknown compounds that could have health benefits. For example, earlier this year Brightseed announced that it had discovered in pre-clinical trials that the bioactive compounds N-trans caffeoyltyramine (NTC) and N-trans-feruloyltyramine (NTF) found in black pepper can help with the clearance of fat accumulated in the liver. After these initial findings through Brightseed’s AI, the company will move forwards to confirm the results through clinical trials to determine efficacy as well as other factors such as dosage and administering the compounds.

Danone first teamed up with Brightseed in June of last year to study potential new benefits of soy. (Danone owns the Silk brand.) According to today’s press announcement sent to The Spoon, Brightseed’s Forager discovered 10 times more bioactives than previously known and 7 new health areas. As these findings are confirmed by more clinical data, brands like Danone benefit because they can tout additional health benefits around their products, but consumers benefit because there are then more plant-based tools to fight different ailments.

What’s interesting about companies in the AI space like Brightseed, Spoonshot, and Journey Foods is how they are shortening the discovery period for food companies looking to create new products. Before machine learning and artificial intelligence, food manufacturers had to first hypothesize about how particular ingredients might work together, or the health benefits of an ingredient. After that guess, they would run physical tests in a lab to see if they were remotely close in their hypothesis. If they were wrong, they’d have to start all over again from scratch. AI helps shrink that time by doing a lot of that guesswork up front quickly in a computer before any lab time is needed.

The whole space is very new, but Danone expanding on its partnership with Brightseed is a vote of confidence for the technology and should lead to more brands jumping into the use of AI and computational biology.

Report: S2G Ventures Talks Alt-Protein, the Digitization of Grocery, and Other Areas of Food the Pandemic is Reshaping

“We continue to see the pandemic act as a catalyzing agent to accelerate trends that were in motion before it began. We believe that food and agriculture has undergone significant structural changes that will alter the course of the industry.” 

So says a new report from S2G Ventures, a VC firm based in Chicago, Illinois. The report, titled “The Ingredients for a Food System Revolution,” analyzes eight pandemics and outbreaks throughout history to pinpoint patterns around financial and economic recovery, innovation, and behavioral changes and norms. The analysis gives a clue as to how the current COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping norms, particularly when it comes to how we produce, get, and eat our food.

As an investment firm, S2G focuses mainly on the food and agriculture sectors, and counts AppHarvest, Shenandoah Growers, and Trace Genomics among its portfolio companies. It follows, then, that the new report is largely focused on how pandemics, epidemics, and outbreaks in the past have changed our food system and how the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to do that at this very moment. “More decentralization [is] going to occur, more convergence of food and health, more decommodification as well,” Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer, tells The Spoon.

As the report notes, “While there are many factors influencing the future of our food system, the study of past pandemic economic history is starkly consistent – an innovation cycle begins, and old habits and norms do shift.” 

A couple especially compelling areas where this is happening include alternative protein and online grocery.

As traditional meat-processing facilities face challenges and the unit economics for some types of alt-protein go down, we’re seeing more of the latter make its way into the mainstream. Krishnan explains we are moving more and more towards an “all of the above” view of protein. “I think there’s going to be animal protein, plant protein, and cell protein,” he says. Production of animal protein, in particular, will see “natural momentum around more niche, regional, decommoditized” products. Plant-based proteins, meanwhile, will see an increased focus on nutrition and affordability, while more countries will follow Singapore’s lead when it comes to cultivated meat. China is another important place to watch in this area, according to Krishnan.

S2G’s report also honed in on channel digitization, and specifically on the grocery sector. The report notes that a forced transition to online grocery during the pandemic “exponentially increased penetration from 24% to 49% between 2019 and 2020. Seniors became the fastest-growing segment of online shoppers on Instacart in 2020. In future, consumers will take “a hybrid approach” to groceries, and retailers will start to slightly differentiate what they sell online versus in the brick-and-mortar store.

The report also calls out controlled environment agriculture, a convergence of food and health, and food and agriculture digitization as other key areas to watch in terms of how the pandemic is reshaping the food system.  

“We can build a more resilient and hopeful food system that both addresses planet health and human health coming out of this,” says Krishnan. “Let’s use the pain and the agony and the anxiety that occurred as a call to action.

