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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Diet

Heali Launches its AI-Based Nutrition and Meal Planning App

Heali, a Los Angeles-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create more personalized nutrition advice and meal planning for people, announced today the beta release of its mobile app.

The Heali app helps people adhere to their choice of 30 different diets (Vegan, Low FODMAP, Paleo, etc.) through recipes as well as grocery shopping and restaurant meal selection guidance.

Heali uses a number of features to help people with their nutritional choices. It has optical character recognition (OCR) so a user can take a photo of a menu description or a product’s nutritional label and the app will understand what ingredients are in that item. There’s a barcode scanner for use on products at the grocery store. Heali also has a meal planner, which analyzes the nutritional makeup of hundreds of thousands of recipes, products and meals to provide its nutritional guidance.

But the Heali app isn’t just for people wanting to eat fewer carbs. I spoke with Heali Founder and CEO Kyle Dardashti last month, who explained that his app can also provide guidance for people with certain medical conditions. For example, if a user has Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), they can use the app when grocery shopping to see if products contain certain emulsifiers that exacerbate their condition.

Heali is part of the personalized nutrition/food-as-medicine movement, and there is certainly no shortage of players in that space. There are other mobile apps like Yes Health and Foodvisor, hardware devices like the Mixfit, and meal delivery services like Kaigo. All of these are looking to help you eat healthier.

When asked what separates Heali from all the other competitors in the space, Dardashti told me, “Others have taken 10 diets or so, they have their subset of recipes in their app. They’ve tagged those few hundred recipes for how it adheres to those 10 diets.” He added that Heali has “built the engine that can do it all programmatically. Now it’s not just one of 10 tags. It has been done programmatically with AI.”

This, according to Dardashti, makes Heali, the most personalized dietary engine on the market.

The proof, as always, will be in the (diet-approved) pudding. The Heali app is free on both iOS and Android, and those interested can join the waitlist. Beta users will be admitted in cohorts.

I Used GenoPalate to Create a Custom Nutrition Plan based on My DNA

A few weeks ago I rubbed my cheek with a swab, slipped it a vial of liquid, and sent my DNA off to be tested. This was part of a service from GenoPalate, a startup that uses information gleaned from DNA to create personalized nutrition plans for users. Having never done any sort of DNA test before, I was surprised at how simple it was: the entire process took maybe three minutes, including creating an online account.

Cut to 10 days later and I got an alert that my GenoPalate report was ready. I downloaded the GenoPalate app, logged in with my email and password, and prepared to get new insights into my ideal diet.

What I found was surprisingly . . . unsurprising. I was told I should eat a diet that’s moderately high in carbohydrates, high in fiber, and has low levels of sugar and saturated fat (but is high in “healthy” fats). I’m likely lactose intolerant (can confirm: yep) and likely not sensitive to gluten. I’m a fast caffeine metabolizer and a normal alcohol metabolizer. I have gene variants that indicate I might need to consume higher levels of Vitamin A, E, and D, among others.

I also got a list of my recommended fruits, vegetables, starches, proteins, and cheeses. These included raspberries, squash, and lettuce, as well as bagels, spaghetti, gruyere cheese, eel, and chicken liver.

Is it fun to discover that my “best” fruits include kiwis? Sure. But after reading through my GenoPalate results, I realized that I didn’t really discover anything I didn’t already know. Basically, the test told me I should be eating a pretty basic healthy diet.

That said, I’m not necessarily GenoPalate’s target audience. I’m already quite conscientious about what I eat and have done a good bit of trial and error to determine what foods make me feel healthy and energized. For someone with a chronic illness, or who suffers from low energy or persistent digestion issues with an unknown cause, GenoPalate’s reports could be more revelatory.

I also didn’t get to try GenoPalate’s recommended recipe service, which, for an additional $30 ($199 as opposed to $169), will give you five recipes based off of your genetic profile. In retrospect, that would have been helpful insight to have. Five recipes aren’t a lot, but they could provide some building blocks for future meal plans and guidance on how to turn the barrage of information in the nutrition analysis (e.g., eat raspberries, not blueberries) into something actionable.

In fact, that’s really the problem with GenoPalate. You can see its potential — discovering which foods to eat to make you feel your best — but right now the technology is too early-stage to be all that helpful for the average person (i.e. me). I haven’t tried them yet, but I imagine services like Viome (which does include recipe recommendations) and Sun Genomics, which also give personalized nutrition reports, are at a similar place. One of the more useful services is DNANudge, which also uses your DNA to guide your grocery shopping outings and push you towards brands that are a better fit for your biology.

Overall these services can give you some high-level information, but they’re not quite ready to be a granular guide. That said, I still think there’s huge potential in the space. As the technology evolves I imagine these services will be able to become more helpful, possibly even linking up with recipe recommendation services as well as health trackers to create a super-curated, all-in-one dietary guide. With these added capabilities, services like GenoPalate could create personalized, shoppable meal plans, and even tweak recipes to meet your health goals (losing weight, training for a marathon, etc.)

If you’re curious about the potential for personalized food and nutrition, then you’ve got to join us at our Customize event on February 27th (next week!) in NYC. GenoPalate’s CEO Dr. Sherry Zhang will be there speaking about biology-driven dining. If you want to come, you can use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off tickets.

Fasting App Zero Fills Up with $2.8 Million in Funding

Fasting app Zero announced today that it has raised $2.8 million in a new funding round from True Ventures and Trinity Ventures (h/t Axios Pro Rata). This brings the total amount raised by the company to $4 million.

In its press announcement Zero describes itself as:

Instead of focusing on short-term wins or specific diets, Zero’s fasting protocols are focused on when people eat, not what they eat. The app connects people who are interested in fasting to the tools, resources and community to help them find the best fasting routines for their health, in addition to tracking progress and milestones over time.

Zero says its app has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, and users have completed more than 35 million fasts to date.

Typically at The Spoon, we cover how technology is changing the way people eat. We write about using your breath to determine your diet, startups that say your biome can impact your health, or even using AI to figure out what to choose at a restaurant. But I guess that should also include technology that gets people to not eat as well.

Intermittent fasting is a hip trend with the tech bros of Silicon Valley, with acolytes like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey who say it helps him be more efficient and focused, and sleep better. Zero CEO, Mike Maser, said that fasting helped him survive cancer.

While we’re not doctors and can’t advocate or reject the promises of intermittent fasting, Zero says it has an advisory team of doctors and researches that use science to guide and support the company’s fasting protocols.

One thing Zero isn’t hungry for after today, however, is cash.

Bone Broth’s $103M Funding Shows Food Supplements Are A Hot Industry

How would you like to have your bone broth and drink it too?

Ancient Nutrition, a company best known for its bone broth-based protein supplement powder, just snagged a $103 million investment. The funding round was led by private equity firm VMG partners along with Hillhouse Capital and Iconiq Capital. It also included participation from over 100 current and former players in craft food companies such as Noosa Yogurt, The Honest Company, and Stone Brewing.

Ancient Nutrition’s new boost in funding shows that the market for supplements—especially ones that are “natural”—is still booming. The company’s main product is powdered bone broth, a trending meal supplement (which is essentially broth) sipped by health fiends and hipsters alike. Bone broth has particular appeal to people on the ketogenic diet, who believe that we should be eating more like our ancestors: high fat, lots of protein, and minimal carbs. The rising popularity of this and other low-carb diets, such as the paleo diet, have led to a higher demand for protein supplements.

Ancient Nutrition also offers bone broth-derived supplements such as protein powder, which comes in flavors like “French Vanilla” and “Greens.” These can be used in your post-workout smoothies or as a meal replacement, which is another category that has been on the rise lately thanks to veteran Soylent and startups like Bear Squeeze and Ample.

Ancient Nutrition has a serious health food pedigree. Co-founder Jordan Rubin started Canadian dietary supplement and probiotic company Atrium Innovations, which was acquired by Nestlé last year for $2.3 billion. He then took his natural products know-how to start Ancient Nutrition in 2016 alongside Josh Axe, the man behind the popular health & fitness website Dr.Axe.

This funding indicates a strong consumer market for health supplements, especially ones derived from natural products instead of chemicals. Throw the words “superfood” and “whole food” in there, and Ancient Nutrition is capitalizing on three consumer trends: natural, unprocessed foods, miracle health ingredients, and low-carb, high-protein diets. Plus they’ve got convenience going for them; by turning bone broth from a beverage that takes hours to cook into an instant, portable supplement, they’ve made it uber accessible.

Ancient Nutrition plans to use their funds to develop new healthy lifestyle products like fungi, probiotics, and essential oils, presumably all of which will come in French Vanilla.