Food Tech Show: Talking Food as Medicine With Dr. Robert Graham

You get sick, you take a pill right?

Not according to Dr. Robert Graham. As a Harvard trained physician and a trained chef, Dr. Graham wants to get at the root cause of our illnesses through diet.

Ever since I met Dr. Graham in Japan at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, I’ve watched him work with food companies and retailers to build scalable approaches to food as medicine and have realized he’s perhaps the industry’s leading advocate and voice for food as medicine.

Dr. Graham joined me on Clubhouse to talk about food as medicine where we discuss:

  • The current state fo food as medicine
  • How new approaches like DNA-driven medicine and microbiome testing fit within food as medicine
  • The role food brands and retailers play in food as medicine
  • And much more!

As always, you can find more Food Tech Show podcasts at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Precision Nutrition Startup DayTwo Raises $37M

Precision medicine startup DayTwo announced over the weekend a $37 million fundraise for its app that provides users customized diet recommendations based on their gut bacteria. New investors participating include Poalim Capital Markets, La’maison Fund and Micron Ventures. They were joined by existing investors including the aMoon VC fund, 10D, and Cathay Innovation Ventures. To date, DayTwo has raised $85 million including this round.

The new funds will go towards Israel-based DayTwo’s technologies that help those with diabetic and metabolic diseases. In particular, the funds will go towards further enhancing the company’s first product, a platform that uses artificial intelligence, microbiome sequencing, and other clinical measures such as surveys to provide customized food prescriptions for users with these diseases. Doing so will help users manage their blood sugar levels, which is critical for those with diabetes. 

Speaking to the Times of Israel, Adi Lev, DayTwo’s deputy CEO for Research & Development, said that the new funds will allow the company to continue its research on the links between bacteria in our bodies and diseases. DayTwo will also continue to develop the algorithms that are an essential part of the company’s platform. 

Users access food recommendations and meal plans via the DayTwo app. In the U.S., they can also scan the barcodes on food to find out more about the item in question.

This kind of precision nutrition, as the name suggests, offers consumers more granular food recommendations and diet plans that are based on factors unique to each individual’s body. Instead of drawing on data from outside sources (e.g., a wearable fitness device), these programs and solutions gather data from inside the human body. Genopalate does this through DNA analysis, while Sun Genomics and Viome are a little more like DayTwo in that they focus on users’ microbiome.

DayTwo, however, is currently the only company of this pack with a specific emphasis on those with diabetes and metabolic diseases. Currently, the company’s platform has about 70,000 users across the U.S. and Israel. In the U.S., the DayTwo is working with large employers and health plans. In Israel, a collaboration with Clalit Health is underway and one with Maccabi Health Services is expected for the future. 

Telenutrition Platform Foodsmart Raises $25M

Foodsmart, a personalized telenutrition service, announced yesterday that it has raised a $25 million Series C round of funding. The new round was led by Advocate Aurora Enterprises, a subsidiary of Advocate Aurora Health, with participation from Mayfield Fund, Seventure Partners (Health for Life Capital), New Ground Ventures, Benefitfocus Founder Shawn Jenkins, Classpass CEO Fritz Lanman and former Darden Restaurants CEO Clarence Otis. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Foodsmart to $76 million.

Based in San Francisco, CA, the Foodsmart platform hosts a national network of registered dietitians to counsel users, and offers subscribers personalized meal plans as well as a marketplace to order food online. The company works with employers and health plans, and says it has 1.25 million members. Foodsmart also does price comparisons and discount discovery to help families on the SNAP program.

Foodsmart is also offers Foodscripts through its platform. These Foodscripts use clinically validated diets to help users overcome obesity, hyperglycemia, heperlipidemia, hypertension and more through nutrition.

The company is part of the food-as-medicine movement, which encourages healthier eating as an important part of creating a healthier life overall. Last year, grocery giant Kroger jumped into the space by testing out a concept where doctors wrote food prescriptions for their patients. These food prescriptions were fulfilled at a Kroger store with the help of a Kroger health professional. Genopalate is taking another approach by personalizing nutrition based on a person’s DNA.

The pandemic changed the way a lot of us eat, as restaurants shut down and we reached for more snacky, comfort foods. Now that the pandemic is receding and we go back out into the world, the food as medicine trend could kick back up as people re-connect with more active lifestyles.